EMNLP Findings2024
NegotiationToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind on Negotiation Surrounding
Chunkit Chan, Cheng Jiayang, Yauwai Yim, Zheye Deng, Wei Fan, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Hongming Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Yangqiu Song
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked substantial interest and debate concerning their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM) ability. Theory of mind evaluations currently focuses on testing models using machinegenerated data or game settings prone to shortcuts and spurious correlations, which lacks evaluation of machine ToM ability in real-world human interaction scenarios. This poses a pressing demand to develop new real-world scenario benchmarks. We introduce NegotiationToM 1 , a new benchmark designed to stress-test machine ToM in real-world negotiation surrounding covered multi-dimensional mental states (i.e., desires, beliefs, and intentions). Our benchmark builds upon the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent modeling theory and conducts the necessary empirical experiments to evaluate large language models. Our findings demonstrate that NegotiationToM is challenging for stateof-the-art LLMs, as they consistently perform significantly worse than humans, even when employing the chain-of-thought (CoT) method.
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Cited by top-tier papers10
- MuMA-ToM: Multi-modal Multi-Agent Theory of MindHaojun Shi, Suyu Ye, Xinyu Fang, Chuanyang Jin et al.AAAI 2025 · 48 citations
- Language Models Use Lookbacks to Track BeliefsNikhil Prakash, Natalie Shapira, Arnab Sen Sharma, Christoph Riedl et al.ICLR 2026 · 42 citations
- The Essence of Contextual Understanding in Theory of Mind: A Study on Question Answering with Story CharactersChulun Zhou, Qiujing Wang, Mo Yu, Xiaoqian Yue et al.ACL 2025 · 9 citations
- TactfulToM: Do LLMs have the Theory of Mind ability to understand White Lies?Yiwei Liu, Emma Jane Pretty, Jiahao Huang, Saku SugawaraEMNLP 2025 · 1 citation
- GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMsWeidong Tang, Jierui Li, Yueling Hou, Zihan Mei et al.ACL 2026
Builds on23
- Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersTom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 64,255 citations
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
- Large Language Models are Zero-Shot ReasonersTakeshi Kojima, Shixiang Shane Gu, Machel Reid, Yutaka Matsuo et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 8,168 citations
- Time Travel in LLMs: Tracing Data Contamination in Large Language ModelsShahriar Golchin, Mihai SurdeanuICLR 2024 · 165 citations
- Task Contamination: Language Models May Not Be Few-Shot AnymoreChangmao Li, Jeffrey FlaniganAAAI 2024 · 138 citations
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