Related papers: A World unto Itself: Human Communication as Active…

To develop computational agents that better communicate using their own emergent language, we endow the agents with an ability to focus their attention on particular concepts in the environment. Humans often understand an object or scene as…

Understanding interpersonal communication requires, in part, understanding the social context and norms in which a message is said. However, current methods for identifying offensive content in such communication largely operate independent…

Identification of affective and attentional states of individuals within groups is difficult to obtain without disrupting the natural flow of collaboration. Recent work from our group used a retrospect cued recall paradigm where…

As autonomous agents, from self-driving cars to virtual assistants, become increasingly present in everyday life, safe and effective collaboration depends on human understanding of agents' intentions. Current intent communication approaches…

Humans quite frequently interact with conversational agents. The rapid advancement in generative language modeling through neural networks has helped advance the creation of intelligent conversational agents. Researchers typically evaluate…

How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…

Non-binding communication is common in daily life and crucial for fostering cooperation, even though it has no direct payoff consequences. However, despite robust empirical evidence, its evolutionary basis remains poorly understood. Here,…

Biological and artificial information processing systems form representations of the world that they can use to categorize, reason, plan, navigate, and make decisions. How can we measure the similarity between the representations formed by…

The ability to cooperate through language is a defining feature of humans. As the perceptual, motory and planning capabilities of deep artificial networks increase, researchers are studying whether they also can develop a shared language to…

Decision-making individuals are typically either an imitator, who mimics the action of the most successful individual(s), a conformist (or coordinating individual), who chooses an action if enough others have done so, or a nonconformist (or…

Being able to predict the mental states of others is a key factor to effective social interaction. It is also crucial for distributed multi-agent systems, where agents are required to communicate and cooperate. In this paper, we introduce…

The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…

Effective communication requires the ability to refer to specific parts of an observation in relation to others. While emergent communication literature shows success in developing various language properties, no research has shown the…

The ability of biological and artificial collectives to outperform solitary individuals in a wide variety of tasks depends crucially on the efficient processing of social and environmental information at the level of the collective. Here,…

We study the self-assembly of a complex network of collaborations among self-interested agents. The agents can maintain different levels of cooperation with different partners. Further, they continuously, selectively, and independently…

Making sense of the world and acting in it relies on building simplified mental representations that abstract away aspects of reality. This principle of cognitive mapping is universal to agents with limited resources. Living organisms,…

As humans, we have a remarkable capacity for reading the characteristics of objects only by observing how another person carries them. Indeed, how we perform our actions naturally embeds information on the item features. Collaborative…

Collaborative tasks often begin with partial task knowledge and incomplete initial plans from each partner. To complete these tasks, agents need to engage in situated communication with their partners and coordinate their partial plans…

Human collaborators can effectively communicate with their partners to finish a common task by inferring each other's mental states (e.g., goals, beliefs, and desires). Such mind-aware communication minimizes the discrepancy among…

Collective human movement is a hallmark of complex systems, exhibiting emergent order across diverse settings, from pedestrian flows to biological collectives. In high-speed scenarios, alignment interactions ensure efficient flow and…