/social-ai

Accompanies the EMNLP 2024 paper: "Advancing Social Intelligence in AI Agents: Technical Challenges and Open Questions". This repo features Social-AI papers across computing communities, courses, and dissertations.

social-ai

By Leena Mathur from the Language Technologies Institute at CMU's School of Computer Science.

This repository contains resources related to advancing socially-intelligent AI (Social-AI) agents. If there are any topics, papers, books, benchmarks, courses, or dissertations you would like added, please feel free to make a pull request or email lmathur@andrew.cmu.edu. All suggestions or contributions are welcome!

This repository accompanies the position paper Advancing Social Intelligence in AI Agents: Technical Challenges and Open Questions by Leena Mathur, Paul Liang, and Louis-Philippe Morency from the Language Technologies Institute and Machine Learning Department at CMU.

The position paper discusses core technical challenges, along with opportunities and open questions, towards advancing social intelligence in AI agents. Social-AI research interest has accelerated across computing communities in recent years:

Cumulative number of Social-AI papers over time, based on 3,257 papers from Semantic Scholar Social-AI queries. Social-AI research interest has been increasingly rapidly!

We believe there are core technical challenges that are particularly relevant to advancing social intelligence in AI agents with a variety of embodiments, social attributes, and roles, interacting in a range of social contexts.

(A) Four core technical challenges in Social-AI research, illustrated in an example context of a Social-AI agent observing and learning from a human-human interaction. (B) Social contexts in which Social-AI agents can be situated, spanning interaction dimensions/structures, social settings, degrees of agent embodiment, and social attributes of humans, with agents in several roles.

C1: Ambiguity in Constructs (Section 4.1 of the paper)

Social constructs have inherent ambiguity in their definition and interpretation in the social world.

C2: Nuanced Signals (Section 4.2 of the paper)

Social constructs are expressed through behaviors and signals that can be nuanced, often manifesting through different degrees of synchrony across actors and modalities. During interactions, small changes in social signals can lead to large shifts in social meaning being conveyed.

C3: Multiple Perspectives (Section 4.3 of the paper)

In social interactions, actors bring their own perspectives, experiences, and roles; these factors can change over time and influence the perspectives of other actors during interactions.

C4: Agency and Adaptation (Section 4.4 of the paper)

Actors learn from social experiences and adapt to social contexts, through interactions, influenced by their own agency, goals, motivations, and identities.

@misc{mathur2024advancing,
      title={Advancing Social Intelligence in AI Agents: Technical Challenges and Open Questions}, 
      author={Leena Mathur and Paul Pu Liang and Louis-Philippe Morency},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2404.11023},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.HC}
}

Table of Contents

Social Intelligence Foundations

Social-AI Research

Ethics, Safety, and Participatory Social-AI

Benchmarks

Courses

Dissertations

Social Intelligence Foundations

What is a social entity?

The Construction of Social Reality, 1995

Social Ontology and the Philosophy of Society, Analyse & Kritik, 1998

The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form, 2000

Introduction. Social Intelligence: From Brain to Culture, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2007

Social Intelligence, Human Intelligence and Niche Construction, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2007

Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, 2010

Three Kinds of Social Kinds, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2013

Human Social Reality and Language, Phenomenology and Mind, 2012

Social Intelligence Definitions and Competencies

Defining and Measuring Social Intelligence

Moral Principles in Education, 1909

Moral Instruction through Social Intelligence, American Journal of Sociology, 1911

Intelligence and Its Uses, Harper's Magazine, 1920

Measures of Social Intelligence, American Journal of Sociology, 1930

An Evaluation of the Attempts to Measure Social Intelligence, Psychological Bulletin, 1937

Social Intelligence – A Review and Critical Discussion of Measurement Concepts, Emotional Intelligence: An International Handbook, 2005

Theory and Measurement of Social Intelligence as a Cognitive Performance Construct, Susanne Weis PhD Dissertation, 2008

New Findings about Social Intelligence, Journal of Individual Differences, 2013

The Social Shapes Test: A New Measure of Social Intelligence, Mentalizing, and Theory of Mind, Personality and Individual Differences, 2019

Social Intelligence Competencies

We consider the following 6 competencies to be core competencies of social intelligence: Social Perception, Knowledge, Memory, Reasoning, Creativity (Theory-of-Mind), Interaction. This perspective is informed by readings from cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience.

