Abstract In an ad hoc teamwork setting, the team needs to coordinate their activities to perform a task without prior agreement on how to achieve it. The ad hoc agent cannot communicate with its teammates but it can observe their behaviour and plan accordingly. To do so, the existing approaches rely on the teammates’ behaviour models. However, the models may not be accurate, which can compromise teamwork. For this reason, we present Ad Hoc Teamwork by Sub-task Inference and Selection (ATSIS) algorithm that uses a sub-task inference without relying on teammates’ models. First, the ad hoc agent observes its teammates to infer which subtasks they are handling. Based on that, it selects its own sub-task using a partially observable Markov decision process that handles the uncertainty of the sub-task inference. Last, the ad hoc agent uses the Monte Carlo tree search to find the set of actions to perform the sub-task. Our experiments show the benefits of ATSIS for robust teamwork