Human-Agent Hybrid Teams: Scaling Principles for Mixed-Autonomy Coordination

TL;DR: This idea tries to figure out how adding humans into the agent mix changes the best way to organize teamwork. An experiment would systematically vary the human/agent ratio in coordination tasks, measuring how team performance and error dynamics shift with different architectures.

Research Question: How do scaling principles for agent system architectures change when humans are integral components of the team, especially under time delays or partial observability?

Hypothesis: Optimal coordination strategies and error amplification properties differ fundamentally in mixed human-agent teams, with factors like human reaction time and trust calibration requiring adjusted predictive models for architecture-task alignment.

Experiment Plan: - Setup: Use collaborative task environments (e.g., simulated RPA, collaborative navigation, or resource allocation) with both human and agent participants.

• Variables: Systematically vary human-to-agent ratios, communication modalities, and levels of autonomy.
• Data: Collect coordination metrics, task completion times, and error propagation logs.
• Analysis: Compare results to the task-property-driven predictions from the original scaling framework, identifying where mixed-autonomy teams diverge.
• Expected Outcomes: Identify new scaling effects (e.g., human-induced delays, trust lapses) and propose adjustments to the quantitative scaling model.

References:

• Chen, Y., & Li, Z. (2025). Human-in-the-Loop Tracking Control for Nonlinear Agricultural Multi-Agent Systems: A Fully Distributed Fuzzy Adaptive Method. Cybersecurity and Cyberforensics Conference.
• Koru, A. T., Ramírez, S. A., Sarsılmaz, B., Yucelen, T., Sipahi, R., & Dogan, K. M. (2024). Containment Control of Multi-Human Multi-Agent Systems Under Time Delays. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems.
• Doost, E. Z., Grimm, D. A., Zhou, S., Scalia, M. J., Yin, X., & Gorman, J. C. (2025). Limited-Teamwork Autonomy in Training: Transfer Effects on Performance and Coordination in Subsequent All-Human Teams. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting.