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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) 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

Despite growing interest in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks for evaluating language models (LMs), little is known about how LMs internally represent mental states of self and others. Understanding these internal mechanisms is critical - not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Matteo Bortoletto , Constantin Ruhdorfer , Lei Shi , Andreas Bulling

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer others' knowledge, intentions, and emotions, is commonly evaluated in large language models (LLMs) using end-point question answering, where performance is judged solely by the final answer to a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Adam Bawatneh , Sagar Sapkota , Amrit Singh Bedi , Santu Karmaker , Mubarak Shah

The study explores whether current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities -- specifically, the ability to infer others' beliefs, intentions, and emotions from text. Given that LLMs are trained on language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Anna Babarczy , Andras Lukacs , Peter Vedres , Zeteny Bujka

Theory of Mind (ToM)-the cognitive ability to reason about mental states of ourselves and others, is the foundation of social interaction. Although ToM comes naturally to humans, it poses a significant challenge to even the most advanced…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Guiyang Hou , Wenqi Zhang , Yongliang Shen , Linjuan Wu , Weiming Lu

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

Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs) requires inferring how people's implicit, evolving beliefs shape what they seek and how they act under uncertainty -- especially in high-stakes settings such as disaster…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Ruxiao Chen , Xilei Zhao , Thomas J. Cova , Frank A. Drews , Susu Xu

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have developed rapidly and are widely applied to both general-purpose and professional tasks to assist human users. However, they still struggle to comprehend and respond to the true user needs when intentions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Minyuan Ruan , Ziyue Wang , Kaiming Liu , Yunghwei Lai , Peng Li , Yang Liu

Can large multimodal models have a human-like ability for emotional and social reasoning, and if so, how does it work? Recent research has discovered emergent theory-of-mind (ToM) reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). LLMs…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Zhawnen Chen , Tianchun Wang , Yizhou Wang , Michal Kosinski , Xiang Zhang , Yun Fu , Sheng Li

Beliefs shape how people reason, communicate, and behave. Rather than existing in isolation, they exhibit a rich correlational structure--some connected through logical dependencies, others through indirect associations or social processes.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Joseph Malone , Rachith Aiyappa , Byunghwee Lee , Haewoon Kwak , Jisun An , Yong-Yeol Ahn

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

Large language models (LLMs) perform substantially below human level on existing theory-of-mind (ToM) benchmarks, even when augmented with chain-of-thought prompting or probabilistic belief updates. We argue that these failures primarily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Wang Bill Zhu , Qiutong Tony Yi , Robin Jia , Jesse Thomason

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

Human interactions are deeply rooted in the interplay of thoughts, beliefs, and desires made possible by Theory of Mind (ToM): our cognitive ability to understand the mental states of ourselves and others. Although ToM may come naturally to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-20 Alex Wilf , Sihyun Shawn Lee , Paul Pu Liang , Louis-Philippe Morency

Theory of Mind (ToM) assesses whether models can infer hidden mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, which is essential for natural social interaction. Although recent progress in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has boosted…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Nanxu Gong , Haotian Li , Sixun Dong , Jianxun Lian , Yanjie Fu , Xing Xie

Language models (LMs) can exhibit human-like behaviour, but it is unclear how to describe this behaviour without undue anthropomorphism. We formalise a behaviourist view of LM character traits: qualities such as truthfulness, sycophancy, or…

Humans with an average level of social cognition can infer the beliefs of others based solely on the nonverbal communication signals (e.g. gaze, gesture, pose and contextual information) exhibited during social interactions. This social…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Jiafei Duan , Samson Yu , Nicholas Tan , Li Yi , Cheston Tan

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal reasoning. However, they often excessively rely on textual information during the later stages of inference, neglecting the crucial integration of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Shuo Yang , Yuwei Niu , Yuyang Liu , Yang Ye , Bin Lin , Li Yuan
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