Daily Papers

Humans build shared spatial understanding by communicating partial, viewpoint-dependent observations. We ask whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can do the same, aligning distinct egocentric views through dialogue to form a coherent, allocentric mental model of a shared environment. To study this systematically, we introduce COSMIC, a benchmark for Collaborative Spatial Communication. In this setting, two static MLLM agents observe a 3D indoor environment from different viewpoints and exchange natural-language messages to solve spatial queries. COSMIC contains 899 diverse scenes and 1250 question-answer pairs spanning five tasks. We find a consistent capability hierarchy, MLLMs are most reliable at identifying shared anchor objects across views, perform worse on relational reasoning, and largely fail at building globally consistent maps, performing near chance, even for the frontier models. Moreover, we find thinking capability yields consistent gains in anchor grounding, but is insufficient for higher-level spatial communication. To contextualize model behavior, we additionally collect 250 human-human dialogues. Humans achieve 95% aggregate accuracy, leaving significant room for improvement for even the best performing model Gemini-3-Pro-Thinking which achieves 72% aggregate accuracy. Moreover, human conversations become increasingly specific as partners converge on a shared mental model, whereas model dialogues continue to explore new possibilities rather than converging, consistent with a limited ability to build and maintain a robust shared mental model. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/ankursikarwar/Cosmic

Figurative language (e.g., "he flew like the wind") is challenging to understand, as it is hard to tell what implicit information is being conveyed from the surface form alone. We hypothesize that to perform this task well, the reader needs to mentally elaborate the scene being described to identify a sensible meaning of the language. We present DREAM-FLUTE, a figurative language understanding system that does this, first forming a "mental model" of situations described in a premise and hypothesis before making an entailment/contradiction decision and generating an explanation. DREAM-FLUTE uses an existing scene elaboration model, DREAM, for constructing its "mental model." In the FigLang2022 Shared Task evaluation, DREAM-FLUTE achieved (joint) first place (Acc@60=63.3%), and can perform even better with ensemble techniques, demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach. More generally, this work suggests that adding a reflective component to pretrained language models can improve their performance beyond standard fine-tuning (3.3% improvement in Acc@60).

Universal embodied intelligence demands robust generalization across heterogeneous embodiments, such as autonomous driving, robotics, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, existing embodied brain in training a unified model over diverse embodiments frequently triggers long-tail data, gradient interference, and catastrophic forgetting, making it notoriously difficult to balance universal generalization with domain-specific proficiency. In this report, we introduce ACE-Brain-0, a generalist foundation brain that unifies spatial reasoning, autonomous driving, and embodied manipulation within a single multimodal large language model~(MLLM). Our key insight is that spatial intelligence serves as a universal scaffold across diverse physical embodiments: although vehicles, robots, and UAVs differ drastically in morphology, they share a common need for modeling 3D mental space, making spatial cognition a natural, domain-agnostic foundation for cross-embodiment transfer. Building on this insight, we propose the Scaffold-Specialize-Reconcile~(SSR) paradigm, which first establishes a shared spatial foundation, then cultivates domain-specialized experts, and finally harmonizes them through data-free model merging. Furthermore, we adopt Group Relative Policy Optimization~(GRPO) to strengthen the model's comprehensive capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACE-Brain-0 achieves competitive and even state-of-the-art performance across 24 spatial and embodiment-related benchmarks.

Large-scale pretrained language models (LMs) are said to ``lack the ability to connect utterances to the world'' (Bender and Koller, 2020), because they do not have ``mental models of the world' '(Mitchell and Krakauer, 2023). If so, one would expect LM representations to be unrelated to representations induced by vision models. We present an empirical evaluation across four families of LMs (BERT, GPT-2, OPT and LLaMA-2) and three vision model architectures (ResNet, SegFormer, and MAE). Our experiments show that LMs partially converge towards representations isomorphic to those of vision models, subject to dispersion, polysemy and frequency. This has important implications for both multi-modal processing and the LM understanding debate (Mitchell and Krakauer, 2023).

While prior work has explored whether large language models (LLMs) possess a "theory of mind" (ToM) - the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others - there has been little work testing whether LLMs can implicitly apply such knowledge to predict behavior, or to judge whether an observed behavior is rational. Such skills are critical for appropriate interaction in social environments. We create a new dataset, SimpleTom, containing concise, diverse stories (e.g., "The can of Pringles has moldy chips in it. Mary picks up the can in the supermarket and walks to the cashier."), each with three questions that test different degrees of ToM reasoning, asking models to predict (a) mental state ("Is Mary aware of the mold?"), (b) behavior ("Will Mary pay for the chips or report the mold?"), and (c) judgment ("Mary paid for the chips. Was that reasonable?"). To our knowledge, SimpleToM is the first dataset to systematically explore downstream reasoning requiring knowledge of mental states in realistic scenarios. Our experimental results are intriguing: While most models can reliably predict mental state on our dataset (a), they often fail to correctly predict the behavior (b), and fare even worse at judging whether given behaviors are reasonable (c), despite being correctly aware of the protagonist's mental state should make such secondary predictions obvious. We further show that we can help models do better at (b) and (c) via interventions such as reminding the model of its earlier mental state answer and mental-state-specific chain-of-thought prompting, raising the action prediction accuracies (e.g., from 49.5% to 93.5% for GPT-4o) and judgment accuracies (e.g., from 15.3% to 94.7% in GPT-4o). While this shows that models can be coaxed to perform well, it requires task-specific interventions, and the natural model performances remain low, a cautionary tale for LLM deployment.

This article presents a theoretical framework for adapting the Common Model of Cognition to large generative network models within the field of artificial intelligence. This can be accomplished by restructuring modules within the Common Model into shadow production systems that are peripheral to a central production system, which handles higher-level reasoning based on the shadow productions' output. Implementing this novel structure within the Common Model allows for a seamless connection between cognitive architectures and generative neural networks.

Natural language has long enabled human cooperation, but its lossy, ambiguous, and indirect nature limits the potential of collective intelligence. While machines are not subject to these constraints, most LLM-based multi-agent systems still rely solely on natural language, exchanging tokens or their embeddings. To go beyond language, we introduce a new paradigm, thought communication, which enables agents to interact directly mind-to-mind, akin to telepathy. To uncover these latent thoughts in a principled way, we formalize the process as a general latent variable model, where agent states are generated by an unknown function of underlying thoughts. We prove that, in a nonparametric setting without auxiliary information, both shared and private latent thoughts between any pair of agents can be identified. Moreover, the global structure of thought sharing, including which agents share which thoughts and how these relationships are structured, can also be recovered with theoretical guarantees. Guided by the established theory, we develop a framework that extracts latent thoughts from all agents prior to communication and assigns each agent the relevant thoughts, along with their sharing patterns. This paradigm naturally extends beyond LLMs to all modalities, as most observational data arise from hidden generative processes. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks validate the theory and demonstrate the collaborative advantages of thought communication. We hope this work illuminates the potential of leveraging the hidden world, as many challenges remain unsolvable through surface-level observation alone, regardless of compute or data scale.

