arXiv:2608. 09638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) is essential for agent interactions, yet existing evaluations either rely on static scenarios that oversimplify mental-state reasoning or interactive settings that provide limited diagnostic insight.
By Yen-Shan Chen, Yu Chian Duan, Chih-En Kuo, Jian-Bin Wu, Yun-Nung Chen
arXiv:2605. 24528v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real world decision-making requires constructing mental models under uncertainty over evidence, over the underlying causal rules, and over the state of the world itself.
By Jeffrey Qin, Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Zhuangfei Gao, Mia Radovanovic, Jessica Sommerville, Kevin Ellis, Marta Kryven
arXiv:2606. 12721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring others' beliefs requires more than reading surface signals; it requires tracking who told them what, in what order, and how credibly.
By Nikolos Gurney, Stacy Marsella
BASIS is a benchmark that tests large language model agents on their ability to infer users’ mental states, detect belief‑reality mismatches, and use this insight to craft better solutions in interactive settings. The study shows that current models often ignore users’ mental states, leading to poorer outcomes, while explicitly eliciting and incorporating such information improves solution quality. Additional experiments compare BASIS with Chain‑of‑Thought prompting, targeted training, and multi‑agent collaboration to demonstrate the practical benefits of mental‑state awareness.
By Minyuan Ruan, Ziyue Wang, Kaiming Liu, Yunghwei Lai, Peng Li, Yang Liu
The paper investigates how children build mental models under uncertainty using a Box Task that involves interacting with a stochastic, partially observed environment. It introduces a Bayesian particle-based inference framework that maintains a small set of working hypotheses and continually generates new ones, offering two implementations: constraint-based and programmatic. The study demonstrates that accounting for subjective reliability of evidence and open-ended hypothesis spaces is essential to explain children's behavior, and shows that programmatic hypotheses can be generated via LLM-based program synthesis, robust across different prompts and LLM backends.
By Jeffrey Qin, Zhuangfei Gao, Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Mia Radovanovic, Jessica Sommerville, Kevin Ellis, Marta Kryven
Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) typically rely on passive question-answering formats, but the deployment of LLMs in increasingly agentic and autonomous forms demands new evaluations. In this paper we evaluate an agent's ability to induce specific belief states in other agents by taking actions rather than using conversational persuasion, a capability we call Non-Conversational Planning ToM (NCP-ToM).