English

A Computable Game-Theoretic Framework for Multi-Agent Theory of Mind

Artificial Intelligence 2025-12-01 v1 Computer Science and Game Theory Multiagent Systems

Abstract

Originating in psychology, Theory of Mind\textit{Theory of Mind} (ToM) has attracted significant attention across multiple research communities, especially logic, economics, and robotics. Most psychological work does not aim at formalizing those central concepts, namely goals\textit{goals}, intentions\textit{intentions}, and beliefs\textit{beliefs}, to automate a ToM-based computational process, which, by contrast, has been extensively studied by logicians. In this paper, we offer a different perspective by proposing a computational framework viewed through the lens of game theory. On the one hand, the framework prescribes how to make boudedly rational decisions while maintaining a theory of mind about others (and recursively, each of the others holding a theory of mind about the rest); on the other hand, it employs statistical techniques and approximate solutions to retain computability of the inherent computational problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.22536,
  title  = {A Computable Game-Theoretic Framework for Multi-Agent Theory of Mind},
  author = {Fengming Zhu and Yuxin Pan and Xiaomeng Zhu and Fangzhen Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.22536},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Ongoing work. A preliminary version has been accepted by the AAAI 2026 Theory of Mind for AI (ToM4AI) Workshop

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:58:11.556Z