[2603.25268] CRAFT: Grounded Multi-Agent Coordination Under Partial Information

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2603.25268 (cs) [Submitted on 26 Mar 2026] Title:CRAFT: Grounded Multi-Agent Coordination Under Partial Information Authors:Abhijnan Nath, Hannah VanderHoeven, Nikhil Krishnaswamy View a PDF of the paper titled CRAFT: Grounded Multi-Agent Coordination Under Partial Information, by Abhijnan Nath and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: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 pragmatic reasoning task 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 mod...