Do Large Language Models (LLMs) possess a Theory of Mind (ToM)? Research into this question has focused on evaluating LLMs against benchmarks and found success across a range of social tasks. However, these evaluations do not test for the actual representations posited by ToM: namely, a causal model of mental states and behavior. Here, we use a cognitively-grounded definition of ToM to develop and test a new evaluation framework. Specifically, our approach probes whether LLMs have a coherent, domain-general, and consistent model of how mental states cause behavior -- regardless of whether that model matches a human-like ToM. We find that even though LLMs succeed in approximating human judgments in a simple ToM paradigm, they fail at a logically equivalent task and exhibit low consistency between their action predictions and corresponding mental state inferences. As such, these findings suggest that the social proficiency exhibited by LLMs is not the result of an domain-general or consistent ToM.

When faced with novel situations, people are able to marshal relevant considerations from a wide range of background knowledge and put these to use in inferences and predictions. What permits us to draw in globally relevant information and reason over it coherently? Here, we explore the hypothesis that people use a combination of distributed and symbolic representations to construct bespoke mental models tailored to novel situations. We propose a computational implementation of this idea -- a ``Model Synthesis Architecture'' (MSA) -- using language models to implement global relevance-based retrieval and model synthesis and probabilistic programs to implement bespoke, coherent world models. We evaluate our MSA as a model of human judgments on a novel reasoning dataset. The dataset -- built around a `Model Olympics` domain of sports vignettes -- tests models' capacity for human-like, open-ended reasoning by requiring (i) judgments about novel causal structures described in language; (ii) drawing on large bodies of background knowledge; and (iii) doing both in light of observations that introduce arbitrary novel variables. Our MSA approach captures human judgments better than language model-only baselines, under both direct and chain-of-thought generations from the LM that supports model synthesis. These results suggest that MSAs can be implemented in a way that mirrors people's ability to deliver locally coherent reasoning over globally relevant variables, offering a path to understanding and replicating human reasoning in open-ended domains.

Despite the recent proliferation of large language models (LLMs), their training recipes -- model architecture, pre-training data and optimization algorithm -- are often very similar. This naturally raises the question of the similarity among the resulting models. In this paper, we propose a novel setting, imaginary question answering (IQA), to better understand model similarity. In IQA, we ask one model to generate purely imaginary questions (e.g., on completely made-up concepts in physics) and prompt another model to answer. Surprisingly, despite the total fictionality of these questions, all models can answer each other's questions with remarkable success, suggesting a "shared imagination space" in which these models operate during such hallucinations. We conduct a series of investigations into this phenomenon and discuss implications on model homogeneity, hallucination, and computational creativity.

Theory of mind (ToM; Premack & Woodruff, 1978) broadly refers to humans' ability to represent the mental states of others, including their desires, beliefs, and intentions. We propose to train a machine to build such models too. We design a Theory of Mind neural network -- a ToMnet -- which uses meta-learning to build models of the agents it encounters, from observations of their behaviour alone. Through this process, it acquires a strong prior model for agents' behaviour, as well as the ability to bootstrap to richer predictions about agents' characteristics and mental states using only a small number of behavioural observations. We apply the ToMnet to agents behaving in simple gridworld environments, showing that it learns to model random, algorithmic, and deep reinforcement learning agents from varied populations, and that it passes classic ToM tasks such as the "Sally-Anne" test (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) of recognising that others can hold false beliefs about the world. We argue that this system -- which autonomously learns how to model other agents in its world -- is an important step forward for developing multi-agent AI systems, for building intermediating technology for machine-human interaction, and for advancing the progress on interpretable AI.

In recent years, evaluating the Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has received significant attention within the research community. As the field rapidly evolves, navigating the diverse approaches and methodologies has become increasingly complex. This systematic review synthesizes current efforts to assess LLMs' ability to perform ToM tasks, an essential aspect of human cognition involving the attribution of mental states to oneself and others. Despite notable advancements, the proficiency of LLMs in ToM remains a contentious issue. By categorizing benchmarks and tasks through a taxonomy rooted in cognitive science, this review critically examines evaluation techniques, prompting strategies, and the inherent limitations of LLMs in replicating human-like mental state reasoning. A recurring theme in the literature reveals that while LLMs demonstrate emerging competence in ToM tasks, significant gaps persist in their emulation of human cognitive abilities.

Large language models are powerful systems that excel at many tasks, ranging from translation to mathematical reasoning. Yet, at the same time, these models often show unhuman-like characteristics. In the present paper, we address this gap and ask whether large language models can be turned into cognitive models. We find that -- after finetuning them on data from psychological experiments -- these models offer accurate representations of human behavior, even outperforming traditional cognitive models in two decision-making domains. In addition, we show that their representations contain the information necessary to model behavior on the level of individual subjects. Finally, we demonstrate that finetuning on multiple tasks enables large language models to predict human behavior in a previously unseen task. Taken together, these results suggest that large, pre-trained models can be adapted to become generalist cognitive models, thereby opening up new research directions that could transform cognitive psychology and the behavioral sciences as a whole.

Complex problem-solving requires cognitive flexibility--the capacity to entertain multiple perspectives while preserving their distinctiveness. This flexibility replicates the "wisdom of crowds" within a single individual, allowing them to "think with many minds." While mental simulation enables imagined deliberation, cognitive constraints limit its effectiveness. We propose synthetic deliberation, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based method that simulates discourse between agents embodying diverse perspectives, as a solution. Using a custom GPT-based model, we showcase its benefits: concurrent processing of multiple viewpoints without cognitive degradation, parallel exploration of perspectives, and precise control over viewpoint synthesis. By externalizing the deliberative process and distributing cognitive labor between parallel search and integration, synthetic deliberation transcends mental simulation's limitations. This approach shows promise for strategic planning, policymaking, and conflict resolution.

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from huge number of parameters, which restricts their deployment on edge devices. Weight sharing is one promising solution that encourages weight reuse, effectively reducing memory usage with less performance drop. However, current weight sharing techniques primarily focus on small-scale models like BERT and employ coarse-grained sharing rules, e.g., layer-wise. This becomes limiting given the prevalence of LLMs and sharing an entire layer or block obviously diminishes the flexibility of weight sharing. In this paper, we present a perspective on $textbf{head-wise shareable attention for large language models}. We further propose two memory-efficient methods that share parameters across attention heads, with a specific focus on LLMs. Both of them use the same dynamic strategy to select the shared weight matrices. The first method directly reuses the pre-trained weights without retraining, denoted as DirectShare. The second method first post-trains with constraint on weight matrix similarity and then shares, denoted as PostShare$. Experimental results reveal our head-wise shared models still maintain satisfactory capabilities, demonstrating the feasibility of fine-grained weight sharing applied to LLMs.

