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Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Agent Coordination

  • Conference paper
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Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XV (COINE 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13549))

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Abstract

In everyday life, people often depend on their theory of mind, i.e., their ability to reason about unobservable mental content of others to understand, explain, and predict their behaviour. Many agent-based models have been designed to develop computational theory of mind and analyze its effectiveness in various tasks and settings. However, most existing models are not generic (e.g., only applied in a given setting), not feasible (e.g., require too much information to be processed), or not human-inspired (e.g., do not capture the behavioral heuristics of humans). This hinders their applicability in many settings. Accordingly, we propose a new computational theory of mind, which captures the human decision heuristics of reasoning by abstracting individual beliefs about others. We specifically study computational affinity and show how it can be used in tandem with theory of mind reasoning when designing agent models for human-agent negotiation. We perform two-agent simulations to analyze the role of affinity in getting to agreements when there is a bound on the time to be spent for negotiating. Our results suggest that modeling affinity can ease the negotiation process by decreasing the number of rounds needed for an agreement as well as yield a higher benefit for agents with theory of mind reasoning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this case, for example the activity monitor agent could start with an offer of 5700 and decrease it with 100 until it goes beyond 5300.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Hybrid Intelligence Center, a 10-year programme funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science through the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, https://hybrid-intelligence-centre.nl, grant number 024.004.022.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Emre Erdogan, Frank Dignum & Pınar Yolum

  2. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Frank Dignum

  3. University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Rineke Verbrugge

Authors
  1. Emre Erdogan
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  2. Frank Dignum
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  3. Rineke Verbrugge
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  4. Pınar Yolum
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Emre Erdogan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Nirav Ajmeri

  2. University of Bath, Bath, UK

    Andreasa Morris Martin

  3. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu

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Erdogan, E., Dignum, F., Verbrugge, R., Yolum, P. (2022). Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Agent Coordination. In: Ajmeri, N., Morris Martin, A., Savarimuthu, B.T.R. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XV. COINE 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13549. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20845-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20845-4_6

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