Patrick Callaghan

Patrick Callaghan, Reid Simmons, Henny Admoni

Discrepancies between an agent's actual knowledge and what a person thinks the agent knows can hinder interactions. If an agent could detect such discrepancies, it could provide feedback to account for them and improve current and future interactions. Using the I-POMDP as a framework for a second-order Theory of Mind (ToM-2), this work endows an agent with the ability to model the evolution of a person's erroneous beliefs about an agent and the cognitive biases and heuristics (CBH) from which they arise. In doing so, the agent can detect when CBH might be at play during an interaction and adaptively generate feedback that accounts for them. An in-person user study shows how a ToM-2 learner can account for the effects of a teacher's CBH to significantly improve the informativeness of teacher actions, and subjective results suggest people find the ToM-2 learner's feedback more useful.

Shivam Vats, Michelle Zhao, Patrick Callaghan et al.

Collaborative robots must continually adapt to novel tasks and user preferences without overburdening the user. While prior interactive robot learning methods aim to reduce human effort, they are typically limited to single-task scenarios and are not well-suited for sustained, multi-task collaboration. We propose COIL (Cost-Optimal Interactive Learning) -- a multi-task interaction planner that minimizes human effort across a sequence of tasks by strategically selecting among three query types (skill, preference, and help). When user preferences are known, we formulate COIL as an uncapacitated facility location (UFL) problem, which enables bounded-suboptimal planning in polynomial time using off-the-shelf approximation algorithms. We extend our formulation to handle uncertainty in user preferences by incorporating one-step belief space planning, which uses these approximation algorithms as subroutines to maintain polynomial-time performance. Simulated and physical experiments on manipulation tasks show that our framework significantly reduces the amount of work allocated to the human while maintaining successful task completion.

Mouad Abrini, Omri Abend, Dina Acklin et al. · cambridge

This volume includes a selection of papers presented at the Workshop on Advancing Artificial Intelligence through Theory of Mind held at AAAI 2025 in Philadelphia US on 3rd March 2025. The purpose of this volume is to provide an open access and curated anthology for the ToM and AI research community.