Multi-subject fMRI studies are challenging due to the high variability of both brain anatomy and functional brain topographies across participants. An effective way of aggregating multi-subject fMRI data is to extract a shared representation that filters out unwanted variability among subjects. Some recent work has implemented probabilistic models to extract a shared representation in task fMRI. In the present work, we improve upon these models by incorporating temporal information in the common latent structures. We introduce a new model, Shared Gaussian Process Factor Analysis (S-GPFA), that discovers shared latent trajectories and subject-specific functional topographies, while modelling temporal correlation in fMRI data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model in revealing ground truth latent structures using simulated data, and replicate experimental performance of time-segment matching and inter-subject similarity on the publicly available Raider and Sherlock datasets. We further test the utility of our model by analyzing its learned model parameters in the large multi-site SPINS dataset, on a social cognition task from participants with and without schizophrenia.

Shared memories between two individuals strengthen their bond and are crucial for facilitating their ongoing conversations. This study aims to make long-term dialogue more engaging by leveraging these shared memories. To this end, we introduce a new long-term dialogue dataset named SHARE, constructed from movie scripts, which are a rich source of shared memories among various relationships. Our dialogue dataset contains the summaries of persona information and events of two individuals, as explicitly revealed in their conversation, along with implicitly extractable shared memories. We also introduce EPISODE, a long-term dialogue framework based on SHARE that utilizes shared experiences between individuals. Through experiments using SHARE, we demonstrate that shared memories between two individuals make long-term dialogues more engaging and sustainable, and that EPISODE effectively manages shared memories during dialogue. Our new dataset is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SHARE-AA1E/SHARE.json.

This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in their training data and can be accomplished solely using natural language, limiting our understanding of their emergent sophisticated cognitive capacities. In this work, we created dozens of novel items of a classic mental imagery task from cognitive psychology. A task which, traditionally, cognitive psychologists have argued is solvable exclusively via visual mental imagery (i.e., language alone would be insufficient). LLMs are perfect for testing this hypothesis. First, we tested several state-of-the-art LLMs by giving text-only models written instructions and asking them to report the resulting object after performing the transformations in the aforementioned task. Then, we created a baseline by testing 100 human subjects in exactly the same task. We found that the best LLMs performed significantly above average human performance. Finally, we tested reasoning models set to different levels of reasoning and found the strongest performance when models allocate greater amounts of reasoning tokens. These results provide evidence that the best LLMs may have the capability to complete imagery-dependent tasks despite the non-pictorial nature of their architectures. Our study not only demonstrates an emergent cognitive capacity in LLMs while performing a novel task, but it also provides the field with a new task that leaves lots of room for improvement in otherwise already highly capable models. Finally, our findings reignite the debate over the formats of representation of visual imagery in humans, suggesting that propositional reasoning (or at least non-imagistic reasoning) may be sufficient to complete tasks that were long-thought to be imagery-dependent.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly capable, but the mechanisms of their thinking and decision-making process remain unclear. Chain-of-thoughts (CoTs) have been commonly utilized to monitor LLMs, but this strategy fails to accurately reflect LLMs' thinking process. Techniques based on LLMs' hidden representations provide an inner perspective to monitor their latent thinking. However, previous methods only try to develop external monitors instead of making LLMs themselves easier to monitor. In this paper, we propose a novel method TELLME, improving the transparency of LLMs and helping monitors identify unsuitable and sensitive behaviors. Furthermore, we showcase the applications of TELLME on trustworthiness tasks (\eg, safety risks monitoring tasks and detoxification tasks), where LLMs achieve consistent improvement in transparency and task performance. More crucially, we theoretically analyze the improvement of TELLME on LLMs' generalization ability through optimal transport theory.

While numerous works have assessed the generative performance of language models (LMs) on tasks requiring Theory of Mind reasoning, research into the models' internal representation of mental states remains limited. Recent work has used probing to demonstrate that LMs can represent beliefs of themselves and others. However, these claims are accompanied by limited evaluation, making it difficult to assess how mental state representations are affected by model design and training choices. We report an extensive benchmark with various LM types with different model sizes, fine-tuning approaches, and prompt designs to study the robustness of mental state representations and memorisation issues within the probes. Our results show that the quality of models' internal representations of the beliefs of others increases with model size and, more crucially, with fine-tuning. We are the first to study how prompt variations impact probing performance on theory of mind tasks. We demonstrate that models' representations are sensitive to prompt variations, even when such variations should be beneficial. Finally, we complement previous activation editing experiments on Theory of Mind tasks and show that it is possible to improve models' reasoning performance by steering their activations without the need to train any probe.

Human-like personality traits have recently been discovered in large language models, raising the hypothesis that their (known and as yet undiscovered) biases conform with human latent psychological constructs. While large conversational models may be tricked into answering psychometric questionnaires, the latent psychological constructs of thousands of simpler transformers, trained for other tasks, cannot be assessed because appropriate psychometric methods are currently lacking. Here, we show how standard psychological questionnaires can be reformulated into natural language inference prompts, and we provide a code library to support the psychometric assessment of arbitrary models. We demonstrate, using a sample of 88 publicly available models, the existence of human-like mental health-related constructs (including anxiety, depression, and Sense of Coherence) which conform with standard theories in human psychology and show similar correlations and mitigation strategies. The ability to interpret and rectify the performance of language models by using psychological tools can boost the development of more explainable, controllable, and trustworthy models.

The observed similarities in the behavior of humans and Large Language Models (LLMs) have prompted researchers to consider the potential of using LLMs as models of human cognition. However, several significant challenges must be addressed before LLMs can be legitimately regarded as cognitive models. For instance, LLMs are trained on far more data than humans typically encounter, and may have been directly trained on human data in specific cognitive tasks or aligned with human preferences. Consequently, the origins of these behavioral similarities are not well understood. In this paper, we propose a novel way to enhance the utility of LLMs as cognitive models. This approach involves (i) leveraging computationally equivalent tasks that both an LLM and a rational agent need to master for solving a cognitive problem and (ii) examining the specific task distributions required for an LLM to exhibit human-like behaviors. We apply this approach to decision-making -- specifically risky and intertemporal choice -- where the key computationally equivalent task is the arithmetic of expected value calculations. We show that an LLM pretrained on an ecologically valid arithmetic dataset, which we call Arithmetic-GPT, predicts human behavior better than many traditional cognitive models. Pretraining LLMs on ecologically valid arithmetic datasets is sufficient to produce a strong correspondence between these models and human decision-making. Our results also suggest that LLMs used as cognitive models should be carefully investigated via ablation studies of the pretraining data.

