The Essence of Contextual Understanding in Theory of Mind: A Study on Question Answering with Story Characters (2025.acl-long)
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Chulun Zhou, Qiujing Wang, Mo Yu, Xiaoqian Yue, Rui Lu, Jiangnan Li, Yifan Zhou, Shunchi Zhang, Jie Zhou, Wai Lam
| Challenge: | Theory-of-Mind (ToM) is a psychological capability that allows humans to understand and interpret the mental states of others. |
| Approach: | They propose a CharToM-QA benchmark to assess the importance of comprehensive contextual understanding about personal backgrounds in ToM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on 1,035 ToM questions based on classic novels and shows that educated participants perform better when they have read the novels than non-educated participants. |
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| Challenge: | Theory of Mind (ToM) is a cornerstone of human social intelligence . Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into daily life . |
| Approach: | They analyze evaluation benchmarks and enhancement strategies to evaluate LLMs' ToM capabilities. |
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OpenToM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Theory-of-Mind Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing N-ToM benchmarks lack ambiguous and artificial narratives, lack of personality traits and preferences, and limited diversity in the questions posed. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM) with longer and clearer narrative stories, characters with explicit personality traits, actions triggered by character intentions, and questions designed to challenge LLMs’ abilities of modeling characters’ mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test aims to assess the performance of LLMs in the physical and psychological worlds. |
Mind Your Theory: Theory of Mind Goes Deeper Than Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Theory of Mind (ToM) focus on whether agents have correct beliefs about others. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose to use the theory of mind to determine whether and how to invoke ToM . |
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Agentic-ToM: Cognition-Inspired Agentic Processing For Enhancing Theory of Mind Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current models struggle with reasoning about others’ perspectives, limiting their ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed psychologically-grounded functions into LLMs to enable them to attribute mental states to oneself and others, known as Theory of Mind. |
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Views Are My Own, but Also Yours: Benchmarking Theory of Mind Using Common Ground (2024.findings-acl)
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Adil Soubki, John Murzaku, Arash Yousefi Jordehi, Peter Zeng, Magdalena Markowska, Seyed Abolghasem Mirroshandel, Owen Rambow
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for theory of mind (ToM) use synthetic data, which can misalign with human behavior. |
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| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that LMs struggle to demonstrate theory of mind (ToM) . |
XToM: Exploring the Multilingual Theory of Mind for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Chunkit Chan, Yauwai Yim, Hongchuan Zeng, Zhiying Zou, Xinyuan Cheng, Zhifan Sun, Zheye Deng, Kawai Chung, Yuzhuo Ao, Fan Yixiang, Cheng Jiayang, Ercong Nie, Ginny Wong, Helmut Schmid, Hinrich Schuetze, Simon See, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of ToM in LLMs are limited to English, neglecting the linguistic diversity that shapes human cognition. |
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Beyond Words: Integrating Theory of Mind into Conversational Agents for Human-Like Belief, Desire, and Intention Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations of LLaMA-3 models demonstrate that ToM-informed alignment improves response quality, achieving win rates of 63% and 67%, respectively. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether open-source LLaMA models can represent and retain ToM-related constructs and whether they can be used to generate more aligned responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can represent and retain ToM-related constructs and improve response quality. |
Machine Theory of Mind Needs Machine Validation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in studying the extent to which language models (LMs) display a theory of mind (ToM) despite the growth of evaluation tools, the extent of evidence for ToM remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They conduct a survey of 16 recent studies aimed at measuring ToM in language models and found that only half do so for patterns only a machine might exploit. |
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Beyond Context to Cognitive Appraisal: Emotion Reasoning as a Theory of Mind Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) reason about others' emotional states using contextual information, within a Theory-of-Mind framework. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to reason about others’ emotional states using contextual information within a Theory-of-Mind framework. |
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Does Theory of Mind Improvement Really Benefit Human-AI Interactions? Empirical Findings from Interactive Evaluations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks measure ToM capability improvement through story-reading, multiple-choice questions from a third-person perspective, while ignoring the first-person, dynamic nature of human-AI interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm of interactive ToM evaluation with both perspective and metric shifts. |
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