Paper ID: 2310.16755

HI-TOM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Higher-Order Theory of Mind Reasoning in Large Language Models

Yinghui He, Yufan Wu, Yilin Jia, Rada Mihalcea, Yulong Chen, Naihao Deng

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to reason about one's own and others' mental states. ToM plays a critical role in the development of intelligence, language understanding, and cognitive processes. While previous work has primarily focused on first and second-order ToM, we explore higher-order ToM, which involves recursive reasoning on others' beliefs. We introduce HI-TOM, a Higher Order Theory of Mind benchmark. Our experimental evaluation using various Large Language Models (LLMs) indicates a decline in performance on higher-order ToM tasks, demonstrating the limitations of current LLMs. We conduct a thorough analysis of different failure cases of LLMs, and share our thoughts on the implications of our findings on the future of NLP.

Submitted: Oct 25, 2023