Think Twice: Perspective-Taking Improves Large Language Models' Theory-of-Mind Capabilities

Understand

Human interactions are deeply rooted in the interplay of thoughts, beliefs, and desires made possible by Theory of Mind (ToM): our cognitive ability to understand the mental states of ourselves and others.

• Although ToM may come naturally to us, emulating it presents a challenge to even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Recent improvements to LLMs' reasoning capabilities from simple yet effective prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought have seen limited applicability to ToM.
• In this paper, we turn to the prominent cognitive science theory "Simulation Theory" to bridge this gap.