ACL2025

EnigmaToM: Improve LLMs' Theory-of-Mind Reasoning Capabilities with Neural Knowledge Base of Entity States

Hainiu Xu, Siya Qi, Jiazheng Li, Yuxiang Zhou, Jinhua Du, Caroline Catmur, Yulan He

5 citations

Abstract

Theory-of-Mind (ToM), the ability to infer others' perceptions and mental states, is fundamental to human interaction but remains challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing ToM reasoning methods show promise with reasoning via perceptual perspectivetaking, they often rely excessively on off-theshelf LLMs, reducing their efficiency and limiting their applicability to high-order ToM reasoning. To address these issues, we present EnigmaToM, a novel neuro-symbolic framework that enhances ToM reasoning by integrating a Neural Knowledge Base of entity states (Enigma) for (1) a psychology-inspired iterative masking mechanism that facilitates accurate perspective-taking and (2) knowledge injection that elicits key entity information. Enigma generates structured knowledge of entity states to build spatial scene graphs for belief tracking across various ToM orders and enrich events with fine-grained entity state details. Experimental results on ToMi, HiToM, and FAN-ToM benchmarks show that EnigmaToM significantly improves ToM reasoning across LLMs of varying sizes, particularly excelling in highorder reasoning scenarios 1 . 1 The neural knowledge base Enigma can be downloaded via https://huggingface.co/SeacowX/Enigma .