Robots operating in everyday environments must often decide when and whether to engage with people, yet such decisions often hinge on subtle nonverbal cues that unfold over time and are difficult to model explicitly. Drawing on a five-day Wizard-of-Oz deployment of a mobile service robot in a university cafe, we analyze how people signal interaction readiness through nonverbal behaviors and how expert wizards use these cues to guide engagement. Motivated by these observations, we propose a two-stage pipeline in which lightweight perceptual detectors (gaze shifts and proxemics) are used to selectively trigger heavier video-based vision-language model (VLM) queries at socially meaningful moments. We evaluate this pipeline on replayed field interactions and compare two prompting strategies. Our findings suggest that selectively using VLMs as proxies for social reasoning enables socially responsive robot behavior, allowing robots to act appropriately by attending to the cues people naturally provide in real-world interactions.

Purpose: The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems like ChatGPT, Claude AI, etc., has a deep impact on how work is done. Predicting how AI will reshape work requires understanding not just its capabilities, but how it is actually being adopted. This study investigates which intrinsic task characteristics drive users' decisions to delegate work to AI systems. Methodology: This study utilizes the Anthropic Economic Index dataset of four million Claude AI interactions mapped to O*NET tasks. We systematically scored each task across seven key dimensions: Routine, Cognitive, Social Intelligence, Creativity, Domain Knowledge, Complexity, and Decision Making using 35 parameters. We then employed multivariate techniques to identify latent task archetypes and analyzed their relationship with AI usage. Findings: Tasks requiring high creativity, complexity, and cognitive demand, but low routineness, attracted the most AI engagement. Furthermore, we identified three task archetypes: Dynamic Problem Solving, Procedural & Analytical Work, and Standardized Operational Tasks, demonstrating that AI applicability is best predicted by a combination of task characteristics, over individual factors. Our analysis revealed highly concentrated AI usage patterns, with just 5% of tasks accounting for 59% of all interactions. Originality: This research provides the first systematic evidence linking real-world generative AI usage to a comprehensive, multi-dimensional framework of intrinsic task characteristics. It introduces a data-driven classification of work archetypes that offers a new framework for analyzing the emerging human-AI division of labor.

As large language models (LLMs) develop anthropomorphic abilities, they are increasingly being deployed as autonomous agents to interact with humans. However, evaluating their performance in realistic and complex social interactions remains a significant challenge. Most previous research built datasets through simulated agent-to-agent interactions, which fails to capture the authentic linguistic styles and relational dynamics found in real human conversations. To address this gap, we introduce SI-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate aspects of social intelligence in LLMs. Grounded in broad social science theories, SI-Bench contains 2,221 authentic multi-turn dialogues collected from a social networking application. We further selected a subset of 312 dialogues for manual annotation across 8 major models. The experiments show that SOTA models have surpassed the human expert in process reasoning under complex social situations, yet they still fall behind humans in reply quality. Moreover, introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning may degrade the performance of LLMs in social dialogue tasks. All datasets are openly available at https://github.com/SI-Bench/SI-Bench.git.

We present a probabilistic intent modeling framework for large language model (LLM) agents in multi-turn social dialogue. The framework maintains a belief distribution over a partner's latent intentions, initialized from contextual priors and dynamically updated through likelihood estimation after each utterance. The evolving distribution provides additional contextual grounding for the policy, enabling adaptive dialogue strategies under uncertainty. Preliminary experiments in the SOTOPIA environment show consistent improvements: the proposed framework increases the Overall score by 9.0% on SOTOPIA-All and 4.1% on SOTOPIA-Hard compared with the Qwen2.5-7B baseline, and slightly surpasses an oracle agent that directly observes partner intentions. These early results suggest that probabilistic intent modeling can contribute to the development of socially intelligent LLM agents.

Many challenges remain before AI agents can be deployed in real-world environments. However, one virtue of such environments is that they are inherently multi-agent and contain human experts. Using advanced social intelligence in such an environment can help an AI agent learn adaptive skills and behaviors that a known expert exhibits. While social intelligence could accelerate training, it is currently difficult to study due to the lack of open-ended multi-agent environments. In this work, we present an environment in which multiple self-interested agents can pursue complex and independent goals, reflective of real world challenges. This environment will enable research into the development of socially intelligent AI agents in open-ended multi-agent settings, where agents may be implicitly incentivized to cooperate to defeat common enemies, build and share tools, and achieve long horizon goals. In this work, we investigate the impact on agent performance due to social learning in the presence of experts and implicit cooperation such as emergent collaborative tool use, and whether agents can benefit from either cooperation or competition in this environment.

Humans engage in lifelong social interactions through interacting with different people under different scenarios for different social goals. This requires social intelligence to gather information through a long time span and use it to navigate various social contexts effectively. Whether AI systems are also capable of this is understudied in the existing research. In this paper, we present a novel benchmark, LIFELONG-SOTOPIA, to perform a comprehensive evaluation of language agents by simulating multi-episode interactions. In each episode, the language agents role-play characters to achieve their respective social goals in randomly sampled social tasks. With LIFELONG-SOTOPIA, we find that goal achievement and believability of all of the language models that we test decline through the whole interaction. Although using an advanced memory method improves the agents' performance, the best agents still achieve a significantly lower goal completion rate than humans on scenarios requiring an explicit understanding of interaction history. These findings show that we can use LIFELONG-SOTOPIA to evaluate the social intelligence of language agents over lifelong social interactions.

