Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) studies how an agent represents what others know, believe, want, or intend, and uses those representations to predict behavior or coordinate. AI approaches range from explicit belief tracking with BDI models, POMDPs, and belief graphs to prompting, reinforcement learning, and multimodal reasoning over dialogue, images, and video. Evaluations include false-belief and Strange Stories tasks as well as interactive games, negotiations, and embodied settings where agents must act on partial information. A central challenge is that success on familiar questions may rely on shortcuts: models can struggle to track changing or nested beliefs and to use mental-state inferences reliably in real interactions.