Distributed Theory of Mind in Multi-Agent Systems

Theory of Mind is a concept from developmental psychology which elucidates how humans mentalise. More specifically, it describes how humans ascribe mental attitudes to others and how they reason about these mental attitudes. In the area of Artificial Intelligence, Theory of Mind serves as a fundamental pillar in the design of intelligent artificial agents that are supposed to coexist with humans within a hybrid society. Having the ability to mentalise, these artificial agents could potentially exhibit a range of advanced capabilities that underlie meaningful communication, including empathy and the capacity to better understanding the meaning behind the utterances others make. In this paper, we propose a distributed theory of mind approach in multi-agent systems, in which agents and human users share evidence to reach more supported conclusions about each other’s mental attitudes. We demonstrate our approach in a scenario of stress detection, in which personal agents infer whether their users are stressed or not according to the distributed theory of mind approach.