Metacognition is a critical component of intelligence, specifically regarding the awareness of one's own knowledge. While humans rely on shared internal memory for both answering questions and reporting their knowledge state, this dependency in LLMs remains underexplored. This study proposes a framework to measure metacognitive ability d_{type2}' using a dual-prompt method, followed by the introduction of Evolution Strategy for Metacognitive Alignment (ESMA) to bind a model's internal knowledge to its explicit behaviors. ESMA demonstrates robust generalization across diverse untrained settings, indicating a enhancement in the model's ability to reference its own knowledge. Furthermore, parameter analysis attributes these improvements to a sparse set of significant modifications.

Recent work on dialogue-based collaborative plan acquisition (CPA) has suggested that Theory of Mind (ToM) modelling can improve missing knowledge prediction in settings with asymmetric skill-sets and knowledge. Although ToM was claimed to be important for effective collaboration, its real impact on this novel task remains under-explored. By representing plans as graphs and by exploiting task-specific constraints we show that, as performance on CPA nearly doubles when predicting one's own missing knowledge, the improvements due to ToM modelling diminish. This phenomenon persists even when evaluating existing baseline methods. To better understand the relevance of ToM for CPA, we report a principled performance comparison of models with and without ToM features. Results across different models and ablations consistently suggest that learned ToM features are indeed more likely to reflect latent patterns in the data with no perceivable link to ToM. This finding calls for a deeper understanding of the role of ToM in CPA and beyond, as well as new methods for modelling and evaluating mental states in computational collaborative agents.

In online learning environments, students often lack personalized peer interactions, which are crucial for cognitive development and learning engagement. Although previous studies have employed large language models (LLMs) to simulate interactive learning environments, these interactions are limited to conversational exchanges, failing to adapt to learners' individualized cognitive and psychological states. As a result, students' engagement is low and they struggle to gain inspiration. To address this challenge, we propose OnlineMate, a multi-agent learning companion system driven by LLMs integrated with Theory of Mind (ToM). OnlineMate simulates peer-like roles, infers learners' psychological states such as misunderstandings and confusion during collaborative discussions, and dynamically adjusts interaction strategies to support higher-order thinking. Comprehensive evaluations, including simulation-based experiments, human assessments, and real classroom trials, demonstrate that OnlineMate significantly promotes deep learning and cognitive engagement by elevating students' average cognitive level while substantially improving emotional engagement scores.

Many cognitive approaches to well-being, such as recognizing and reframing unhelpful thoughts, have received considerable empirical support over the past decades, yet still lack truly widespread adoption in self-help format. A barrier to that adoption is a lack of adequately specific and diverse dedicated practice material. This work examines whether current language models can be leveraged to both produce a virtually unlimited quantity of practice material illustrating standard unhelpful thought patterns matching specific given contexts, and generate suitable positive reframing proposals. We propose PATTERNREFRAME, a novel dataset of about 10k examples of thoughts containing unhelpful thought patterns conditioned on a given persona, accompanied by about 27k positive reframes. By using this dataset to train and/or evaluate current models, we show that existing models can already be powerful tools to help generate an abundance of tailored practice material and hypotheses, with no or minimal additional model training required.

Text-to-image diffusion models have revolutionized visual content generation, but current safety mechanisms apply uniform standards that often fail to account for individual user preferences. These models overlook the diverse safety boundaries shaped by factors like age, mental health, and personal beliefs. To address this, we propose Personalized Safety Alignment (PSA), a framework that allows user-specific control over safety behaviors in generative models. PSA integrates personalized user profiles into the diffusion process, adjusting the model's behavior to match individual safety preferences while preserving image quality. We introduce a new dataset, Sage, which captures user-specific safety preferences and incorporates these profiles through a cross-attention mechanism. Experiments show that PSA outperforms existing methods in harmful content suppression and aligns generated content better with user constraints, achieving higher Win Rate and Pass Rate scores. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://torpedo2648.github.io/PSAlign/.

Human interactions are deeply rooted in the interplay of thoughts, beliefs, and desires made possible by Theory of Mind (ToM): our cognitive ability to understand the mental states of ourselves and others. Although ToM may come naturally to us, emulating it presents a challenge to even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent improvements to LLMs' reasoning capabilities from simple yet effective prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought have seen limited applicability to ToM. In this paper, we turn to the prominent cognitive science theory "Simulation Theory" to bridge this gap. We introduce SimToM, a novel two-stage prompting framework inspired by Simulation Theory's notion of perspective-taking. To implement this idea on current ToM benchmarks, SimToM first filters context based on what the character in question knows before answering a question about their mental state. Our approach, which requires no additional training and minimal prompt-tuning, shows substantial improvement over existing methods, and our analysis reveals the importance of perspective-taking to Theory-of-Mind capabilities. Our findings suggest perspective-taking as a promising direction for future research into improving LLMs' ToM capabilities.

We introduce Graph of Thoughts (GoT): a framework that advances prompting capabilities in large language models (LLMs) beyond those offered by paradigms such as Chain-of-Thought or Tree of Thoughts (ToT). The key idea and primary advantage of GoT is the ability to model the information generated by an LLM as an arbitrary graph, where units of information ("LLM thoughts") are vertices, and edges correspond to dependencies between these vertices. This approach enables combining arbitrary LLM thoughts into synergistic outcomes, distilling the essence of whole networks of thoughts, or enhancing thoughts using feedback loops. We illustrate that GoT offers advantages over state of the art on different tasks, for example increasing the quality of sorting by 62% over ToT, while simultaneously reducing costs by >31%. We ensure that GoT is extensible with new thought transformations and thus can be used to spearhead new prompting schemes. This work brings the LLM reasoning closer to human thinking or brain mechanisms such as recurrence, both of which form complex networks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated amazing capabilities in language generation, text comprehension, and knowledge reasoning. While a single powerful model can already handle multiple tasks, relying on a single perspective can lead to biased and unstable results. Recent studies have further improved the model's reasoning ability on a wide range of tasks by introducing multi-model collaboration. However, models with different capabilities may produce conflicting answers on the same problem, and how to reasonably obtain the correct answer from multiple candidate models has become a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose the multi-model brainstorming based on prompt. It incorporates different models into a group for brainstorming, and after multiple rounds of reasoning elaboration and re-inference, a consensus answer is reached within the group. We conducted experiments on three different types of datasets, and demonstrate that the brainstorming can significantly improve the effectiveness in logical reasoning and fact extraction. Furthermore, we find that two small-parameter models can achieve accuracy approximating that of larger-parameter models through brainstorming, which provides a new solution for distributed deployment of LLMs.

