TR2026-081

LLawCo: Learning Laws of Cooperation for Modeling Embodied Multi-Agent Behavior


    •  Zhou, Q., Gan, C., Cherian, A., "LLawCo: Learning Laws of Cooperation for Modeling Embodied Multi-Agent Behavior", International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), June 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-081 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Zhou2026jun,
      • author = {Zhou, Qinhong and Gan, Chuang and Cherian, Anoop},
      • title = {{LLawCo: Learning Laws of Cooperation for Modeling Embodied Multi-Agent Behavior}},
      • booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = jun,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-081}
      • }
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  • Research Areas:

    Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics

Abstract:

Embodied agents operating in decentralized and partially observable environments have attracted growing attention in recent years. However, existing large language model (LLM)–based agents often exhibit behaviors that are misaligned with their partners or inconsistent with the environment state, leading to inefficient cooperation and poor task success. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, Learning Laws of Cooperation (LLawCo), that enables embodied agents to autonomously align with both their partners and task objectives. Our framework allows agents to reflect on past failures to extract misaligned behavioral patterns, which are used to de- rive high-level behavioral laws (e.g., “Talk when necessary”, “Wait for partner”). These laws are explicitly incorporated into the agents’ chains of thought via supervised fine-tuning, aligning their reasoning with task requirements and the behavior of other agents. To evaluate our approach, we introduce PARTNR-Dialog, a large-scale multi- agent communicative and cooperative planning benchmark built on the PARTNR environment. Experiments on existing tasks and our new bench- mark demonstrate significant improvements in co- operative efficiency and task success rates. Across four backbone LLMs, our method achieves aver- age success rate improvements of 4.5% on the PARTNR-Dialog benchmark and 6.8% on the TDW-MAT benchmark over state-of-the-art open- source communicative agent frameworks.