Social Reasoning

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7 papers in the last four weeks, up 75% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Explicit Trait Inference for Multi-Agent Coordination
Apr 21, 2026Suhaib Abdurahman, Etsuko Ishii, Katerina Margatina +3Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Coordination
University of Southern California · AWS Agentic AI Labs
Omni-MMSI: Toward Identity-attributed Social Interaction Understanding
Mar 31, 2026Xinpeng Li, Bolin Lai, Hardy Chen +5Multimodal Understanding Social Reasoning
University of Texas at Dallas · Georgia Institute of Technology · University of California, Santa Cruz +1
Social-R1: Towards Human-like Social Reasoning in LLMs
Mar 10, 2026Jincenzi Wu, Yuxuan Lei, Jianxun Lian +5Social Reasoning RL for Language Model Reasoning
The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Microsoft Research Asia · Princeton University
Social Norm Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models: An Evaluation
Mar 3, 2026Oishik Chowdhury, Anushka Debnath, Bastin Tony Roy SavarimuthuSocial Reasoning Multimodal Large Language Models
School of Computing, University of Otago, New Zealand
Do Large Language Models Possess a Theory of Mind? A Comparative Evaluation Using the Strange Stories Paradigm
Feb 20, 2026Anna Babarczy, Andras Lukacs, Peter Vedres +1Theory of Mind Social Reasoning
Institute of General and Hungarian Linguistics, Research Centre for Linguistics · Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics · Institute of Mathematics, Eötvös Lóránd University
Social Caption: Evaluating Social Understanding in Multimodal Models
Jan 21, 2026Leena Mathur, Bhaavanaa Thumu, Youssouf Kebe +1Multimodal Large Language Models Multimodal Reasoning
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
SocialMaze: A Benchmark for Evaluating and Enhancing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models in Complex Social Environments
May 29, 2025Zixiang Xu, Yanbo Wang, Yue Huang +13LLM Evaluation AI Agent Benchmarks
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · University of Southern California · University of Notre Dame +3

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Explicit Trait Inference for Multi-Agent Coordination

Suhaib Abdurahman, Etsuko Ishii, Katerina Margatina, Divya Bhargavi+2

University of Southern California · AWS Agentic AI Labs

Multi-Agent LLM Systems Multi-Agent Coordination Social Reasoning

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LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) show promise on complex tasks but remain prone to coordination failures such as goal drift, error cascades, and misaligned behaviors. We propose Explicit Trait Inference (ETI), a psychologically grounded method for improving coordination. ETI enables agents to infer and track partner characteristics along two established psychological dimensions--warmth (e.g., trust) and competence (e.g., skill)--from interaction histories to guide decisions. We evaluate ETI in controlled settings (economic games), where it reduces payoff loss by 45-77%, and in more realistic, complex multi-agent settings (MultiAgentBench), where it improves performance by 3-29% depending on the scenario and model, relative to a CoT baseline. Additional analysis shows that gains are closely linked to trait inference: ETI profiles predict agents' actions, and informative profiles drive improvements. These results highlight ETI as a lightweight and robust mechanism for improving coordination in diverse multi-agent settings, and provide the first systematic evidence that LLM agents can (i) reliably infer others' traits from interaction histories and (ii) leverage structured awareness of others' traits for coordination.