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Related papers: SimpleToM: Exposing the Gap between Explicit ToM I…

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Theory of Mind (ToM)$\unicode{x2014}$the ability to reason about the mental states of other people$\unicode{x2014}$is a key element of our social intelligence. Yet, despite their ever more impressive performance, large-scale neural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Melanie Sclar , Sachin Kumar , Peter West , Alane Suhr , Yejin Choi , Yulia Tsvetkov

While humans naturally develop theory of mind (ToM), the capability to understand other people's mental states and beliefs, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) underperform on simple ToM benchmarks. We posit that we can extend our…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Chani Jung , Dongkwan Kim , Jiho Jin , Jiseon Kim , Yeon Seonwoo , Yejin Choi , Alice Oh , Hyunwoo Kim

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to others, is a hallmark of social intelligence. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate promising performance on standard ToM benchmarks, we observe that they often fail…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Mengfan Li , Xuanhua Shi , Yang Deng

Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM), machine's ability to understand and keep track of the mental states of others, is pivotal in developing socially intelligent agents. However, prevalent N-ToM benchmarks have several shortcomings, including the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Hainiu Xu , Runcong Zhao , Lixing Zhu , Jinhua Du , Yulan He

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people's minds based on their behavior, is key to developing socially intelligent agents. Current approaches to ToM reasoning either rely on prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), which are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Zhining Zhang , Chuanyang Jin , Mung Yao Jia , Shunchi Zhang , Tianmin Shu

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the cognitive capability to perceive and ascribe mental states to oneself and others. Recent research has sparked a debate over whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit a form of ToM. However, existing ToM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Zhuang Chen , Jincenzi Wu , Jinfeng Zhou , Bosi Wen , Guanqun Bi , Gongyao Jiang , Yaru Cao , Mengting Hu , Yunghwei Lai , Zexuan Xiong , Minlie Huang

Evaluating the theory of mind (ToM) capabilities of language models (LMs) has recently received a great deal of attention. However, many existing benchmarks rely on synthetic data, which risks misaligning the resulting experiments with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Adil Soubki , John Murzaku , Arash Yousefi Jordehi , Peter Zeng , Magdalena Markowska , Seyed Abolghasem Mirroshandel , Owen Rambow

Theory of Mind (ToM) is central to social cognition and human-AI interaction, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used to help understand and represent ToM. However, most evaluations treat ToM as a static judgment at a single moment,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Thuy Ngoc Nguyen , Duy Nhat Phan , Cleotilde Gonzalez

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to an agent's ability to model the internal states of others. Contributing to the debate whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit genuine ToM capabilities, our study investigates their ToM robustness using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Christian Nickel , Laura Schrewe , Florian Mai , Lucie Flek

Theory of Mind (ToM)-the ability to reason about the mental states of oneself and others-is a cornerstone of human social intelligence. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, understanding their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Ruirui Chen , Weifeng Jiang , Chengwei Qin , Cheston Tan

Theory-of-Mind (ToM), the ability to infer others' perceptions and mental states, is fundamental to human interaction but remains challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing ToM reasoning methods show promise with reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Hainiu Xu , Siya Qi , Jiazheng Li , Yuxiang Zhou , Jinhua Du , Caroline Catmur , Yulan He

Large Language Models have shown exceptional generative abilities in various natural language and generation tasks. However, possible anthropomorphization and leniency towards failure cases have propelled discussions on emergent abilities…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Mudit Verma , Siddhant Bhambri , Subbarao Kambhampati

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, there is increasing interest in their ability to infer human mental states and demonstrate a human-like Theory of Mind (ToM). Most existing ToM evaluations, however, are centered on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Siqi Liu , Xinyang Li , Bochao Zou , Junbao Zhuo , Huimin Ma , Jiansheng Chen

Recent empirical results have sparked a debate about whether or not Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of Theory of Mind (ToM). While some have found LLMs to be successful on ToM evaluations such as the False Belief task, others have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhiqiang Pi , Annapurna Vadaparty , Benjamin K. Bergen , Cameron R. Jones

Understanding and attributing mental states, known as Theory of Mind (ToM), emerges as a fundamental capability for human social reasoning. While Large Language Models (LLMs) appear to possess certain ToM abilities, the mechanisms…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Wentao Zhu , Zhining Zhang , Yizhou Wang

Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities in LLMs have recently become a central object of investigation. Cognitive science distinguishes between two steps required for ToM tasks: 1) determine whether to invoke ToM, which includes the appropriate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Eitan Wagner , Nitay Alon , Joseph M. Barnby , Omri Abend

We introduce StorySim, a programmable framework for synthetically generating stories to evaluate the theory of mind (ToM) and world modeling (WM) capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Unlike prior benchmarks that may suffer from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Nathaniel Getachew , Abulhair Saparov

Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning entails recognizing that other individuals possess their own intentions, emotions, and thoughts, which is vital for guiding one's own thought processes. Although large language models (LLMs) excel in tasks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Maryam Amirizaniani , Elias Martin , Maryna Sivachenko , Afra Mashhadi , Chirag Shah

To what degree should we ascribe cognitive capacities to Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the ability to reason about intentions and beliefs known as Theory of Mind (ToM)? Here we add to this emerging debate by (i) testing 11 base- and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Max J. van Duijn , Bram M. A. van Dijk , Tom Kouwenhoven , Werner de Valk , Marco R. Spruit , Peter van der Putten

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to reason about one's own and others' mental states. ToM plays a critical role in the development of intelligence, language understanding, and cognitive processes. While previous work has primarily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Yinghui He , Yufan Wu , Yilin Jia , Rada Mihalcea , Yulong Chen , Naihao Deng