CooT: Learning to Coordinate In-Context with Coordination Transformers

Abstract

Effective coordination among unfamiliar partners remains a major challenge in multi-agent systems. Existing approaches, such as population-based methods, improve robustness through diversity but often lack mechanisms for efficient adaptation beyond training distribution. Moreover, fine-tuning is impractical in few-shot settings due to its high interaction cost. To address these limitations, we propose CooT, a framework that leverages in-context learning (ICL) for real-time partner adaptation. Unlike prior ICL approaches that focus on task generalization, CooT is designed to generalize across diverse partner behaviors. Trained on trajectories from behavior-preferring agents, it learns to align actions with partner intentions purely through observation. We evaluate CooT on two challenging multi-agent benchmarks: Overcooked and Google Research Football. Results show that CooT consistently outperforms population-based methods, gradient-based fine-tuning, and Meta-RL baselines, achieving stable and rapid adaptation without parameter updates. Human evaluations also identify CooT as a preferred collaborator, and our ablations confirm its ability to adapt quickly to new partners and remain stable under sudden partner changes, making it reliable for real-world human-AI collaboration.