Infusing Theory of Mind into Socially Intelligent LLM Agents

Theory of Mind (ToM)-an understanding of the mental states of others-is a key aspect of human social intelligence, yet, chatbots and LLM-based social agents do not typically integrate it. In this work, we demonstrate that LLMs that explicitly use ToM get better at dialogue, achieving goals more effectively. After showing that simply prompting models to generate mental states between dialogue turns already provides significant benefit, we further introduce ToMAgent (TOMA), a ToM-focused dialogue agent. TOMA is trained by pairing ToM with dialogue lookahead to produce mental states that are maximally useful for achieving dialogue goals. Experiments on the Sotopia interactive social evaluation benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over a range of baselines. Extensive analysis shows that TOMA exhibits more strategic, goaloriented reasoning behaviors, which enable long-horizon adaptation, while maintaining better relationships with their partners. Our results suggest a step forward in integrating ToM for building socially intelligent LLM agents. 1 * * Equal contribution. 1 Code, training data, and models are available at GitHub.