Cognitive diversity, reflected in variations of language, perspective, and reasoning, is essential to creativity and collective intelligence. This diversity is rich and grounded in culture, history, and individual experience. Yet as large language models (LLMs) become deeply embedded in people's lives, they risk standardizing language and reasoning. This Review synthesizes evidence across linguistics, cognitive, and computer science to show how LLMs reflect and reinforce dominant styles while marginalizing alternative voices and reasoning strategies. We examine how their design and widespread use contribute to this effect by mirroring patterns in their training data and amplifying convergence as all people increasingly rely on the same models across contexts. Unchecked, this homogenization risks flattening the cognitive landscapes that drive collective intelligence and adaptability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest and debate regarding their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM). Several recent inquiries reveal a lack of robust ToM in these models and pose a pressing demand to develop new benchmarks, as current ones primarily focus on different aspects of ToM and are prone to shortcuts and data leakage. In this position paper, we seek to answer two road-blocking questions: (1) How can we taxonomize a holistic landscape of machine ToM? (2) What is a more effective evaluation protocol for machine ToM? Following psychological studies, we taxonomize machine ToM into 7 mental state categories and delineate existing benchmarks to identify under-explored aspects of ToM. We argue for a holistic and situated evaluation of ToM to break ToM into individual components and treat LLMs as an agent who is physically situated in environments and socially situated in interactions with humans. Such situated evaluation provides a more comprehensive assessment of mental states and potentially mitigates the risk of shortcuts and data leakage. We further present a pilot study in a grid world setup as a proof of concept. We hope this position paper can facilitate future research to integrate ToM with LLMs and offer an intuitive means for researchers to better position their work in the landscape of ToM. Project page: https://github.com/Mars-tin/awesome-theory-of-mind

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their impressive abilities in various reasoning and decision-making tasks. However, the quality and coherence of the reasoning process can still benefit from enhanced introspection and self-reflection. In this paper, we introduce Multiplex CoT (Chain of Thought), a method that enables LLMs to simulate a form of self-review while reasoning, by initiating double Chain of Thought (CoT) thinking. Multiplex CoT leverages the power of iterative reasoning, where the model generates an initial chain of thought and subsequently critiques and refines this reasoning with a second round of thought generation. This recursive approach allows for more coherent, logical, and robust answers, improving the overall decision-making process. We demonstrate how this method can be effectively implemented using simple prompt engineering in existing LLM architectures, achieving an effect similar to that of the Learning-Refinement Model (LRM) without the need for additional training. Additionally, we present a practical guide for implementing the method in Google Colab, enabling easy integration into real-world applications.

Human social interactions depend on the ability to infer others' unspoken intentions, emotions, and beliefs-a cognitive skill grounded in the psychological concept of Theory of Mind (ToM). While large language models (LLMs) excel in semantic understanding tasks, they struggle with the ambiguity and contextual nuance inherent in human communication. To bridge this gap, we introduce MetaMind, a multi-agent framework inspired by psychological theories of metacognition, designed to emulate human-like social reasoning. MetaMind decomposes social understanding into three collaborative stages: (1) a Theory-of-Mind Agent generates hypotheses user mental states (e.g., intent, emotion), (2) a Domain Agent refines these hypotheses using cultural norms and ethical constraints, and (3) a Response Agent generates contextually appropriate responses while validating alignment with inferred intent. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across three challenging benchmarks, with 35.7% improvement in real-world social scenarios and 6.2% gain in ToM reasoning. Notably, it enables LLMs to match human-level performance on key ToM tasks for the first time. Ablation studies confirm the necessity of all components, which showcase the framework's ability to balance contextual plausibility, social appropriateness, and user adaptation. This work advances AI systems toward human-like social intelligence, with applications in empathetic dialogue and culturally sensitive interactions. Code is available at https://github.com/XMZhangAI/MetaMind.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods struggle with the non-stationarity of multi-agent systems and fail to adaptively learn online when tested with novel agents. Here, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to create an autonomous agent that can handle these challenges. Our agent, Hypothetical Minds, consists of a cognitively-inspired architecture, featuring modular components for perception, memory, and hierarchical planning over two levels of abstraction. We introduce the Theory of Mind module that scaffolds the high-level planning process by generating hypotheses about other agents' strategies in natural language. It then evaluates and iteratively refines these hypotheses by reinforcing hypotheses that make correct predictions about the other agents' behavior. Hypothetical Minds significantly improves performance over previous LLM-agent and RL baselines on a range of competitive, mixed motive, and collaborative domains in the Melting Pot benchmark, including both dyadic and population-based environments. Additionally, comparisons against LLM-agent baselines and ablations reveal the importance of hypothesis evaluation and refinement for succeeding on complex scenarios.

Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a compelling level of proficiency in Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks. This ability to impute unobservable mental states to others is vital to human social cognition and may prove equally important in principal-agent relations between individual humans and Artificial Intelligences (AIs). In this paper, we explore how a mechanism studied in developmental psychology known as Violation of Expectation (VoE) can be implemented to reduce errors in LLM prediction about users by leveraging emergent ToM affordances. And we introduce a metacognitive prompting framework to apply VoE in the context of an AI tutor. By storing and retrieving facts derived in cases where LLM expectation about the user was violated, we find that LLMs are able to learn about users in ways that echo theories of human learning. Finally, we discuss latent hazards and augmentative opportunities associated with modeling user psychology and propose ways to mitigate risk along with possible directions for future inquiry.

Theory of Mind (ToM) can be used to assess the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex scenarios where social reasoning is required. While the research community has proposed many ToM benchmarks, their hardness varies greatly, and their complexity is not well defined. This work proposes a framework inspired by cognitive load theory to measure the complexity of ToM tasks. We quantify a problem's complexity as the number of states necessary to solve it correctly. Our complexity measure also accounts for spurious states of a ToM problem designed to make it apparently harder. We use our method to assess the complexity of five widely adopted ToM benchmarks. On top of this framework, we design a prompting technique that augments the information available to a model with a description of how the environment changes with the agents' interactions. We name this technique Discrete World Models (DWM) and show how it elicits superior performance on ToM tasks.

Human-model conversations provide a window into users' real-world scenarios, behavior, and needs, and thus are a valuable resource for model development and research. While for-profit companies collect user data through the APIs of their models, using it internally to improve their own models, the open source and research community lags behind. We introduce the ShareLM collection, a unified set of human conversations with large language models, and its accompanying plugin, a Web extension for voluntarily contributing user-model conversations. Where few platforms share their chats, the ShareLM plugin adds this functionality, thus, allowing users to share conversations from most platforms. The plugin allows the user to rate their conversations, both at the conversation and the response levels, and delete conversations they prefer to keep private before they ever leave the user's local storage. We release the plugin conversations as part of the ShareLM collection, and call for more community effort in the field of open human-model data. The code, plugin, and data are available.

