Does Theory of Mind Improvement Really Benefit Human-AI Interactions? Empirical Findings from Interactive Evaluations
Existing Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmarks for LLMs often use static story-reading and third-person multiple-choice questions, ignoring the dynamic, first-person nature of human-AI interactions. This study introduces an interactive ToM evaluation paradigm and systematically examines four ToM enhancement techniques across various tasks, finding that improvements on static benchmarks do not always translate to better performance in dynamic interactions, highlighting the necessity of interaction-based assessments.
[2605.15205] Does Theory of Mind Improvement Really Benefit Human-AI Interactions? Empirical Findings from Interactive Evaluations
[Submitted on 28 Apr 2026]
Title:Does Theory of Mind Improvement Really Benefit Human-AI Interactions? Empirical Findings from Interactive Evaluations
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Abstract:Improving the Theory of Mind (ToM) capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for effective social interactions between these AI models and humans. However, the existing benchmarks often measure ToM capability improvement through story-reading, multiple-choice questions from a third-person perspective, while ignoring the first-person, dynamic, and open-ended nature of human-AI (HAI) interactions. To directly examine how ToM improvement techniques benefit HAI interactions, we first proposed the new paradigm of interactive ToM evaluation with both perspective and metric shifts. Next, following the paradigm, we conducted a systematic study of four representative ToM enhancement techniques using both four real-world datasets and a user study, covering both goal-oriented tasks (e.g., coding, math) and experience-oriented tasks (e.g., counseling). Our findings reveal that improvements on static benchmarks do not always translate to better performance in dynamic HAI interactions. This paper offers critical insights into ToM evaluation, showing the necessity of interaction-based assessments in developing next-generation, socially aware LLMs for HAI symbiosis.
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Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.15205 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2605.15205v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15205
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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From: Nanxu Gong [view email] [v1] Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:38:31 UTC (7,139 KB)
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