Social Perception

Social Perception, 1990

Bridging the Gap between Social Animal and Unsocial Machine: A Survey of Social Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2011

Nonverbal Signals, Handbook of Interpersonal Communication, 2011

Social Signals: A Framework in Terms of Goals and Beliefs, Cognitive Processing, 2012

Data-driven Approaches in the Investigation of Social Perception, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016

The Handbook of Multimodal-Multisensory Interfaces: Signal Processing, Architectures, and Detection of Emotion and Cognition-Volume 2, ACM, 2018

Social Knowledge

Thinking about Ourselves and Others: Self-monitoring and Social Knowledge, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1980

A Proposed Model for the Acquisition of Social Knowledge and Social Competence, Psychology in the Schools, 1993

Social Memory

Social Memory in Everyday Life: Recall of Self-events and Other-events, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1991

Self and Social Functions: Individual Autobiographical Memory and Collective Narrative, Memory, 2003

Social Reasoning

Constraint Satisfaction Processes in Social Reasoning, Proceedings of the 25th Annual Cognitive Science Society, 2003

Reasoning Strategies Explain Individual Differences in Social Reasoning, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2021

Social Creativity (Theory-of-Mind)

Theory of Mind Development and Social Understanding, Cognition and Emotion, 2008

A Social Perspective on Theory of Mind, Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, 2015

Social Interaction

A Theory of Social Interaction, 1988

Interaction, Chapter 13 within Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism, 2003

Can Social Interaction Constitute Social Cognition?, Trends in Cognitive Science, 2010

Dimensions of Social Context, Additional Concepts, and Frameworks

Social-AI agents can be situated within interactions spanning social units, interaction structures, and timescales. Interactions can span social settings, degrees of agent embodiment, and social attributes of humans, with agents in several roles.

Social identity shapes social perception and evaluation, Neuroscience of Prejudice and Intergroup Relations, 2013

Social Identity Theory,Psychology of Entertainment, 2006

Social Identity Theory, 2016

Difference Matters: Communicating Social Identity, 2023

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959

Action and Embodiment within Situated Human Interaction, Journal of Pragmatics, 2000

The Role of Physical Embodiment in Human-Robot Interaction, IEEE RO-MAN, 2006

Grounding in Communication, Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, 1991

Shared Reality: Experiencing Commonality with Others' Inner States about the World, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2009

Embodiment in Socially-Interactive Robots, Foundations and Trends in Robotics, 2019

Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life, 1972

Interpretation as a Communicative Event: A Look Through Hymes' Lenses, Meta, 2000

Language and Social Relations, 2006

Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence, 1995

Understanding Dialogue: Language Use and Social Interaction, 2021

Phases, Transitions and Interruptions: Modeling Processes in Multi-party Negotiations, International Journal of Conflict Management, 2003

Social Influence Network Theory: A Sociological Examination of Small Group Dynamics, 2011

Detecting, Measuring, and Testing Dyadic Patterns in the Actor--Partner Interdependence Model, Journal of Family Psychology, 2019

Social Moments: A Perspective on Interaction for Social Robotics, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2017

Social-AI Research

Note: This section will be periodically updated with representative papers. Pull requests are always welcome, too

Rule-Based Approaches

Elementary Contracts as a Pragmatic Basis of Language Interaction, COLING, 1986

Linguistic Issues in Facial Animation, Computer Animation, 1991

Abductive explanation of dialogue misunderstandings, EACL, 1993

Social Interaction: Multimodal Conversation with Social Agents, AAAI, 1994

Animated Conversation: Rule-Based Generation of Facial Expression, Gesture & Spoken Intonation for Multiple Conversational Agents, SIGGRAPH, 1994

