PerspAct: Enhancing LLM Situated Collaboration Skills through Perspective Taking and Active Vision

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models have significantly broadened their application in robotics and collaborative systems. However, effective multi-agent interaction necessitates robust perspective-taking capabilities, enabling models to interpret both physical and epistemic viewpoints. Current training paradigms often neglect these interactive contexts, resulting in challenges when models must reason about the subjectivity of individual perspectives or navigate environments with multiple observers. This study evaluates whether explicitly incorporating diverse points of view using the ReAct framework, an approach that integrates reasoning and acting, can enhance an LLM's ability to understand and ground the demands of other agents. We extend the classic Director task by introducing active visual exploration across a suite of seven scenarios of increasing perspective-taking complexity. These scenarios are designed to challenge the agent's capacity to resolve referential ambiguity based on visual access and interaction, under varying state representations and prompting strategies, including ReAct-style reasoning. Our results demonstrate that explicit perspective cues, combined with active exploration strategies, significantly improve the model's interpretative accuracy and collaborative effectiveness. These findings highlight the potential of integrating active perception with perspective-taking mechanisms in advancing LLMs' application in robotics and multi-agent systems, setting a foundation for future research into adaptive and context-aware AI systems.

Who Sees What? Structured Thought-Action Sequences for Epistemic Reasoning in LLMs

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and reasoning frameworks have opened new possibilities for improving the perspective -taking capabilities of autonomous agents. However, tasks that involve active perception, collaborative reasoning, and perspective taking (understanding what another agent can see or knows) pose persistent challenges for current LLM-based systems. This study investigates the potential of structured examples derived from transformed solution graphs generated by the Fast Downward planner to improve the performance of LLM-based agents within a ReAct framework. We propose a structured solution-processing pipeline that generates three distinct categories of examples: optimal goal paths (G-type), informative node paths (E-type), and step-by-step optimal decision sequences contrasting alternative actions (L-type). These solutions are further converted into ``thought-action'' examples by prompting an LLM to explicitly articulate the reasoning behind each decision. While L-type examples slightly reduce clarification requests and overall action steps, they do not yield consistent improvements. Agents are successful in tasks requiring basic attentional filtering but struggle in scenarios that required mentalising about occluded spaces or weighing the costs of epistemic actions. These findings suggest that structured examples alone are insufficient for robust perspective-taking, underscoring the need for explicit belief tracking, cost modelling, and richer environments to enable socially grounded collaboration in LLM-based agents.

SCOOP: A Framework for Proactive Collaboration and Social Continual Learning through Natural Language Interaction andCausal Reasoning

Multimodal information-gathering settings, where users collaborate with AI in dynamic environments, are increasingly common. These involve complex processes with textual and multimodal interactions, often requiring additional structural information via cost-incurring requests. AI helpers lack access to users' true goals, beliefs, and preferences and struggle to integrate diverse information effectively. We propose a social continual learning framework for causal knowledge acquisition and collaborative decision-making. It focuses on autonomous agents learning through dialogues, question-asking, and interaction in open, partially observable environments. A key component is a natural language oracle that answers the agent's queries about environmental mechanisms and states, refining causal understanding while balancing exploration or learning, and exploitation or knowledge use. Evaluation tasks inspired by developmental psychology emphasize causal reasoning and question-asking skills. They complement benchmarks by assessing the agent's ability to identify knowledge gaps, generate meaningful queries, and incrementally update reasoning. The framework also evaluates how knowledge acquisition costs are amortized across tasks within the same environment. We propose two architectures: 1) a system combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ReAct framework and question-generation, and 2) an advanced system with a causal world model, symbolic, graph-based, or subsymbolic, for reasoning and decision-making. The latter builds a causal knowledge graph for efficient inference and adaptability under constraints. Challenges include integrating causal reasoning into ReAct and optimizing exploration and question-asking in error-prone scenarios. Beyond applications, this framework models developmental processes combining causal reasoning, question generation, and social learning.