Recent advances in LLM agents have enabled complex cognitive capabilities, such as multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use, that increasingly position these agents as collaborative partners in human workflows. Effective collaboration, however, requires collaborators to continuously maintain and align mental models of their own reasoning, partners’ intentions, and shared goals during the collaborative process. Today’s agents rarely develop such capabilities since they are primarily optimized for task completion rather than for maintaining the underlying mental models required for collaborative processes. Moreover, the community lacks authentic human collaboration data with action-level mental model annotations that could guide agents toward collaborative competence. To bridge this gap, we present ALMANAC, a dataset of Action-Level Mental model ANnotations for Agent Collaboration built from the Map Task, a classic dyadic routing task from social science. ALMANAC contains 2,987 collaboration actions, each paired with theory-informed mental model annotations that record the participants’ self-reasoning, perceived partner intent, and perceived team goal. We benchmark six LLMs on predicting humans’ next-turn behavior and mental models. Our results demonstrate ALMANAC’s utility in evaluating models’ ability to simulate human collaborative behaviors and infer their underlying mental models. The project page is available at https://human-agent-collab.hailab.io/almanac.

Nearly all human work is collaborative; thus, the evaluation of real-world NLP applications often requires multiple dimensions that align with diverse human perspectives. As real human evaluator resources are often scarce and costly, the emerging “LLM-as-a-judge” paradigm sheds light on a promising approach to leverage LLM agents to believably simulate human evaluators. Yet, to date, existing LLM-as-a-judge approaches face two limitations: persona descriptions of agents are often arbitrarily designed, and the frameworks are not generalizable to other tasks. To address these challenges, we propose MAJ-EVAL, a Multi-Agent-as-Judge evaluation framework that can automatically construct multiple evaluator personas with distinct dimensions from relevant text documents (e.g., research papers), instantiate LLM agents with the personas, and engage in-group debates with multi-agents to generate multi-dimensional feedback. Our evaluation experiments in both the educational and medical domains demonstrate that MAJ-EVAL can generate evaluation results that better align with human experts’ ratings compared with conventional automated evaluation metrics and existing LLM-as-a-judge methods.

Interactive story reading is common in early childhood education, where teachers expect to teach both language skills and real-world knowledge beyond the story. While many story reading systems have been developed for this activity, they often fail to infuse real-world knowledge into the conversation. This limitation can be attributed to the existing question-answering (QA) datasets used for children’s education, upon which the systems are built, failing to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities. To bridge this gap, we design an annotation framework, empowered by existing knowledge graph to capture experts’ annotations and thinking process, and leverage this framework to construct StorySparkQA dataset, which comprises 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge. We conduct automated and human expert evaluations across various QA pair generation settings to demonstrate that our StorySparkQA can effectively support models in generating QA pairs that target real-world knowledge beyond story content. StorySparkQA is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/NEU-HAI/StorySparkQA.