--Facial expressiveness plays a crucial role in a robot's ability to engage and interact with children. Prior research has shown that expressive robots can enhance child engagement during human-robot interactions. However, many robots used in therapy settings feature non-personalized, static faces designed with traditional facial feature considerations, which can limit the depth of interactions and emotional connections. Digital faces offer opportunities for personalization, yet the current landscape of robot face design lacks a dynamic, user-centered approach. Specifically, there is a significant research gap in designing robot faces based on child preferences. Instead, most robots in child-focused therapy spaces are developed from an adult-centric perspective. We present a novel study investigating the influence of child-drawn digital faces in child-robot interactions. This approach focuses on a design activity with children instructed to draw their own custom robot faces. We compare the perceptions of social intelligence (PSI) of two implementations: a generic digital face and a robot face, personalized using the user's drawn robot faces. The results of this study show the perceived social intelligence of a child-drawn robot was significantly higher compared to a generic face.

Large language models demonstrate advanced problem-solving capabilities by incorporating reasoning techniques such as chain of thought and reflection. However, how these reasoning capabilities extend to social intelligence remains unclear. In this study, we investigate this question using economic games that model social dilemmas, where social intelligence plays a crucial role. First, we examine the effects of chain-of-thought and reflection techniques in a public goods game. We then extend our analysis to six economic games on cooperation and punishment, comparing off-the-shelf non-reasoning and reasoning models. We find that reasoning models significantly reduce cooperation and norm enforcement, prioritizing individual rationality. Consequently, groups with more reasoning models exhibit less cooperation and lower gains through repeated interactions. These behaviors parallel human tendencies of "spontaneous giving and calculated greed." Our results suggest the need for AI architectures that incorporate social intelligence alongside reasoning capabilities to ensure that AI supports, rather than disrupts, human cooperative intuition. Recent innovations in reasoning techniques, such as chain of thought [1] and reflection [2], are advancing the intellectual capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to the next level. Models such as OpenAI o1 leverage these techniques to solve complex problems, generate coherent arguments, and improve decision-making in multi-step reasoning scenarios [3-5]. Indeed, these reasoning models have demonstrated excellence in mathematical proofs, logical deduction, and strategic planning [6, 7]. The necessity of social intelligence is highlighted in social dilemmas, where individual rationality leads to collective irrationality [12].

Large language models (LLMs), due to their advanced natural language capabilities, have seen significant success in applications where the user interface is usually a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) agent and engages the user through multi-round conversations. However, many scenarios require the agents to exhibit stronger social and conversational intelligence and demonstrate more human-like (anthropomorphic) reactions. This is an aspect that foundational LLMs have yet to fully address such that a single call of foundational models might be insufficient. To bridge this gap, we propose a two-stage solution. In this work, we focus on the first stage, introducing a multi-module framework designed to replicate the key aspects of human intelligence involved in conversations. This framework comprises thinking modules for reasoning, resource modules for managing knowledge and external information, and response modules for generating contextually appropriate interactions. With all the modules cooperating, the framework would empower the agents to provide a better human-like conversation experience. In the second stage of our approach, these conversational data, after filtering and labeling, can serve as training and testing data for reinforcement learning, enabling AI to better capture human preferences. This stage is left for future work. In our experiments, volunteers engaged in over 3000 rounds of conversation with the same AI character powered by a standalone LLM and our framework which integrates the same LLM. A separate group of evaluators rated the conversation samples, revealing that our framework significantly enhanced the social and conversational intelligence, even without fine-tuning the LLM.

Socially intelligent AI that can understand and interact seamlessly with humans in daily lives is increasingly important as AI becomes more closely integrated with peoples' daily activities. However, current works in artificial social reasoning all rely on language-only, or language-dominant approaches to benchmark and training models, resulting in systems that are improving in verbal communication but struggle with nonverbal social understanding. To address this limitation, we tap into a novel source of data rich in nonverbal and social interactions -- mime videos. Mimes refer to the art of expression through gesture and movement without spoken words, which presents unique challenges and opportunities in interpreting non-verbal social communication. We contribute a new dataset called MimeQA, obtained by sourcing 221 videos from YouTube, through rigorous annotation and verification, resulting in a benchmark with 101 videos and 806 question-answer pairs. Using MimeQA, we evaluate state-of-the-art video large language models (vLLMs) and find that their overall accuracy ranges from 15-30%. Our analysis reveals that vLLMs often fail to ground imagined objects and over-rely on the text prompt while ignoring subtle nonverbal interactions. Our data resources are released at https://github.com/MIT-MI/MimeQA to inspire future work in foundation models that embody true social intelligence capable of interpreting non-verbal human interactions.