Self-consciousness, the introspection of one's existence and thoughts, represents a high-level cognitive process. As language models advance at an unprecedented pace, a critical question arises: Are these models becoming self-conscious? Drawing upon insights from psychological and neural science, this work presents a practical definition of self-consciousness for language models and refines ten core concepts. Our work pioneers an investigation into self-consciousness in language models by, for the first time, leveraging causal structural games to establish the functional definitions of the ten core concepts. Based on our definitions, we conduct a comprehensive four-stage experiment: quantification (evaluation of ten leading models), representation (visualization of self-consciousness within the models), manipulation (modification of the models' representation), and acquisition (fine-tuning the models on core concepts). Our findings indicate that although models are in the early stages of developing self-consciousness, there is a discernible representation of certain concepts within their internal mechanisms. However, these representations of self-consciousness are hard to manipulate positively at the current stage, yet they can be acquired through targeted fine-tuning. Our datasets and code are at https://github.com/OpenCausaLab/SelfConsciousness.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people's mental states, is an essential ingredient for developing machines with human-level social intelligence. Recent machine learning models, particularly large language models, seem to show some aspects of ToM understanding. However, existing ToM benchmarks use unimodal datasets - either video or text. Human ToM, on the other hand, is more than video or text understanding. People can flexibly reason about another person's mind based on conceptual representations (e.g., goals, beliefs, plans) extracted from any available data. To address this, we introduce a multimodal Theory of Mind question answering (MMToM-QA) benchmark. MMToM-QA comprehensively evaluates machine ToM both on multimodal data and on different kinds of unimodal data about a person's activity in a household environment. To engineer multimodal ToM capacity, we propose a novel method, BIP-ALM (Bayesian Inverse Planning Accelerated by Language Models). BIP-ALM extracts unified representations from multimodal data and utilizes language models for scalable Bayesian inverse planning. We conducted a systematic comparison of human performance, BIP-ALM, and state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4. The experiments demonstrate that large language models and large multimodal models still lack robust ToM capacity. BIP-ALM, on the other hand, shows promising results, by leveraging the power of both model-based mental inference and language models.

We investigate whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. It is difficult to answer this question through conversation alone, as genuine introspection cannot be distinguished from confabulations. Here, we address this challenge by injecting representations of known concepts into a model's activations, and measuring the influence of these manipulations on the model's self-reported states. We find that models can, in certain scenarios, notice the presence of injected concepts and accurately identify them. Models demonstrate some ability to recall prior internal representations and distinguish them from raw text inputs. Strikingly, we find that some models can use their ability to recall prior intentions in order to distinguish their own outputs from artificial prefills. In all these experiments, Claude Opus 4 and 4.1, the most capable models we tested, generally demonstrate the greatest introspective awareness; however, trends across models are complex and sensitive to post-training strategies. Finally, we explore whether models can explicitly control their internal representations, finding that models can modulate their activations when instructed or incentivized to "think about" a concept. Overall, our results indicate that current language models possess some functional introspective awareness of their own internal states. We stress that in today's models, this capacity is highly unreliable and context-dependent; however, it may continue to develop with further improvements to model capabilities.

We introduce "Method Actors" as a mental model for guiding LLM prompt engineering and prompt architecture. Under this mental model, LLMs should be thought of as actors; prompts as scripts and cues; and LLM responses as performances. We apply this mental model to the task of improving LLM performance at playing Connections, a New York Times word puzzle game that prior research identified as a challenging benchmark for evaluating LLM reasoning. Our experiments with GPT-4o show that a "Method Actors" approach can significantly improve LLM performance over both a vanilla and "Chain of Thoughts" approach. A vanilla approach solves 27% of Connections puzzles in our dataset and a "Chain of Thoughts" approach solves 41% of puzzles, whereas our strongest "Method Actor" approach solves 86% of puzzles. We also test OpenAI's newest model designed specifically for complex reasoning tasks, o1-preview. When asked to solve a puzzle all at once, o1-preview solves 79% of Connections puzzles in our dataset, and when allowed to build puzzle solutions one guess at a time over multiple API calls, o1-preview solves 100% of the puzzles. Incorporating a "Method Actor" prompt architecture increases the percentage of puzzles that o1-preview solves perfectly from 76% to 87%.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand the mental states of oneself and others, remains a challenging area for large language models (LLMs), which often fail to predict human mental states accurately. In this paper, we introduce UniToMBench, a unified benchmark that integrates the strengths of SimToM and TOMBENCH to systematically improve and assess ToM capabilities in LLMs by integrating multi-interaction task designs and evolving story scenarios. Supported by a custom dataset of over 1,000 hand-written scenarios, UniToMBench combines perspective-taking techniques with diverse evaluation metrics to better stimulate social cognition in LLMs. Through evaluation, we observe that while models like GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini show consistently high accuracy in tasks involving emotional and belief-related scenarios, with results usually above 80%, there is significant variability in their performance across knowledge-based tasks. These results highlight both the strengths and limitations of current LLMs in ToM-related tasks, underscoring the value of UniToMBench as a comprehensive tool for future development. Our code is publicly available here: https://github.com/Shamant/unifiedtombenchmark.

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the cognitive ability to infer and attribute mental states to oneself and others. As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for social and cognitive capabilities, it remains unclear to what extent these models demonstrate ToM across diverse languages and cultural contexts. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive study of multilingual ToM capabilities aimed at addressing this gap. Our approach includes two key components: (1) We translate existing ToM datasets into multiple languages, effectively creating a multilingual ToM dataset and (2) We enrich these translations with culturally specific elements to reflect the social and cognitive scenarios relevant to diverse populations. We conduct extensive evaluations of six state-of-the-art LLMs to measure their ToM performance across both the translated and culturally adapted datasets. The results highlight the influence of linguistic and cultural diversity on the models' ability to exhibit ToM, and questions their social reasoning capabilities. This work lays the groundwork for future research into enhancing LLMs' cross-cultural social cognition and contributes to the development of more culturally aware and socially intelligent AI systems. All our data and code are publicly available.

