Spring 2026 GRASP SFI: Ruta Desai, ex-Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), Meta, “Towards AI Partners: Socially Intelligent Agents that Augment Human Abilities”

This was a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance…

ABSTRACT

AI agents — whether embodied robots, conversational systems, or wearable assistants — are increasingly present in our daily lives, yet they remain far from being true partners. Bridging the gap from assistance to partnership requires social intelligence: the ability to form and use adaptive mental models of human beliefs, emotions, goals, and actions. In this talk, I will present our work on building socially intelligent agents across two domains. First, I will discuss embodied partners, including Habitat 3.0, a high-speed simulation platform for human-robot collaboration, and PARTNR, a large-scale benchmark of natural-language household tasks that reveals fundamental coordination challenges for LLM-based planners — where even state-of-the-art models can be slower than a human working alone. Second, I will present Coral, a benchmark for collaborative reasoning, where we find that current LLMs are surprisingly poor collaborators — overly agreeable and lacking the persuasiveness and assertiveness needed for effective partnership. I will show how synthetic interaction data and self-training via belief filtering can produce collaborative reasoners that surpass frontier models including GPT-4o and O1. Throughout, I will highlight the core challenges of mental world modeling, generalization to unseen humans, and the flywheel of simulation, deployment, and adaptation needed to realize truly personalized AI partners.