Interactive AI with a Theory of Mind

Understanding each other is the key to success in collaboration. For humans, attributing mental states to others, the theory of mind, provides the crucial advantage. We argue for formulating human–AI interaction as a multi-agent problem, endowing AI with a computational theory of mind to understand and anticipate the user. To differentiate the approach from previous work, we introduce a categorisation of user modelling approaches based on the level of agency learnt in the interaction. We describe our recent work in using nested multi-agent modelling to formulate user models for multi-armed bandit based interactive AI systems, including a proof-of-concept user study.