Generating Facial Expressions for Speech, Cognitive Science, 1996

Cooperation Structures, IJCAI, 1997

Modeling Social Action for AI Agents, Artificial Intelligence, 1998

A Computational Model of Social Perlocutions, ACL/COLING, 1998

Early Works in Multi-Agent Social Intelligence and Social Robotics

Multi-agent planning as a dynamic search for social consensus, IJCAI 1993

Designing Emergent Behaviors: From Local Interactions to Collective Intelligence, International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior: From Animals to Animats, 1993

Learning to Behave Socially, International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior: From Animals to Animats, 1994

How to Build Robots That Make Friends and Influence People, IROS 1999

Toward Sociable Robots, 2003

Designing Sociable Robots, 2004

ML, Deep Learning, Probabilistic and Game Theoretic Approaches

Toward Virtual Humans, AI Magazine, 2006

Latent-dynamic Discriminative Models for Continuous Gesture Recognition, CVPR, 2007

Social Signal Processing: Survey of an emerging domain, Image and Vision Computing, 2009

Improving Data Association by Joint Modeling of Pedestrian Trajectories and Groupings, ECCV, 2010

Towards Multimodal Sentiment Analysis: Harvesting Opinions from the Web, ACM ICMI, 2011

AVEC 2012: The Continuous Audio/visual Emotion Challenge, ACM ICMI, 2012

Note: AVEC has occurred several times as a workshop.

Learning the Communication of Intent Prior to Physical Collaboration, IEEE RO-MAN, 2012

Social Signal Classification Using Deep BLSTM Recurrent Neural Networks, ICASSP 2014

The Geneva Minimalistic Acoustic Parameter Set (GeMAPS) for Voice Research and Affective Computing, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2015

Coordinate to Cooperate or Compete: Abstract Goals and Joint Intentions in Social Interaction, Cognitive Science, 2016

Commonsense Interpretation of Triangle Behavior, AAAI, 2016

Active Preference-based Learning of Reward Functions, RSS, 2017

Personalized Machine Learning for Robot Perception of Affect and Engagement in Autism Therapy, Science Robotics, 2018

Multimodal Language Analysis in the Wild: CMU-Mosei Dataset and Interpretable Dynamic Fusion Graph, ACL, 2018

Social-bigat: Multimodal Trajectory Forecasting Using Bicycle-gan and Graph Attention Networks, NeurIPS, 2019

Gaitset: Regarding Gait as a Set for Cross-view Gait Recognition, AAAI, 2019

Dialoguernn: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations, AAAI, 2019

Multimodal Analysis and Estimation of Intimate Self-Disclosure, ACM ICMI, 2019

Social Influence as Intrinsic Motivation for Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning, ICML, 2019

Theory of Minds: Understanding Behavior in Groups through Inverse Planning, AAAI, 2019

Too Many Cooks: Coordinating Multi-agent Collaboration through Inverse Planning, Cognitive Science, 2020

Joint Attention for Multi-agent Coordination and Social Learning, ICRA Workshop on Social Intelligence in Humans and Robots, 2021

Learning To Listen: Modeling Non-Deterministic Dyadic Facial Motion, CVPR, 2022

Gesture2path: Imitation Learning for Gesture-aware Navigation, arXiv, 2022

Observer-aware Legibility for Social Navigation, RO-MAN, 2022

Modeling Multimodal Social Interactions: New Challenges and Baselines with Densely Aligned Representations,CVPR, 2024

Probing Social Intelligence Competencies of Models

Social-iq: A Question Answering Benchmark for Artificial Social Intelligence, CVPR, 2019

Revisiting the Evaluation of Theory of Mind through Question Answering, EMNLP, 2019

Socialiqa: Commonsense Reasoning about Social Interactions, EMNLP, 2019

Human-centric Dialog Training via Offline Reinforcement Learning, EMNLP, 2020

A Simple Language Model for Task-oriented Dialogue, NeurIPS, 2020

Language Model Transformers as Evaluators for Open-domain Dialogues, COLING, 2020

Exploring RoBERTa's Theory of Mind through Textual Entailment, 2021

Neural Theory-of-mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMs, EMNLP, 2022

