arXiv AI

Can Induced Emotion Bias LLM Behaviors in Sequential Decision Making?

arXiv:2607. 12631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in high-stakes domains, understanding contextual factors that may modulate their decision-making becomes critical.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

Effects of Theory of Mind and Prosocial Beliefs on Steering Human-Aligned Behaviors of LLMs in Ultimatum Games

The study examines how Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning and prosocial beliefs influence large language models (LLMs) in the ultimatum game. By initializing LLM agents with Greedy, Fair, or Selfless beliefs and applying chain‑of‑thought or varying levels of ToM reasoning, the authors ran 2,700 simulations across several models, including o3‑mini and DeepSeek‑R1 Distilled Qwen 32B. Results show that ToM‑enhanced LLMs align more closely with human decision patterns, exhibit greater consistency, and achieve better negotiation outcomes, with Llama 3.3 70B producing the most belief‑consistent reasoning. whyItMatters":"The findings clarify the importance of incorporating Theory of Mind into LLMs to improve their alignment with human norms in cooperative decision‑making tasks."

By Neemesh Yadav, Yihuai Lan, Shan Dong, Mai Hieu Hien, Palakorn Achananuparp, Jing Jiang, Ee-Peng Lim
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Better Behavioral Prediction, More Faithful Model Ablations? Evidence from Sequential Choice

The paper investigates whether input ablations on predictive models can reliably reveal the importance of information for explaining human sequential choice behavior. Using two synthetic bandit tasks with known generating policies, the authors compare GRUs, Transformers, a fine‑tuned LLaMA, and cognitive models under varied reward contributions. They find that while neural models can predict choices well, their responses to ablations often diverge from the true generating process, indicating that predictive accuracy alone does not guarantee faithful model ablations.

By Hanbo Xie
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Emotion2Skill: Model-Internal Emotion Signals for Adaptive Skill Selection and Evolution

arXiv:2608. 09248v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skill-based LLM agents select reusable procedures from an external library to solve complex tasks, yet their routing decisions rely entirely on text-level signals such as task descriptions, verbal reflections, and experience-derived rules, while the model's own internal representational state remains unobserved.

By Bohan Lin, Hejia Geng, Xinyi Xie, Heng Zhou, Qinghua Xing, Bo Liu, Chen Zhang, Yudong Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

When Cognitive Graphs Meet LLMs: BDEI Cognitive Pathways for Panic Emotional Arousal Prediction

The paper introduces PanicCognitivePath (PCP), a model that predicts the timing of panic emotional arousal by integrating appraisal emotion theory into a Belief‑Desire‑Emotion‑Intention (BDEI) framework. PCP uses a Psychological Safety Distance (PSD) model to fuse physical, social, cognitive, and informational signals into a unified risk metric, and confines large language models to a single parameter‑estimation step to reduce hallucinations. Experiments on Hurricane Sandy data show PCP improves individual prediction accuracy by 10.68% and reduces peak count error to 7.07%.

By Mengzhu Liu, Long Qin, Chuan Ai, Zhengqiu Zhu, Hongru Liang, Fangfang Li, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Xin Lu, Quanjun Yin
arXiv AI
Sep 4

EmoDistill: Offline Emotion Skill Distillation for Language Model Agents in Adversarial Negotiation

EmoDistill is an offline framework that distills emotional negotiation skills from large language model interactions into smaller agents. It separates emotion selection, handled by an Implicit Q‑Learning selector, from emotion‑conditioned expression, learned by a LoRA‑adapted 7B policy via supervised fine‑tuning and judge policy optimization. Experiments across four negotiation domains show that the full EmoDistill policy outperforms vanilla and IQL‑only baselines, while removing the explicit emotion channel markedly reduces negotiation utility and reveals partial, domain‑dependent transfer to unseen counterparties.

By Yunbo Long, Haolang Zhao, Lukas Beckenbauer, Liming Xu, Alexandra Brintrup
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Do LLMs Choose Like Humans? Using Cognitive Theory to Evaluate LLM Decision-Making

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) make decisions in ways that mirror human cognition. Using a new 140,000-trial product choice benchmark, the authors test 12 open‑source and commercial LLMs to see if their context sensitivity aligns with a cognitive economic theory that relies on problem categorization and attention allocation. While context prompts human‑like shifts in choice and problem categorization, it does not consistently reweight attention between features such as price and quality, and neither scaling nor chain‑of‑thought reasoning produces human‑like behavior. The findings indicate that LLM decision mechanisms differ from those of humans.

By Johnathan Sun, Andrei Shleifer, Yonatan Belinkov
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Assessing mentalization in humans and large language models

The study evaluates mentalization—the capacity to infer others’ beliefs and intentions—in large language models (LLMs) using two economic games and cognitive computational modeling. Researchers tested 2,099 LLM agents from four model families (DeepSeek, GPT‑4.1, GPT‑5, Gemini 2.0 Flash) against opponents of varying sophistication, comparing their performance to 251 human participants. Results show that LLMs exhibit distinct mentalizing behaviors that vary by model provider and size, with strategic prompting generally enhancing performance; notably, GPT‑5 agents adapt their recursive reasoning depth to match opponent sophistication, outperforming humans in one task.

By Aamir Sohail, Xintong Zhong, Arkady Konovalov, Patricia L. Lockwood, Lei Zhang