Language Models Might Not Understand You: Evaluating Theory of Mind via Story Prompting

arXiv:2506.19089 · cs.CL, cs.AI · Submitted 2025-06-23 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI

Submitted: 2025-06-23

Updated: 2026-09-01

Code: https://github.com/ngetachew/StorySim

Terminology

• Accuracy — 30× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 14× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmarking — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 3× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Theory of Mind (ToM) — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Synthetic Data Generation — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Actor — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Knowledge Distillation — 1× in this paper · explained in 11 episodes
• Knowledge Graph — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Scaffolding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• World Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes

Sources

• GPT-4 Technical Report
• On the Diversity of Synthetic Data and its Impact on Training Large Language Models
• DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
• Surveying the Effects of Quality, Diversity, and Complexity in Synthetic Data From Large Language Models
• GPT-4o System Card
• OpenAI o1 System Card
• Evaluating Large Language Models in Theory of Mind Tasks
• Do Large Language Models Have a Planning Theory of Mind? Evidence from MindGames: a Multi-Step Persuasion Task
• PHYBench: Holistic Evaluation of Physical Perception and Reasoning in Large Language Models
• Explore Theory of Mind: Program-guided adversarial data generation for theory of mind reasoning
• Does Synthetic Data Generation of LLMs Help Clinical Text Mining?
• Large Language Models Fail on Trivial Alterations to Theory-of-Mind Tasks
• MiMo: Unlocking the Reasoning Potential of Language Model -- From Pretraining to Posttraining
• Logic-RL: Unleashing LLM Reasoning with Rule-Based Reinforcement Learning
• Qwen3 Technical Report

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