CRAFT: Grounded Multi-Agent Coordination Under Partial Information

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nath, Abhijnan, VanderHoeven, Hannah, Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917441908506624
author Nath, Abhijnan
VanderHoeven, Hannah
Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
author_facet Nath, Abhijnan
VanderHoeven, Hannah
Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
contents We introduce CRAFT, a multi-agent benchmark for evaluating pragmatic communication in large language models under strict partial information. In this setting, multiple agents with complementary but incomplete views must coordinate through natural language to construct a shared 3D structure that no single agent can fully observe. We formalize this problem as a multi-sender Bounded Pragmatic Speaker problem and provide a diagnostic framework that decomposes failures into spatial grounding, belief modeling and pragmatic communication errors, including a taxonomy of behavioral failure profiles in both frontier and open-weight models. Across a diverse set of models, including 8 open-weight and 7 frontier including reasoning models, we find that stronger reasoning ability does not reliably translate to better coordination: smaller open-weight models often match or outperform frontier systems, and improved individual communication does not guarantee successful collaboration. These results suggest that multi-agent coordination remains a fundamentally unsolved challenge for current language models. Our code can be found at https://github.com/csu-signal/CRAFT
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_25268
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CRAFT: Grounded Multi-Agent Coordination Under Partial Information
Nath, Abhijnan
VanderHoeven, Hannah
Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce CRAFT, a multi-agent benchmark for evaluating pragmatic communication in large language models under strict partial information. In this setting, multiple agents with complementary but incomplete views must coordinate through natural language to construct a shared 3D structure that no single agent can fully observe. We formalize this problem as a multi-sender Bounded Pragmatic Speaker problem and provide a diagnostic framework that decomposes failures into spatial grounding, belief modeling and pragmatic communication errors, including a taxonomy of behavioral failure profiles in both frontier and open-weight models. Across a diverse set of models, including 8 open-weight and 7 frontier including reasoning models, we find that stronger reasoning ability does not reliably translate to better coordination: smaller open-weight models often match or outperform frontier systems, and improved individual communication does not guarantee successful collaboration. These results suggest that multi-agent coordination remains a fundamentally unsolved challenge for current language models. Our code can be found at https://github.com/csu-signal/CRAFT
title CRAFT: Grounded Multi-Agent Coordination Under Partial Information
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25268