Matteo Bortoletto

I'm a Research Engineer at kapa.ai (YC S23).

I'm also a PhD candidate in the Collaborative AI group at the University of Stuttgart, advised by Prof. Andreas Bulling, where my research focuses on theory of mind in AI.

During my PhD, I spent time as a Visiting Graduate Scholar at the SCAI Lab, Johns Hopkins University, advised by Prof. Tianmin Shu.

LinkedIn   Scholar   GitHub   CV

Interests

My research focuses on how AI can understand others' beliefs, goals, preferences, and intentions — a concept known as theory of mind — and how this understanding can improve human–AI interaction.

  • Designing and assessing AI models for theory of mind across vision and language [AAAI'24] [ACL'24] [ECAI'24] [IJCAI-W'25]
  • Probing and manipulating internal representations of mental states [EMNLP-F'25]
  • Stress-testing theory of mind on large foundation models [EMNLP'25]
  • Using theory of mind for action selection and intervention [ArXiv]
Publications
Preprints
ProToM: Promoting Prosocial Behaviour via Theory of Mind-Informed Feedback
M Bortoletto, Y Zhou, L Ying, T Shu, A Bulling
arXiv:2509.05091
[ArXiv] [Website] [Code]
Unsupervised Partner Design Enables Robust Ad-hoc Teamwork
C Ruhdorfer, M Bortoletto, V Oei, A Penzkofer, A Bulling
arXiv:2508.06336
[ArXiv] [Code]
Peer Reviewed
ToM-SSI: Evaluating Theory of Mind in Situated Social Interactions
M Bortoletto, C Ruhdorfer, A Bulling
EMNLP 2025
[ArXiv] [Code] [Poster]
Brittle Minds, Fixable Activations: Understanding Belief Representations in Language Models
M Bortoletto, C Ruhdorfer, L Shi, A Bulling
EMNLP 2025 Findings · ICML 2024 Workshop on Mechanistic Interpretability
[ArXiv] [Code] [Poster] [OpenReview]
The Overcooked Generalisation Challenge
C Ruhdorfer, M Bortoletto, A Penzkofer, A Bulling
TMLR
[ArXiv] [Code]
The Yokai Learning Environment: Tracking Beliefs Over Space and Time
C Ruhdorfer, M Bortoletto, A Bulling
IJCAI 2025 Workshop on Theory of Mind (Oral)
[ArXiv] [Code]
Explicit Modelling of Theory of Mind for Belief Prediction in Nonverbal Social Interactions
M Bortoletto, C Ruhdorfer, L Shi, A Bulling
ECAI 2024 (Oral)
[ArXiv] [Code]
Limits of Theory of Mind Modelling in Dialogue-Based Collaborative Plan Acquisition
M Bortoletto, C Ruhdorfer, A Abdessaied, L Shi, A Bulling
ACL 2024
[Proceedings] [Code] [Poster]
Neural Reasoning about Agents' Goals, Preferences, and Actions
M Bortoletto, L Shi, A Bulling
AAAI 2024
[ArXiv] [Code] [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
[Proceedings]
Exploring Natural Language Processing Methods for Interactive Behaviour Modelling
G Zhang, M Bortoletto, Z Hu, L Shi, M Bâce, A Bulling
INTERACT 2023
[ArXiv] [Code]

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

Personal: mabo22 [dot] lab [at] gmail [dot] com