Communicating with Unknown teammates

Teamwork is central to many tasks, and past research has introduced a number of methods for coordinating teams of agents. However, with the growing number of sources of agents, it is likely that an agent will encounter teammates that do not share its coordination method. Therefore, it is desirable for agents to adapt to these teammates, forming an effective ad hoc team. Past ad hoc team research has focused on cases where the agents do not directly communicate. This paper tackles the problem of communication in ad hoc teams, introducing a minimal version of the multiagent, multi-armed bandit problem with communication between the agents. The theoretical results in this paper prove that this problem setting can be solved in polynomial time when the agent knows the set of possible teammates. Furthermore, the empirical results show that an agent can cooperate with a variety of teammates not created by the authors even when its models of these teammates are imperfect.