Papers › ToM2C: Target-oriented Multi-agent Communication and Cooperation with Theory of Mind

ToM2C: Target-oriented Multi-agent Communication and Cooperation with Theory of Mind

15 Oct 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2111.09189archive 2025-07-28

Yuanfei Wang, Fangwei Zhong, Jing Xu, Yizhou Wang

Being able to predict the mental states of others is a key factor to effective social interaction. It is also crucial for distributed multi-agent systems, where agents are required to communicate and cooperate. In this paper, we introduce such an important social-cognitive skill, i.e. Theory of Mind (ToM), to build socially intelligent agents who are able to communicate and cooperate effectively to accomplish challenging tasks. With ToM, each agent is capable of inferring the mental states and intentions of others according to its (local) observation. Based on the inferred states, the agents decide "when" and with "whom" to share their intentions. With the information observed, inferred, and received, the agents decide their sub-goals and reach a consensus among the team. In the end, the low-level executors independently take primitive actions to accomplish the sub-goals. We demonstrate the idea in two typical target-oriented multi-agent tasks: cooperative navigation and multi-sensor target coverage. The experiments show that the proposed model not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on reward and communication efficiency, but also shows good generalization across different scales of the environment.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

14 samples harvested; 13 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 1 has no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 14 of the 14 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from unrealtracking/tom2c. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections