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How FaR Are Large Language Models From Agents with Theory-of-Mind?

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arxiv 2310.03051 v1 pith:T7RMH2T3 submitted 2023-10-04 cs.CL cs.AI

classification cs.CLcs.AI
keywords inferencesmodelsllmsactionactionsmentalotherstates
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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"Thinking is for Doing." Humans can infer other people's mental states from observations--an ability called Theory-of-Mind (ToM)--and subsequently act pragmatically on those inferences. Existing question answering benchmarks such as ToMi ask models questions to make inferences about beliefs of characters in a story, but do not test whether models can then use these inferences to guide their actions. We propose a new evaluation paradigm for large language models (LLMs): Thinking for Doing (T4D), which requires models to connect inferences about others' mental states to actions in social scenarios. Experiments on T4D demonstrate that LLMs such as GPT-4 and PaLM 2 seemingly excel at tracking characters' beliefs in stories, but they struggle to translate this capability into strategic action. Our analysis reveals the core challenge for LLMs lies in identifying the implicit inferences about mental states without being explicitly asked about as in ToMi, that lead to choosing the correct action in T4D. To bridge this gap, we introduce a zero-shot prompting framework, Foresee and Reflect (FaR), which provides a reasoning structure that encourages LLMs to anticipate future challenges and reason about potential actions. FaR boosts GPT-4's performance from 50% to 71% on T4D, outperforming other prompting methods such as Chain-of-Thought and Self-Ask. Moreover, FaR generalizes to diverse out-of-distribution story structures and scenarios that also require ToM inferences to choose an action, consistently outperforming other methods including few-shot in-context learning.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Training with (Swap) Regret Loss in a Single-Layer Self-Attention Model: A Case Study on the Probability Simplex

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    cs.AI 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Attention heads in multimodal LLMs linearly encode agents' beliefs, and steering those heads along probe-derived directions improves first- and second-order belief accuracy on the new GridToM benchmark.

  3. Where You Go is Who You Are: Behavioral Theory-Guided LLMs for Inverse Reinforcement Learning

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    cs.AI 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Unstructured natural-language reasoning plans outperform dynamically generated JSON reasoning plans in an instance-level Self-Discover framework, with relative gains up to 18.90% on MATH.

  5. Towards Machine Theory of Mind with Large Language Model-Augmented Inverse Planning

    cs.AI 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    An LLM-augmented Bayesian inverse planning model, LAIP, generates hypotheses and action likelihoods, then uses Bayes' rule to infer agent preferences, outperforming LLM-only baselines.

  6. Multi-Agent Language Models: Advancing Cooperation, Coordination, and Adaptation

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A thesis proposal repurposing two prior papers on LM agents for text games, framed as a path to theory-of-mind AI, with no new theory-of-mind evidence.

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