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.
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:
- I reasearch the intersection between partner and map generalisation, i.e. in The Overcooked Generalisation Challenge.
- I research how computational Theory of Mind and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning can be combined to improve zero-shot human-AI cooperation.
- 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
- 2025: Ruhdorfer, C., Bortoletto, M., Penzkofer, A. & Bulling, A. (2025). The Overcooked Generalisation Challenge: Evaluating Cooperation with Novel Partners in Unknown Environments Using Unsupervised Environment Design. Transactions on Machine Learning Research. [website] [arxiv]
- 2025: Ruhdorfer, C., Bortoletto, M. & Bulling, A. (2025) The Yōkai Learning Environment: Tracking Beliefs Over Space and Time IJCAI Workshop on Generative AI & Theory of Mind In Communicating Agents [website] [arxiv]
- 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]
- 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]
- 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]
- 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]
- 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:
- 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
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.
News
I am very happy to announce that we have two papers accepted at EMNLP 2025!
Both works deal with Theory of Mind and Large Language Models.
In the first we study how LLMs represent beliefs (findings) and in the second we propose a new benchmark for evaluating the Theory of Mind abilities of LLMs (main conference).
Matteo Bortoletto, Constantin Ruhdorfer, Lei Shi, Andreas Bulling
Brittle Minds, Fixable Activations: Understanding Belief Representations in Language Models
Findings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2025.
Matteo Bortoletto, Constantin Ruhdorfer, Andreas Bulling
ToM-SSI: Evaluating Theory of Mind in Situated Social Interactions
Proc. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2025.
I am very happy to announce that we have a paper accepted at ToM IJCAI 2025.
Our work will be featured as a long oral talk at the workshop.
The paper is titled The Yōkai Learning Environment: Tracking Beliefs Over Space and Time and proposes a new multi-agent RL environment for zero-shot coordination and Theory of Mind research.
Super excited to announce that I have been accepted into the 2025 edition of the Cooperative AI foundation’s summer school in Marlow, UK.
I had a blast attending the ELLIS CoGenAI Summer School last week where I talked about our recent preprint “The Overcooked Generalisation Challenge” available here.
For more details you can also see my LinkedIn post
