A Dialogue Game for Eliciting Balanced Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new online dialogue game designed to promote balanced collaboration between human players, demonstrating that such balance enhances task success and presents challenges for AI agents.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel 2D object placement game that encourages balanced roles in human collaboration and explores AI agent performance on this task.

Findings

Balanced collaboration improves task performance

Humans exhibit diverse role distributions in the game

AI agents face challenges in automatic gameplay

Abstract

Collaboration is an integral part of human dialogue. Typical task-oriented dialogue games assign asymmetric roles to the participants, which limits their ability to elicit naturalistic role-taking in collaboration and its negotiation. We present a novel and simple online setup that favors balanced collaboration: a two-player 2D object placement game in which the players must negotiate the goal state themselves. We show empirically that human players exhibit a variety of role distributions, and that balanced collaboration improves task performance. We also present an LLM-based baseline agent which demonstrates that automatic playing of our game is an interesting challenge for artificial systems.