Matteo Bortoletto

About

I am a PhD Student in the Collaborative AI group at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, advised by Prof. Andreas Bulling. My core research lies at the intersection of artificial and social intelligence.

Currently, I'm a Visiting Graduate Scholar at the SCAI Lab, Johns Hopkins University.

[Google Scholar] [GitHub] [X] [LinkedIn] [CV]

Research Interests

My research focuses on how AI can understand others' mental states such as desires, beliefs, and intentions — a concept known as theory of mind — and how this understanding can improve interactions between humans and AI. In particular, I work on:

Designing and assessing AI models for theory of mind tasks that span multiple modalities, including vision and natural language
Probing and manipulating models' internal representations of mental states
Stress-testing theory of mind on large foundation models
Using theory of mind for planning

News

[08.05.2025] 📑 Reviewing for UIST 2025
[13.05.2025] 🏛️ Starting a position as Visiting Graduate Scholar at the SCAI Lab, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA)
[01.03.2025] 📑 Reviewing for TOCHI
[02.01.2025] 📑 Reviewing for the ACL 2025 Rolling Review
[01.10.2024] 📑 Reviewing for CHI 2025
[10.07.2024] 🏅 I got selected as volunteer for ACL 2024
[04.07.2024] 🔥 Paper accepted at ECAI 2024 (Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
[24.06.2024] 🔥 Paper accepted at ICML 2024 Workshop on Mechanistic Interpretability (Vienna, Austria)
[16.05.2024] 🔥 Paper accepted at ACL 2024 (Bangkok, Thailand)
[01.05.2024] ☀️ I got accepted to the CoGenAI Summer School (Aalto University, Finland)
[25.03.2024] 👨🏼‍🏫 Co-organizing “Computational Theory of Mind and Cognition” with Constantin Ruhdorfer & Anna Penzkofer
[01.03.2024] 🏆 My student Constantin Ruhdorfer has been awarded the Rul Gunzenhäuser Award for his master thesis
[18.12.2023] 🏅 I got selected as volunteer for AAAI 2024
[09.12.2023] 🔥 Paper accepted at AAAI 2024 (Vancouver, Canada)
[29.09.2023] 📑 Reviewing for CHI 2024
[07.04.2023] 🔥 Paper accepted at CogSci 2023 (Sydney, Australia)
[27.03.2023] 🔥 Paper accepted at INTERACT 2023 (York, UK)

Publications

Peer Reviewed

Explicit Modelling of Theory of Mind for Belief Prediction in Nonverbal Social Interactions
M Bortoletto, C Ruhdorfer, L Shi, A Bulling
ECAI 2024 (Oral) [Paper] [Project]

Benchmarking Mental State Representations in Language Models
M Bortoletto, C Ruhdorfer, L Shi, A Bulling
ICML 2024 Workshop on Mechanistic Interpretability [Paper] [Project] [Poster]

Limits of Theory of Mind Modelling in Dialogue-Based Collaborative Plan Acquisition
M Bortoletto, C Ruhdorfer, A Abdessaied, L Shi, A Bulling
ACL 2024 [Paper] [Project] [Poster]

Neural Reasoning about Agents' Goals, Preferences, and Actions
M Bortoletto, L Shi, A Bulling
AAAI 2024 [Paper] [Project] [Poster]

Improving Neural Saliency Prediction with a Cognitive Model of Human Visual Attention
E Sood, L Shi, M Bortoletto, Y Wang, P Müller, A Bulling
CogSci 2023 [Paper]

Exploring Natural Language Processing Methods for Interactive Behaviour Modelling
G Zhang, M Bortoletto, Z Hu, L Shi, M Bâce, A Bulling
INTERACT 2023 [Paper]

Preprints

The Overcooked Generalisation Challenge
C Ruhdorfer, M Bortoletto, A Penzkofer, A Bulling
arXiv:2406.17949 [Paper]

Contact

Email: matteo [dot] bortoletto [at] uni-stuttgart [dot] de

Office: SimTech Building, Room 01.027

Students

I regularly supervise Master and Bachelor theses. If you have an idea for your thesis, feel free to contact me. If you are looking for available projects, check if there are Open Thesis Projects here.