Selective Deficits in LLM Mental Self-Modeling in a Behavior-Based Test of Theory of Mind
The ability to represent oneself and others as agents with knowledge, intentions, and belief states that guide their behavior - Theory of Mind - is a human universal that enables us to navigate - and manipulate - the social world. It is supported by our ability to form mental models of ourselves and others. Its ubiquity in human affairs entails that LLMs have seen innumerable examples of it in their training data and therefore may have learned to mimic it, but whether they have actually learned causal models that they can deploy in arbitrary settings is unclear. We therefore develop a novel experimental paradigm that requires that subjects form representations of the mental states of them...
| Authors | Christopher Ackerman |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 27 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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