@inproceedings{bortoletto-etal-2026-protom,
title = "{P}ro{T}o{M}: Promoting Prosocial Behaviour via Theory of Mind-Informed Feedback",
author = "Bortoletto, Matteo and
Zhou, Yichao and
Ying, Lance and
Shu, Tianmin and
Bulling, Andreas",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1331/",
pages = "26715--26734",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "While humans are inherently social creatures, the challenge of identifying when and how to assist and collaborate with others - particularly when pursuing independent goals - can hinder cooperation. To address this challenge, we aim to develop an AI system that provides useful feedback to promote prosocial behaviour - actions that benefit others, even when not directly aligned with one{'}s own goals. We introduce ProToM, a Theory of Mind-informed facilitator that promotes prosocial actions in multi-agent systems by providing targeted, context-sensitive feedback to individual agents. ProToM first infers agents' goals using Bayesian inverse planning, then selects feedback to communicate by maximising expected utility, conditioned on the inferred goal distribution. We evaluate our approach against baselines in two multi-agent environments: Doors, Keys, and Gems, as well as Overcooked. Our results suggest that state-of-the-art large language and reasoning models fall short of communicating feedback that is both contextually grounded and well-timed - leading to higher communication overhead and lower success rates. In contrast, ProToM provides targeted and helpful feedback, achieving a higher success rate, shorter task completion times, and is consistently preferred by human users."
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<abstract>While humans are inherently social creatures, the challenge of identifying when and how to assist and collaborate with others - particularly when pursuing independent goals - can hinder cooperation. To address this challenge, we aim to develop an AI system that provides useful feedback to promote prosocial behaviour - actions that benefit others, even when not directly aligned with one’s own goals. We introduce ProToM, a Theory of Mind-informed facilitator that promotes prosocial actions in multi-agent systems by providing targeted, context-sensitive feedback to individual agents. ProToM first infers agents’ goals using Bayesian inverse planning, then selects feedback to communicate by maximising expected utility, conditioned on the inferred goal distribution. We evaluate our approach against baselines in two multi-agent environments: Doors, Keys, and Gems, as well as Overcooked. Our results suggest that state-of-the-art large language and reasoning models fall short of communicating feedback that is both contextually grounded and well-timed - leading to higher communication overhead and lower success rates. In contrast, ProToM provides targeted and helpful feedback, achieving a higher success rate, shorter task completion times, and is consistently preferred by human users.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T ProToM: Promoting Prosocial Behaviour via Theory of Mind-Informed Feedback
%A Bortoletto, Matteo
%A Zhou, Yichao
%A Ying, Lance
%A Shu, Tianmin
%A Bulling, Andreas
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F bortoletto-etal-2026-protom
%X While humans are inherently social creatures, the challenge of identifying when and how to assist and collaborate with others - particularly when pursuing independent goals - can hinder cooperation. To address this challenge, we aim to develop an AI system that provides useful feedback to promote prosocial behaviour - actions that benefit others, even when not directly aligned with one’s own goals. We introduce ProToM, a Theory of Mind-informed facilitator that promotes prosocial actions in multi-agent systems by providing targeted, context-sensitive feedback to individual agents. ProToM first infers agents’ goals using Bayesian inverse planning, then selects feedback to communicate by maximising expected utility, conditioned on the inferred goal distribution. We evaluate our approach against baselines in two multi-agent environments: Doors, Keys, and Gems, as well as Overcooked. Our results suggest that state-of-the-art large language and reasoning models fall short of communicating feedback that is both contextually grounded and well-timed - leading to higher communication overhead and lower success rates. In contrast, ProToM provides targeted and helpful feedback, achieving a higher success rate, shorter task completion times, and is consistently preferred by human users.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1331/
%P 26715-26734
Markdown (Informal)
[ProToM: Promoting Prosocial Behaviour via Theory of Mind-Informed Feedback](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1331/) (Bortoletto et al., Findings 2026)
ACL