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Inner Speech as Behavior Guides: Steerable Imitation of Diverse Behaviors for Human-AI coordination

Rakshit Trivedi, Kartik Sharma, David C Parkes · Feb 24, 2026 · Citations: 0

Coding Demonstrations
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How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts. Imitation learning has emerged as one of the prominent approaches to build such agents by training them to mimic human-demonstrated behaviors. However, current methods struggle to capture the inherent diversity and non-Markovian nature of human behavior and lack the ability to steer behavior at inference time. Drawing inspiration from the theory of human cognitive processes, where inner speech guides action selection before execution, we propose MIMIC (Modeling Inner Motivations for Imitation and Control), a framework that uses language as an internal representation of behavioral intent. MIMIC employs the novel use of vision-language models as linguistic scaffolding to train a conditional variational autoencoder capable of generating inner speech from observations. A diffusion-based behavior cloning policy then selects actions conditioned on current observations and the generated inner speech. MIMIC enables fine-grained steering of behavior at inference time by conditioning the agent on behavior-specific speech. Experiments across robotic manipulation tasks and human-AI collaboration games demonstrate that MIMIC significantly enhances both behavior diversity and fidelity to human demonstrations while enabling nuanced behavioral steering without training on additional demonstrations. We open source our code and provide pre-trained MIMIC agents and qualitative demos at: https://mimic-research.github.io.

Low-signal caution for protocol decisions

Use this page for context, then validate protocol choices against stronger HFEPX references before implementation decisions.

  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
  • The abstract does not clearly describe the evaluation setup.
  • The abstract does not clearly name benchmarks or metrics.
Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

Background context only.

Main weakness

The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

40/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Detected

Evaluation Signal

Weak / implicit signal

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 45%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

partial

Demonstrations

Directly usable for protocol triage.

"Experiments across robotic manipulation tasks and human-AI collaboration games demonstrate that MIMIC significantly enhances both behavior diversity and fidelity to human demonstrations while enabling nuanced behavioral steering without training on additional demonstrations."

Evaluation Modes

missing

None explicit

Validate eval design from full paper text.

"Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: Yes
  • Feedback types: Demonstrations
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: Coding

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes:
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts.
  • Imitation learning has emerged as one of the prominent approaches to build such agents by training them to mimic human-demonstrated behaviors.
  • However, current methods struggle to capture the inherent diversity and non-Markovian nature of human behavior and lack the ability to steer behavior at inference time.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts.
  • Imitation learning has emerged as one of the prominent approaches to build such agents by training them to mimic human-demonstrated behaviors.
  • Drawing inspiration from the theory of human cognitive processes, where inner speech guides action selection before execution, we propose MIMIC (Modeling Inner Motivations for Imitation and Control), a framework that uses language as an…

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts.
  • Drawing inspiration from the theory of human cognitive processes, where inner speech guides action selection before execution, we propose MIMIC (Modeling Inner Motivations for Imitation and Control), a framework that uses language as an…

Researcher Checklist

  • Pass: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Demonstrations

  • Gap: Evaluation mode is explicit

    No clear evaluation mode extracted.

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Gap: Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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