From Human-Human Collaboration to Human-Agent Collaboration: A Vision, Design Philosophy, and an Empirical Framework for Achieving Successful Partnerships Between Humans and LLM Agents

TL;DR

The paper argues for treating LLM agents as remote collaborators rather than tools, leveraging CSCW/HCI theory to ground trust, awareness, and common ground in human–agent interaction. It presents a design philosophy and empirical framework to study and engineer mutual, mixed-initiative partnerships, including asynchronous collaboration and multi-human multi-agent teamwork. It acknowledges limitations such as embodiment gaps, potential privacy and safety risks, and proposes methods to make failures legible and to ensure accountability and provenance. It also outlines a concrete, community-building workshop plan to establish shared vocabulary and a research agenda for advancing human–agent collaboration.

Abstract

The emergence of Large Language Model (LLM) agents enables us to build agent-based intelligent systems that move beyond the role of a "tool" to become genuine collaborators with humans, thereby realizing a novel human-agent collaboration paradigm. Our vision is that LLM agents should resemble remote human collaborators, which allows HCI researchers to ground the future exploration in decades of research on trust, awareness, and common ground in remote human collaboration, while also revealing the unique opportunities and challenges that emerge when one or more partners are AI agents. This workshop establishes a foundational research agenda for the new era by posing the question: How can the rich understanding of remote human collaboration inspire and inform the design and study of human-agent collaboration? We will bring together an interdisciplinary group from HCI, CSCW, and AI to explore this critical transition. The 180-minute workshop will be highly interactive, featuring a keynote speaker, a series of invited lightning talks, and an exploratory group design session where participants will storyboard novel paradigms of human-agent partnership. Our goal is to enlighten the research community by cultivating a shared vocabulary and producing a research agenda that charts the future of collaborative agents.