Welcome!

Hi, I am a Ph.D. candidate and research associate in the Collaborative Artificial Intelligence (CAI) group under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Andreas Bulling at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Additionally, I am a Ph.D. scholar at the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS). Next to Andreas Bulling, Prof. Dr. Georg Martius (Max Planck Institute for Intelliegent Systems, University of Tübingen) and Dr. Charley Wu (University of Tübingen) are part of my IMPRS-IS Thesis Advisory Committee.

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I research cooperative AI with a focus on social reasoning and generalisation. Specifically, in my work I investigate the intersection of multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, computational Theory of Mind, and ad-hoc teamwork. I specifically focus on hard generalisation problems in open-ended learning with unknown partners:

1. I reasearch the intersection between partner and map generalisation, i.e. in The Overcooked Generalisation Challenge.
2. I research how computational Theory of Mind and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning can be combined to improve zero-shot human-AI cooperation.
3. I try to adress how open-ended learning is connected to learning Theory of Mind in artificial agents.

You can find more about me or my work on the about page, on our groups website, or on google scholar. For students interested in a project or thesis please check the open thesis page.

Publications

1. 2024: Bortoletto, M., Ruhdorfer, C., Shi, L. & Bulling, A. (2024). Explicit Modelling of Theory of Mind for Belief Prediction in Nonverbal Social Interactions. Proc. European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), pp. 1–7, 2024. (oral) [paper] [website] [arxiv]
2. 2024: Ruhdorfer, C., Bortoletto, M., Penzkofer, A. & Bulling, A. (2024). The Overcooked Generalisation Challenge. Preprint arXiv:2406.17949. [website] [arxiv]
3. 2024: Bortoletto, M., Ruhdorfer, C., Shi, L. & Bulling, A. (2024). Benchmarking Mental State Representations in Language Models. ICML Workshop on Mechanistic Interpretability. [paper] [website] [arxiv]
4. 2024: Bortoletto, M., Ruhdorfer, C., Abdessaied, A., Shi, L. & Bulling, A. (2024). Limits of Theory of Mind Modelling in Dialogue-Based Collaborative Plan Acquisition. Proc. 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 1–16, 2024. [paper] [website] [arxiv] [acl]
5. 2024: Wang, Y., Jiang, Y., Hu, Z., Ruhdorfer, C., Bhâce, M., & Bulling, A. (2024). VisRecall++: Analysing and Predicting Visualisation Recallability from Gaze Bahaviour. Proc. ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACM HCI), 1–11. [paper] [website] [acm]
6. 2020: Ruhdorfer, C., & Schulz, S. (2020). Efficient Implementation of Large-Scale Watchlists. PAAR+SC² @ International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR) (pp. 120-133). [paper] [website]

I sometimes collaborate with others to work on topics not related to my core research interests:

1. 2025: Hofmeyer, P. E., Burghaus, H., Ruhdorfer, C., Oswald, J., Bulling, A., Herdrich, G. (2025) Integration of Machine Learning in High-Enthalpy Plasma Spectroscopy. Proc. International Conference on Flight vehicles, Aerothermodynamics and Re-entry (FAR), pp. 1–8 [paper] [website]

Conferences, Summer Schools and Other

• 2025: Accepted into the 2025 Cooperative AI Foundation Summer School in Marlow, UK.
• 2024: Attended the IMPRS-IS 2024 Bootcamp in Sonthofen, Germany and presented a poster about my paper: The Overcooked Generalisation Challenge.
• 2024: I help with the organization of the ELLIS Distinguished Lecture Series at the ELLIS Unit Stuttgart.
• 2024: Attended the 2024 ELLIS summer school on Collaborative and Generative AI (CoGenAI) at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finnland.

Awards

• 2024: Rul Gunzenhäuser award for the best Master's thesis at the Institute for Visualisation and Interactive Systems, Stuttgart University in 2023.[announcement] [website]

Teaching

For details please refer to here.

• 2024 (winter): Mediainformatics (Organizer and Tutor) (Bachelor level course)
• 2024 (summer): Computational Theory of Mind and Cognition (Organizer, Tutor and Lecturer) (Master level practical course)
• 2024 (summer): Human Computer Interaction (Tutor) (Bachelor level lecture)
• 2023 (winter): Machine Perception and Learning (Tutor) (Master level lecture)

Supervision

I regulary supervise Master and Bachelor theses, see here for a full list and if interested our open projects page. To this day I was or am involved in supervising a total of 3 students in their Master Thesis and a total of 8 students in various group projects offered through some of our lectures.

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