Automatic Analysis of Collaboration Through Human Conversational Data Resources: A Review

Recent advances in LLM agents have enabled complex cognitive capabilities, such as multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use, that increasingly position these agents as human collaborators. Effective collaboration, however, requires collaborators to continuously maintain and align mental models of their own reasoning,partners' intentions, and shared goals during the collaborative process. Today's agents rarely develop such capabilities since they are primarily optimized for task completion, and the community lacks authentic human collaboration data with action-level mental model annotations that could guide agents toward process-level collaborative competence. To bridge this gap, we present ALMANAC, a dataset of Action-Level Mental model ANnotations for Agent Collaboration built from the Map Task, a classic dyadic routing task from social science. ALMANAC contains 2,987 collaboration actions, each paired with theory-informed mental model annotations that record the participants' self-reasoning, perceived partner intent, and perceived team goal. We benchmark six LLMs on predicting humans' next-turn behavior and mental models. Our results demonstrate ALMANAC's utility in evaluating models' ability to simulate human collaborative behaviors and infer their underlying mental models.

When humans collaborate with AI agents on long-horizon tasks, what happens to the agents' contributions? For solving long-horizon tasks, humans place greater importance on ongoing interaction with AI agents (e.g., revising plans) than on an agent's ability to complete the task in a single attempt. However, most agentic benchmarks have focused more on automation. Strong performance on such benchmarks does not imply effective real-world collaboration. Professional workflows offer a useful setting, as they often involve interdependent steps. To address this gap, we introduce Kolab, a new dataset of 115+ hours of screen recordings of 50 professionals from 40 occupations collaborating with agents on realistic, long-horizon problems. Kolab also contains participants' collaboration and output quality judgments. Our analysis reveals diverse collaboration patterns, highlighting the importance of when and how professionals coordinate with agents. A collaborative agent must do two things that automation benchmarks never test: anticipate whether experts will adopt, modify, or reject its contribution once it leaves the chat window to guide its next steps, and assess collaboration quality from the unfolding workflow without constant expert feedback. Our benchmark operationalizes both: (1) forecasting how professionals use agent contributions at diverse workflows, and (2) verifying their judgments of collaboration satisfaction and output quality. Findings show that frontier models, both agentic and non-agentic, overestimate collaboration with experts and struggle to distinguish between high- and low-quality collaboration. Longer workflow context does not consistently improve these predictions. As frontier agents cannot yet understand long-horizon collaboration with experts, we position Kolab as a valuable dataset for studying human-agent collaboration grounded in real professional workflows.

Large Language Model-powered agents are increasingly used in the workplace via human-artificial intelligence (AI) collaboration. In this new era of work, it is important to understand the kinds of prompting traits that contribute to task success. Moreover, we need to uncover key skills required for modern professionals and inform educators on how to foster these skills among students. Existing guidelines for human-AI collaboration are built from either top-down theory or context-specific observations of human-AI interactions. However, since LLM capabilities are rapidly improving, theory may not be able to explain emerging interaction patterns, and empirical guidelines may become obsolete quickly. In this work, we explore an automated, data-driven approach to uncover patterns, which we term traits, of effective human-AI interaction that are aligned with task outcomes. We propose Principal Trait Analysis, a Principal Component Analysis-inspired algorithm for deriving common traits from patterns in LLM conversations. Our algorithm uses LLM-based processing stages to analyze corpora of human-AI collaborative session traces, deriving common traits across the dataset and scoring each human collaborator's usage style by each trait. The approach also allows domain expertise to be injected during trait discovery and selects the most distinguishing traits to be those that exhibit the highest variance across collaborators. We evaluate PTA on two human-AI collaborative coding datasets, an educational setting (students working with an AI tutor) and a professional setting (developers working with an AI coding agent). We find that PTA-derived traits are significant in explaining collaborator behavior across both settings and can help predict task outcomes. However, whether traits qualify as skills remains to be seen, due to inconclusive results on generalizability and how user traits change over time.