Collaborative Theory of Mind: Learning to Self-Revise by Anticipating User Responses

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong individual task performance, yet still struggle to collaborate with users over extended, multi-turn interactions, for example by attempting solutions before understanding the user's needs or by failing to revise mistaken assumptions after receiving feedback. We propose Collaborative Theory of Mind (CToM), a framework that addresses these challenges by explicitly training LLMs to anticipate user responses and to use those predictions to improve their own behavior. CToM drafts a response, predicts how the user will respond, and uses this prediction to guide internal revision before presenting a response. During training, the user's reply to each draft serves as the target for predicting the next turn, and we train the assistant to minimize the negative log-likelihood of that reply. We combine this prediction objective with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) to optimize both task performance and interaction efficiency. Across mathematical reasoning, coding, and writing tasks, CToM achieves higher collaborative task performance than all baselines; for example, on a collaborative mathematical reasoning task, it improves final accuracy from 74.1% to 79.6% compared with naive GRPO. Ablations show that predicting user responses also makes collaboration more efficient: under the same reward, adding prediction supervision reduces the number of user replies by 8% on coding and 17% on writing while improving task performance. Behavioral analyses of interaction trajectories show that user-response predictions become more accurate after training, and that more accurate predictions are associated with larger improvements in collaborative task performance through self-revision.