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Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yihuai Hong , Dian Zhou , Meng Cao , Lei Yu , Zhijing Jin

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enhances performance of large language models, but questions remain about whether these reasoning traces faithfully reflect the internal processes of the model. We present the first comprehensive study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Sriram Balasubramanian , Samyadeep Basu , Soheil Feizi

Social reasoning necessitates the capacity of theory of mind (ToM), the ability to contextualise and attribute mental states to others without having access to their internal cognitive structure. Recent machine learning approaches to ToM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Dung Nguyen , Phuoc Nguyen , Hung Le , Kien Do , Svetha Venkatesh , Truyen Tran

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

To produce accurate predictions, language models (LMs) must balance between generalization and memorization. Yet, little is known about the mechanism by which transformer LMs employ their memorization capacity. When does a model decide to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Adi Haviv , Ido Cohen , Jacob Gidron , Roei Schuster , Yoav Goldberg , Mor Geva

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

The question of whether large language models (LLMs) possess Theory of Mind (ToM) -- often defined as the ability to reason about others' mental states -- has sparked significant scientific and public interest. However, the evidence as to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Jennifer Hu , Felix Sosa , Tomer Ullman

Entity tracking is essential for complex reasoning. To perform in-context entity tracking, language models (LMs) must bind an entity to its attribute (e.g., bind a container to its content) to recall attribute for a given entity. For…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qin Dai , Benjamin Heinzerling , Kentaro Inui

Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks, particularly when prompted to generate intermediate explanations. However, it remains an open question whether these intermediate reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Moritz Miller , Kumar Shridhar

While large language models (LLMs) excel in mathematical and code reasoning, we observe they struggle with social reasoning tasks, exhibiting cognitive confusion, logical inconsistencies, and conflation between objective world states and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jialu Du , Guiyang Hou , Yihui Fu , Chen Wu , Wenqi Zhang , Yongliang Shen , Weiming Lu

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the cognitive ability to infer and attribute mental states to oneself and others. As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for social and cognitive capabilities, it remains unclear to what…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Jayanta Sadhu , Ayan Antik Khan , Noshin Nawal , Sanju Basak , Abhik Bhattacharjee , Rifat Shahriyar

Theory-of-Mind (ToM) is a fundamental psychological capability that allows humans to understand and interpret the mental states of others. Humans infer others' thoughts by integrating causal cues and indirect clues from broad contextual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Chulun Zhou , Qiujing Wang , Mo Yu , Xiaoqian Yue , Rui Lu , Jiangnan Li , Yifan Zhou , Shunchi Zhang , Jie Zhou , Wai Lam

Natural language interaction with agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI), driven by Large Language Models (LLMs), is expected to remain a dominant paradigm in the near future. While humans instinctively align their communication with mental…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Mehdi Jafari , Devin Yuncheng Hua , Hao Xue , Flora Salim

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability of individuals to attribute mental states to others. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown some promise with ToM ability, they still struggle with complex ToM reasoning. Our approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Weizhi Tang , Vaishak Belle

Although pretrained language models (PTLMs) contain significant amounts of world knowledge, they can still produce inconsistent answers to questions when probed, even after specialized training. As a result, it can be hard to identify what…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-01 Nora Kassner , Oyvind Tafjord , Hinrich Schütze , Peter Clark

The ability to understand and predict the mental states of oneself and others, known as the Theory of Mind (ToM), is crucial for effective social scenarios. Although recent studies have evaluated ToM in Large Language Models (LLMs),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Fangxu Yu , Lai Jiang , Shenyi Huang , Zhen Wu , Xinyu Dai

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

Research on mental state reasoning in language models (LMs) has the potential to inform theories of human social cognition--such as the theory that mental state reasoning emerges in part from language exposure--and our understanding of LMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Sean Trott , Samuel Taylor , Cameron Jones , James A. Michaelov , Pamela D. Rivière

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

Large language models (LLMs) have been routinely used to solve various tasks using step-by-step reasoning. However, the structure of intermediate reasoning steps, or thoughts, is rigid and unidirectional, such as chains, trees, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Sijia Chen , Baochun Li