# Speaking the Language of Your Listener: Audience-Aware Adaptation via Plug-and-Play Theory of Mind

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19933 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19933/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [What you can cram into a single vector: Probing sentence embeddings for linguistic properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01070/) (2018)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07779/) (2020)
- [How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08023/) (2016)
- [Machine Theory of Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07740/) (2018)
- [Fine-grained Analysis of Sentence Embeddings Using Auxiliary Prediction Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04207/) (2016)
- [COLD Decoding: Energy-based Constrained Text Generation with Langevin Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11705/) (2022)
- [A Joint Speaker-Listener-Reinforcer Model for Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.09542/) (2016)
- [Reasoning About Pragmatics with Neural Listeners and Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00562/) (2016)
- [Multi-agent Communication meets Natural Language: Synergies between Functional and Structural Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07064/) (2020)
- [PADA: Example-based Prompt Learning for on-the-fly Adaptation to Unseen Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12206/) (2021)
- [Colors in Context: A Pragmatic Neural Model for Grounded Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10186/) (2017)
- [A Plug-and-Play Method for Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09707/) (2021)
- [The PhotoBook Dataset: Building Common Ground through Visually-Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01530/) (2019)
- [Context-aware Captions from Context-agnostic Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02870/) (2017)
- [Pragmatically Informative Image Captioning with Character-Level Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05417/) (2018)
- [Few-shot Language Coordination by Modeling Theory of Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05697/) (2021)
- [Continual adaptation for efficient machine communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09896/) (2019)
- [Refer, Reuse, Reduce: Generating Subsequent References in Visual and Conversational Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04554/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Pragmatics in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey on Datasets, Evaluation, Opportunities and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12378/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models as Theory of Mind Aware Generative Agents with Counterfactual Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15355/) (2025)
- [Instruct Once, Chat Consistently in Multiple Rounds: An Efficient Tuning Framework for Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06967/) (2024)
- [Explicit Modelling of Theory of Mind for Belief Prediction in Nonverbal Social Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06762/) (2024)
- [Direct Preference Optimization for Adaptive Concept-based Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15626/) (2025)
- [Personalizing MLLMs via Reinforced Multimodal Reference Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28845/) (2026)
- [Which one is banana man? Evaluating vision-language models in multi-turn pragmatic interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29571/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dialogue participants may have varying levels of knowledge about the topic under discussion. In such cases, it is essential for speakers to adapt their utterances by taking their audience into account. Yet, it is an open question how such adaptation can be modelled in computational agents. In this paper, we model a visually grounded referential game between a knowledgeable speaker and a listener with more limited visual and linguistic experience. Inspired by psycholinguistic theories, we endow our speaker with the ability to adapt its referring expressions via a simulation module that monitors the effectiveness of planned utterances from the listener's perspective. We propose an adaptation mechanism building on plug-and-play approaches to controlled language generation, where utterance generation is steered on the fly by the simulator without finetuning the speaker's underlying language model. Our results and analyses show that our approach is effective: the speaker's utterances become closer to the listener's domain of expertise, which leads to higher communicative success.