Wider access to therapeutic care is one of the biggest challenges in mental health treatment. Due to institutional barriers, some people seeking mental health support have turned to large language models (LLMs) for personalized therapy, even though these models are largely unsanctioned and untested. We investigate the potential and limitations of using LLMs as providers of evidence-based therapy by using mixed methods clinical metrics. Using HELPERT, a prompt run on a large language model using the same process and training as a comparative group of peer counselors, we replicated publicly accessible mental health conversations rooted in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to compare session dynamics and counselor's CBT-based behaviors between original peer support sessions and their reconstructed HELPERT sessions. Two licensed, CBT-trained clinical psychologists evaluated the sessions using the Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale and provided qualitative feedback. Our findings show that the peer sessions are characterized by empathy, small talk, therapeutic alliance, and shared experiences but often exhibit therapist drift. Conversely, HELPERT reconstructed sessions exhibit minimal therapist drift and higher adherence to CBT methods but display a lack of collaboration, empathy, and cultural understanding. Through CTRS ratings and psychologists' feedback, we highlight the importance of human-AI collaboration for scalable mental health. Our work outlines the ethical implication of imparting human-like subjective qualities to LLMs in therapeutic settings, particularly the risk of deceptive empathy, which may lead to unrealistic patient expectations and potential harm.

Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, serving as an important foundation for a variety of intellectual activities. While prior work has shown that LLMs can represent task patterns and surface-level concepts, it remains unclear whether these models can encode high-level relational concepts and apply them to novel situations through structured comparisons. In this work, we explore this fundamental aspect using proportional and story analogies, and identify three key findings. First, LLMs effectively encode the underlying relationships between analogous entities; both attributive and relational information propagate through mid-upper layers in correct cases, whereas reasoning failures reflect missing relational information within these layers. Second, unlike humans, LLMs often struggle not only when relational information is missing, but also when attempting to apply it to new entities. In such cases, strategically patching hidden representations at critical token positions can facilitate information transfer to a certain extent. Lastly, successful analogical reasoning in LLMs is marked by strong structural alignment between analogous situations, whereas failures often reflect degraded or misplaced alignment. Overall, our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit emerging but limited capabilities in encoding and applying high-level relational concepts, highlighting both parallels and gaps with human cognition.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become a widely used strategy for working with large language and multimodal models. While CoT has been shown to improve performance across many tasks, determining the settings in which it is effective remains an ongoing effort. In particular, it is still an open question in what settings CoT systematically reduces model performance. In this paper, we seek to identify the characteristics of tasks where CoT reduces performance by drawing inspiration from cognitive psychology, looking at cases where (i) verbal thinking or deliberation hurts performance in humans, and (ii) the constraints governing human performance generalize to language models. Three such cases are implicit statistical learning, visual recognition, and classifying with patterns containing exceptions. In extensive experiments across all three settings, we find that a diverse collection of state-of-the-art models exhibit significant drop-offs in performance (e.g., up to 36.3% absolute accuracy for OpenAI o1-preview compared to GPT-4o) when using inference-time reasoning compared to zero-shot counterparts. We also identify three tasks that satisfy condition (i) but not (ii), and find that while verbal thinking reduces human performance in these tasks, CoT retains or increases model performance. Overall, our results show that while there is not an exact parallel between the cognitive processes of models and those of humans, considering cases where thinking has negative consequences for human performance can help us identify settings where it negatively impacts models. By connecting the literature on human deliberation with evaluations of CoT, we offer a new tool that can be used in understanding the impact of prompt choices and inference-time reasoning.

In the era of large language models, model merging is a promising way to combine multiple task-specific models into a single multitask model without extra training. However, two challenges remain: (a) interference between different models and (b) heterogeneous data during testing. Traditional model merging methods often show significant performance gaps compared to fine-tuned models due to these issues. Additionally, a one-size-fits-all model lacks flexibility for diverse test data, leading to performance degradation. We show that both shared and exclusive task-specific knowledge are crucial for merging performance, but directly merging exclusive knowledge hinders overall performance. In view of this, we propose Twin-Merging, a method that encompasses two principal stages: (1) modularizing knowledge into shared and exclusive components, with compression to reduce redundancy and enhance efficiency; (2) dynamically merging shared and task-specific knowledge based on the input. This approach narrows the performance gap between merged and fine-tuned models and improves adaptability to heterogeneous data. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets for both discriminative and generative tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing an average improvement of 28.34% in absolute normalized score for discriminative tasks and even surpassing the fine-tuned upper bound on the generative tasks. (Our implementation is available in https://github.com/LZY-the-boys/Twin-Mergin.)

Parameter-shared pre-trained language models (PLMs) have emerged as a successful approach in resource-constrained environments, enabling substantial reductions in model storage and memory costs without significant performance compromise. However, it is important to note that parameter sharing does not alleviate computational burdens associated with inference, thus impeding its practicality in situations characterized by limited stringent latency requirements or computational resources. Building upon neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), we introduce a straightforward technique to enhance the inference efficiency of parameter-shared PLMs. Additionally, we propose a simple pre-training technique that leads to fully or partially shared models capable of achieving even greater inference acceleration. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on both autoregressive and autoencoding PLMs, providing novel insights into more efficient utilization of parameter-shared models in resource-constrained settings.

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform complex reasoning by generating explanations for their predictions. However, a complementary goal of explanations is to also communicate useful knowledge that improves weaker agents. Hence, we investigate whether LLMs also make good teachers for weaker agents. In particular, we consider a student-teacher framework between two LLM agents and study if, when, and how the teacher should intervene with natural language explanations to improve the student's performance. Since communication is expensive, we define a budget such that the teacher only communicates explanations for a fraction of the data, after which the student should perform well on its own. We decompose the teaching problem along four axes: (1) if teacher's test time intervention improve student predictions, (2) when it is worth explaining a data point, (3) how the teacher should personalize explanations to better teach the student, and (4) if teacher explanations also improve student performance on future unexplained data. We first show that teacher LLMs can indeed intervene on student reasoning to improve their performance. Next, we propose a Theory of Mind approach, in which the teacher builds two few-shot mental models of the student. The first model defines an Intervention Function that simulates the utility of an intervention, allowing the teacher to intervene when this utility is the highest and improving student performance at lower budgets. The second model enables the teacher to personalize explanations for a particular student and outperform unpersonalized teachers. We also demonstrate that in multi-turn interactions, teacher explanations generalize and learning from explained data improves student performance on future unexplained data. Finally, we also verify that misaligned teachers can lower student performance to random chance by intentionally misleading them.

Can Vision Language Models (VLMs) imagine the full scene from just a few views, like humans do? Humans form spatial mental models, internal representations of unseen space, to reason about layout, perspective, and motion. Our new MindCube benchmark with 21,154 questions across 3,268 images exposes this critical gap, where existing VLMs exhibit near-random performance. Using MindCube, we systematically evaluate how well VLMs build robust spatial mental models through representing positions (cognitive mapping), orientations (perspective-taking), and dynamics (mental simulation for "what-if" movements). We then explore three approaches to help VLMs approximate spatial mental models, including unseen intermediate views, natural language reasoning chains, and cognitive maps. The significant improvement comes from a synergistic approach, "map-then-reason", that jointly trains the model to first generate a cognitive map and then reason upon it. By training models to reason over these internal maps, we boosted accuracy from 37.8% to 60.8% (+23.0%). Adding reinforcement learning pushed performance even further to 70.7% (+32.9%). Our key insight is that such scaffolding of spatial mental models, actively constructing and utilizing internal structured spatial representations with flexible reasoning processes, significantly improves understanding of unobservable space.

