Abstracting Minds:Computational Theory of Mind for Human-Agent Collaboration

Theory of mind refers to the human ability to reason about mental content of other people such as beliefs, desires, and goals. In everyday life, people rely on their theory of mind to understand, explain, and predict the behaviour of others. Having a theory of mind is especially useful when people collaborate, since individuals can then reason on what the other individual knows as well as what reasoning they might do. Realization of hybrid intelligence, where an agent collaborates with a human, will require the agent to be able to do similar reasoning through computational theory of mind. Accordingly, this paper provides a mechanism for computational theory of mind based on abstractions of single beliefs into higher-level concepts. These concepts can correspond to social norms, roles, as well as values. Their use in decision making serves as a heuristic to choose among interactions, thus facilitating collaboration on decisions. Using examples from the medical domain, we demonstrate how having such a theory of mind enables an agent to interact with humans efficiently and can increase the quality of the decisions humans make.