aiqbench analysis
This research introduces Collaborative Theory of Mind (CToM), a framework that trains large language models to anticipate user feedback and self-revision before generating final responses. By integrating response prediction with group-relative policy optimization, the method significantly improves accuracy in multi-turn interactions for coding, math, and writing tasks while reducing the number of required user turns. The study demonstrates that explicitly modeling user intent leads to more efficient and effective human-AI collaboration compared to standard reinforcement learning baselines.
Collaborative Theory of Mind: Learning to Self-Revise by Anticipating User Responses
arXiv:2610.12872v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong individual task performance, yet still struggle to collaborate with users over extended, multi-turn interactions, for example by attempting solutions before understanding the user's needs or by failing to revise mistaken assumptions after receiving feedback. We propose Collaborative Theory of Mind (CToM), a framework that addresses these challenges by explicitly training LLMs to anticipate user responses and to use those predictions to improve their own behavior. CToM drafts a response, predicts how the user will respond, and uses this prediction to guide internal revision before presenting a response. During training, the user's reply to each draft serves as the target for predicting the next turn, and we train the assistant to minimize the negative log-likelihood of that reply. We combine this prediction objective with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) to optimize both task performance and interaction efficiency. Across mathematical reasoning, coding, and writing tasks, CToM achieves higher collaborative task performance than all baselines; for example, on a collaborative mathematical reasoning task, it improves final accuracy from 74.1% to 79.6% compared with naive GRPO. Ablations show that predicting user responses also makes collaboration more efficient: under the same reward, adding prediction supervision reduces the number of user replies by 8% on coding and 17% on writing while improving task performance. Behavioral analyses of interaction trajectories show that user-response predictions become more accurate after training, and that more accurate predictions are associated with larger improvements in collaborative task performance through self-revision.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong individual task performance, yet still struggle to collaborate with users over extended, multi-turn interactions, for example by attempting solutions before understanding the user's needs or by failing to revise mistaken assumptions after receiving feedback. We propose Collaborative Theory of Mind (CToM), a framework that addresses these challenges by explicitly training LLMs to anticipate user responses and to use those predictions to improve their own behavior. CToM drafts a response, predicts how the user will respond, and uses this prediction to guide internal revision before presenting a response. During training, the user's reply to each draft serves as the target for predicting the next turn, and we train the assistant to minimize the negative log-likelihood of that reply. We combine this prediction objective with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) to optimize both task performance and interaction efficiency. Across mathematical reasoning, coding, and writing tasks, CToM achieves higher collaborative task performance than all baselines; for example, on a collaborative mathematical reasoning task, it improves final accuracy from 74.1% to 79.6% compared with naive GRPO. Ablations show that predicting user responses also makes collaboration more efficient: under the same reward, adding prediction supervision reduces the number of user replies by 8% on coding and 17% on writing while improving task performance. Behavioral analyses of interaction trajectories show that user-response predictions become more accurate after training, and that more accurate predictions are associated with larger improvements in collaborative task performance through self-revision.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2610.12872 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2610.12872v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.12872 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 337 words
