Cross-Task Dissociation in Frontier Vision-Language Model Theory of Mind
Do frontier vision-language models present a coherent Theory-of-Mind (ToM) profile across tasks, matching the same human reference group, or does that profile fragment from one paradigm to the next? We evaluate a shared panel of nine frontier VLMs on two psychology-derived benchmarks: the Keysar Director Task (visual perspective-taking under egocentric interference) and the Frith-Happé animated triangles scored with the Castelli rubric (intention attribution from pure motion). On the Director Task, without chain-of-thought, the panel makes the egocentric error on 78\% of trials like children rather than adults; variation is substantial across models, and reasoning rescues several models. ...
| Authors | Kejia Zhang, Youran Sun, Chugang Yi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 31 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 July 2026 |
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