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arXiv · 2605.11688

Shaping Zero-Shot Coordination via State Blocking

Mingu Kang·Sunwoo Lee·Yonghyeon Jo·Seungyul Han
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Abstract

Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) aims to enable agents to cooperate with independently trained partners without prior interaction, a key requirement for real-world multi-agent systems and human-AI collaboration. Existing approaches have largely emphasized increasing partner diversity during training, yet such strategies often fall short of achieving reliable generalization to unseen partners. We introduce State-Blocked Coordination (SBC), a simple yet effective framework that improves ZSC by inducing diverse interaction scenarios without direct environment modification. Specifically, SBC generates a family of virtual environments through state blocking, allowing agents to experience a wide range of suboptimal partner policies. Across multiple benchmarks, SBC demonstrates superior performance in zero-shot coordination, including strong generalization to human partners.

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Mingu Kang, Sunwoo Lee, Yonghyeon Jo, Seungyul Han. 2026-05-12. Shaping Zero-Shot Coordination via State Blocking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11688

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