Affective Behavior Learning for Social Robot Haru with Implicit Evaluative Feedback, IROS, 2022

Social-iq 2.0 Challenge: Benchmarking Multimodal Social Understanding, ICCV Challenge, 2023

The Socialai School: Insights from Developmental Psychology towards Artificial Socio-cultural Agents, arXiv, 2023

FANToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind in Interactions, EMNLP, 2023

NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms, ACL, 2023

Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models, EACL, 2024

Building Cooperative Embodied Agents Modularly with Large Language Models, ICLR 2024

Sotopia: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents, ICLR, 2024

MMToM-QA: Multimodal Theory of Mind Question Answering,arXiv, 2024

Habitat 3.0: A Co-habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots, ICLR 2024

Example Applications

Note: This section includes representative work and is being periodically updated.

Health and Well-being

Human--AI collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-based Peer-to-peer Mental Health Support, Nature Machine Intelligence 2023

Wellbeat: A Framework for Tracking Daily Well-being Using Smartwatches, IEEE Internet Computing, 2020

Social Robots in Hospitals: A Systematic Review, Applied Sciences, 2021

Socially Assistive Robotics for Post-stroke Rehabilitation, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, 2007

Social Robot for Rehabilitation: Expert Clinicians and Post-stroke Patients’ Evaluation Following a Long-term Intervention, HRI, 2020

Social and Emotional Skills Training with Embodied Moxie, arXiv, 2020

Robots for Use in Autism Research, Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering, 2012

A Robotic Positive Psychology Coach to Improve College Students’ Wellbeing, IEEE RO-MAN, 2020

Education

A Model-free Affective Reinforcement Learning Approach to Personalization of an Autonomous Social Robot Companion for Early Literacy Education, AAAI, 2019

Lifelong Personalization for Social Robot Learning Companions: Interactive Student Modeling Across Tasks and Over Time, PhD Thesis, 2022

Industrial

The Social Impact of a Robot Co-worker in Industrial Setting, CHI, 2015

Investigating the Role of Multi-modal Social Cues in Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Settings, International Journal of Social Robotics, 2023

Ethics, Safety, and Participatory Social-AI

Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers, Journal of Social Issues, 2000

Beyond Dirty, Dangerous and Dull: What Everyday People Think Robots Should Do, HRI, 2008

Averting robot eyes, Maryland Law Review, 2016

Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language, ACL, 2020

Towards Transparency by Design for Artificial Intelligence, Science and Engineering Ethics, 2020

Towards Understanding and Mitigating Social Biases in Language Models, ICML, 2021

Few-shot Instruction Prompts for Pretrained Language Models to Detect Social Biases, arXiv, 2021

Envisioning Communities: A Participatory Approach towards AI for Social Good, AIES, 2021

Unmasking the Mask--Evaluating Social Biases in Masked Language Models, AAAI, 2022

Power to the People? Opportunities and Challenges for Participatory AI, EAAMO, 2022

Deliberating with AI: Improving Decision-Making for the Future through Participatory AI Design and Stakeholder Deliberation, CSCW, 2023

Stable Bias: Evaluating Societal Representations in Diffusion Models, NeurIPS, 2023

Survey of Social Bias in Vision-Language Models, arXiv, 2023

Dall-eval: Probing the Reasoning Skills and Social Biases of Text-to-image Generation Models, ICCV, 2023

Never Trust Anything That Can Think for Itself, if You Can’t Control Its Privacy Settings: The Influence of a Robot’s Privacy Settings on Users’ Attitudes and Willingness to Self-disclose, International Journal of Social Robotics, 2023

Using Design Metaphors to Understand User Expectations of Socially Interactive Robot Embodiments, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interation, 2023

Federated Continual Learning for Socially Aware Robotics, IEEE RO-MAN, 2023

Benchmarks, Datasets, and Environments

Note: This section is being periodically updated. Pull requests are always welcome, too

