# Planning Ahead with RSA: Efficient Signalling in Dynamic Environments by Projecting User Awareness across Future Timesteps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23340 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23340/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Reasoning About Pragmatics with Neural Listeners and Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00562/) (2016)
- [Colors in Context: A Pragmatic Neural Model for Grounded Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10186/) (2017)
- [Unified Pragmatic Models for Generating and Following Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04987/) (2017)
- [Pragmatically Informative Image Captioning with Character-Level Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05417/) (2018)
- [Pragmatic Instruction Following and Goal Assistance via Cooperative Language-Guided Inverse Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17930/) (2024)
- [Language Models in Dialogue: Conversational Maxims for Human-AI Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15115/) (2024)
- [Grounding Language in Multi-Perspective Referential Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03959/) (2024)
- [An Incremental Iterated Response Model of Pragmatics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00367/) (2018)
- [Vision-Language Models Are Not Pragmatically Competent in Referring Expression Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16060/) (2025)
- [The division of labor in communication: Speakers help listeners account for asymmetries in visual perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09000/) (2018)
- [A practical introduction to the Rational Speech Act modeling framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09867/) (2021)
- [Shifting Focus with HCEye: Exploring the Dynamics of Visual Highlighting and Cognitive Load on User Attention and Saliency Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14232/) (2024)
- [Gricean Norms as a Basis for Effective Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14484/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adaptive agent design offers a way to improve human-AI collaboration on time-sensitive tasks in rapidly changing environments. In such cases, to ensure the human maintains an accurate understanding of critical task elements, an assistive agent must not only identify the highest priority information but also estimate how and when this information can be communicated most effectively, given that human attention represents a zero-sum cognitive resource where focus on one message diminishes awareness of other or upcoming information. We introduce a theoretical framework for adaptive signalling which meets these challenges by using principles of rational communication, formalised as Bayesian reference resolution using the Rational Speech Act (RSA) modelling framework, to plan a sequence of messages which optimise timely alignment between user belief and a dynamic environment. The agent adapts message specificity and timing to the particulars of a user and scenario based on projections of how prior-guided interpretation of messages will influence attention to the interface and subsequent belief update, across several timesteps out to a fixed horizon. In a comparison to baseline methods, we show that this effectiveness depends crucially on combining multi-step planning with a realistic model of user awareness. As the first application of RSA for communication in a dynamic environment, and for human-AI interaction in general, we establish theoretical foundations for pragmatic communication in human-agent teams, highlighting how insights from cognitive science can be capitalised to inform the design of assistive agents.