Hypothesis-Driven Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11881v1
• Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:08:50 GMT
• Title: Hypothesis-Driven Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Large Language Models
• Authors: Hyunwoo Kim, Melanie Sclar, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Lance Ying, Sydney Levine, Yang Liu, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Yejin Choi,
• Abstract summary: We introduce thought-tracing, an inference-time reasoning algorithm to trace the mental states of agents. Our algorithm is modeled after the Bayesian theory-of-mind framework. We evaluate thought-tracing on diverse theory-of-mind benchmarks, demonstrating significant performance improvements.
• Score: 76.6028674686018
• License:
• Abstract: Existing LLM reasoning methods have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks, such as solving math and coding problems. However, applying these methods to scenarios without ground-truth answers or rule-based verification methods - such as tracking the mental states of an agent - remains challenging. Inspired by the sequential Monte Carlo algorithm, we introduce thought-tracing, an inference-time reasoning algorithm designed to trace the mental states of specific agents by generating hypotheses and weighting them based on observations without relying on ground-truth solutions to questions in datasets. Our algorithm is modeled after the Bayesian theory-of-mind framework, using LLMs to approximate probabilistic inference over agents' evolving mental states based on their perceptions and actions. We evaluate thought-tracing on diverse theory-of-mind benchmarks, demonstrating significant performance improvements compared to baseline LLMs. Our experiments also reveal interesting behaviors of the recent reasoning models - e.g., o1 and R1 - on theory-of-mind, highlighting the difference of social reasoning compared to other domains.

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