Beyond Belief Nesting: Rethinking Higher-Order Theory of Mind in Large Language Models
Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to reason about others' mental states, underlies effective communication and coordination. Its higher-order form enables reasoning over nested perspectives in strategic interactions. However, existing evaluations often equate belief-nesting depth with reasoning order, allowing nominally higher-order questions to admit lower-order shortcuts. We formalize effective order through the distinct events supporting successive belief prefixes, revealing widespread order inflation across existing benchmarks. We introduce HopToM, with certified full-order questions and controls for lower-order alternatives. Under direct prompting, mean accuracy across four frontier ...
| Authors | Shanshan You, Zhengqi Wang, Hao Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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