Resource Modality and/or Domain Paper Data/Code
Social-IQ multimodal video qa paper data + code
Social-IQ 2.0 multimodal video qa ICCV 2023 Challenge data + code
Social-IQa text qa paper data + code
EmpathicStories++ text empathy prediction paper data
CMU-MOSEI multimodal sentiment and emotion intensity paper data + code
IEMOCAP multimodal emotional dyadic motion capture paper data
GENEA virtual agent gesture generation paper website
SocNavBench robot social navigation simulation paper website
Habitat 3.0 simulated human-robot social navigation and object rearrangement tasks ICLR 2024 paper website
SOTOPIA social intelligence abilities in language agents paper website
COELA cooperative embodied agents paper website
AgentVerse cooperation in multi-agent systems paper repo
CAMEL cooperative behaviors and abilities of multi-agent systems paper website

Courses

Note: This section is being periodically updated. Pull requests to add courses are always welcome, too

11:866: Artificial Social Intelligence, Carnegie Mellon University

CMU offers a new course 11:866: Artificial Social Intelligence, most recently taught in Spring 2023. There are publicly-available summaries from class discussions and reading lists for anyone interested in Social-AI topics.

Multimodal Probabilistic Learning of Human Communication, University of Southern California

Affective Computing: An Interdisciplinary Approach, University of Southern California

Affective Computing and Ethics, MIT

Dissertations

Note: This section is being periodically updated. Pull requests to add dissertations are always welcome, too

Communication and Coarticulation in Facial Animation, 1991, Catherine Pelachaud

Interaction and Intelligent Behavior, 1994, Maja J Matarić

Sociable Machines: Expressive Social Exchange Between Humans and Robots, 2000, Cynthia Breazeal

Foundations for a Theory of Mind for a Humanoid Robot, 2001, Brian Scassellati

Socially guided Machine Learning, 2006, Andrea Thomaz

Context-Based Visual Feedback Recognition, 2006, Louis-Philippe Morency

Vision-Based Multimodal Analysis of Affective Face and Upper-Body Behaviorl 2007, Hatice Gunes

Implicit and Automated Emotional Tagging of Videos, 2011, Mohammad Soleymani

Computers to Help with Conversations: Affective Framework to Enhance Human Nonverbal Skills, 2013, Ehsan Hoque

Measuring college students' sleep, stress, mental health and wellbeing with wearable sensors and mobile phones, 2016, Akane Sano

Nonverbal Communication in Socially Assistive Human-Robot Interaction, Henny Admoni

A Bayesian Theory of Mind Approach to Nonverbal Communication for Human-Robot Interactions, 2017, Jin Joo Lee

Cooperative and Transparent Machine Learning for the Context-Sensitive Analysis of Social Interactions, 2018, Tobias Baur

Computational Foundations of Human Social Intelligence, 2018, Max Kleiman-Weiner

Social and Affective Machine Learning, 2019, Natasha Jaques

Social Scene Understanding: Group Activity Parsing, Human-Robot Interactions, and Perception of Animacy, 2019, Tianmin Shu

Computational Social Roles, 2019, Diyi Yang

Modeling Visual Minutiae: Gestures, Styles, and Temporal Patterns, 2020, Shiry Ginosar

Positive AI with Social Commonsense Models, 2021, Maarten Sap

Towards Human-Centered Optimality Criteria, 2021, Asma Ghandeharioun

Lifelong Personalization for Social Robot Learning Companions: Interactive Student Modeling Across Tasks and Over Time, 2022, Sam Spaulding

Communication Beyond Words: Grounding Visual Body Motion with Language, 2022, Chaitanya Ahuja

Conversation Modeling with Human Values, Social Relations, Mental States, and Structure Learning, 2022, Liang Qiu

Synthesis of Multi-Modal Socially Intelligent Human-Robot Interaction, 2022, Karen Tatarian

VirtualHome: Building Socially Intelligent Agents via Simulation, 2023, Xavier Puig

Towards Artificial Social Intelligence in the Wild: Sensing, Synthesizing, Modeling, and Perceiving Nonverbal Social Human Behavior, 2023, Chirag Raman

Foundations of Multisensory Artificial Intelligence, 2024, Paul Pu Liang