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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Robot. AI

Sec. Computational Intelligence in Robotics

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1532693

This article is part of the Research TopicTheory of Mind in Robots and Intelligent SystemsView all 5 articles

Towards Fluid Human-Agent Collaboration: From Dynamic Collaboration Patterns to Models of Theory of Mind Reasoning

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany
  • 2Center of Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Collaborating in real-life situations rarely follows predefined roles or plans, but is established on-the-fly and flexibly coordinated by the interacting agents. We introduce the notion of fluid collaboration (FC), marked by frequent changes of the tasks partners assume or the resources they consume in response to varying requirements or affordances of the environment, tasks, or other agents. FC thus necessitates dynamic, action-oriented Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning to enable agents to continuously infer and adapt to others' intentions and beliefs in real-time.In this paper, we discuss how FC can be enabled in human-agent collaboration. We introduce Cooperative Cuisine (CoCu), an interactive environment inspired by the game Overcooked! that facilitates human-human and human-agent collaboration in dynamic settings. We report results of an empirical study on human-human collaboration in CoCu, showing how FC can be measured empirically and that humans naturally engage in dynamically established collaboration patterns with minimal explicit communication and relying on efficient mentalizing. We then present an approach to develop artificial agents that can effectively participate in FC. Specifically, we argue for a model of dynamic mentalizing under computational constraints and integrated with action planning. We present first steps in this direction by addressing resource-rational and action-driven ToM reasoning.

Keywords: Fluid Collaboration, Theory of Mind, Dynamic Mentalizing, Human-Agent Collaboration, Action-Oriented Reasoning, Cooperative Cuisine, Real-time adaptation, Collaborative agents

Received: 22 Nov 2024; Accepted: 03 Jul 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Schröder, Heinrich and Kopp. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Florian Schröder, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

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