This paper examines the extent to which large language models (LLMs) have developed higher-order theory of mind (ToM); the human ability to reason about multiple mental and emotional states in a recursive manner (e.g. I think that you believe that she knows). This paper builds on prior work by introducing a handwritten test suite -- Multi-Order Theory of Mind Q&A -- and using it to compare the performance of five LLMs to a newly gathered adult human benchmark. We find that GPT-4 and Flan-PaLM reach adult-level and near adult-level performance on ToM tasks overall, and that GPT-4 exceeds adult performance on 6th order inferences. Our results suggest that there is an interplay between model size and finetuning for the realisation of ToM abilities, and that the best-performing LLMs have developed a generalised capacity for ToM. Given the role that higher-order ToM plays in a wide range of cooperative and competitive human behaviours, these findings have significant implications for user-facing LLM applications.

Modern language models can process inputs across diverse languages and modalities. We hypothesize that models acquire this capability through learning a shared representation space across heterogeneous data types (e.g., different languages and modalities), which places semantically similar inputs near one another, even if they are from different modalities/languages. We term this the semantic hub hypothesis, following the hub-and-spoke model from neuroscience (Patterson et al., 2007) which posits that semantic knowledge in the human brain is organized through a transmodal semantic "hub" which integrates information from various modality-specific "spokes" regions. We first show that model representations for semantically equivalent inputs in different languages are similar in the intermediate layers, and that this space can be interpreted using the model's dominant pretraining language via the logit lens. This tendency extends to other data types, including arithmetic expressions, code, and visual/audio inputs. Interventions in the shared representation space in one data type also predictably affect model outputs in other data types, suggesting that this shared representations space is not simply a vestigial byproduct of large-scale training on broad data, but something that is actively utilized by the model during input processing.

Large language models (LLMs) solve complex problems yet fail on simpler variants, suggesting they achieve correct outputs through mechanisms fundamentally different from human reasoning. To understand this gap, we synthesize cognitive science research into a taxonomy of 28 cognitive elements spanning reasoning invariants, meta-cognitive controls, representations for organizing reasoning & knowledge, and transformation operations. We introduce a fine-grained evaluation framework and conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis of 192K traces from 18 models across text, vision, and audio, complemented by 54 human think-aloud traces, which we make publicly available. We find that models under-utilize cognitive elements correlated with success, narrowing to rigid sequential processing on ill-structured problems where diverse representations and meta-cognitive monitoring are critical. Human traces show more abstraction and conceptual processing, while models default to surface-level enumeration. Meta-analysis of 1.6K LLM reasoning papers reveals the research community concentrates on easily quantifiable elements (sequential organization: 55%, decomposition: 60%) but neglecting meta-cognitive controls (self-awareness: 16%) that correlate with success. Models possess behavioral repertoires associated with success but fail to deploy them spontaneously. Leveraging these patterns, we develop test-time reasoning guidance that automatically scaffold successful structures, improving performance by up to 66.7% on complex problems. By establishing a shared vocabulary between cognitive science and LLM research, our framework enables systematic diagnosis of reasoning failures and principled development of models that reason through robust cognitive mechanisms rather than spurious shortcuts, while providing tools to test theories of human cognition at scale.

As mental health care systems worldwide struggle to meet demand, there is increasing focus on using language models to infer neuropsychiatric conditions or psychopathological traits from language production. Yet, so far, this research has only delivered solutions with limited clinical applicability, due to insufficient consideration of ethical questions crucial to ensuring the synergy between possible applications and model design. To accelerate progress towards clinically applicable models, our paper charts the ethical landscape of research on language-based inference of psychopathology and provides a practical tool for researchers to navigate it. We identify seven core ethical principles that should guide model development and deployment in this domain, translate them into ELLIPS, an ethical toolkit operationalizing these principles into questions that can guide researchers' choices with respect to data selection, architectures, evaluation, and model deployment, and provide a case study exemplifying its use. With this, we aim to facilitate the emergence of model technology with concrete potential for real-world applicability.

Today's large language models (LLMs) routinely generate coherent, grammatical and seemingly meaningful paragraphs of text. This achievement has led to speculation that these networks are -- or will soon become -- "thinking machines", capable of performing tasks that require abstract knowledge and reasoning. Here, we review the capabilities of LLMs by considering their performance on two different aspects of language use: 'formal linguistic competence', which includes knowledge of rules and patterns of a given language, and 'functional linguistic competence', a host of cognitive abilities required for language understanding and use in the real world. Drawing on evidence from cognitive neuroscience, we show that formal competence in humans relies on specialized language processing mechanisms, whereas functional competence recruits multiple extralinguistic capacities that comprise human thought, such as formal reasoning, world knowledge, situation modeling, and social cognition. In line with this distinction, LLMs show impressive (although imperfect) performance on tasks requiring formal linguistic competence, but fail on many tests requiring functional competence. Based on this evidence, we argue that (1) contemporary LLMs should be taken seriously as models of formal linguistic skills; (2) models that master real-life language use would need to incorporate or develop not only a core language module, but also multiple non-language-specific cognitive capacities required for modeling thought. Overall, a distinction between formal and functional linguistic competence helps clarify the discourse surrounding LLMs' potential and provides a path toward building models that understand and use language in human-like ways.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) provide a new opportunity to address the long-standing question of how concepts are represented and organized in the mind, which is central to unravelling the nature of human cognition. Here, we reframed the classic reverse dictionary task to simulate human concept inference in context and investigated the emergence of human-like conceptual representations within LLMs. We found that LLMs were able to infer concepts from definitional descriptions and construct representation spaces that converge towards a shared, context-independent structure. These representations effectively predicted human behavioural judgments and aligned well with neural activity patterns in the human brain, offering evidence for biological plausibility. These findings demonstrate that human-like conceptual representations and organization can naturally emerge from language prediction, even without real-world grounding. Our work supports the view that LLMs serve as valuable tools for understanding complex human cognition and paves the way for better alignment between artificial and human intelligence.

Motivated by the remarkable progress of large language models (LLMs) in objective tasks like mathematics and coding, there is growing interest in their potential to simulate human behavior--a capability with profound implications for transforming social science research and customer-centric business insights. However, LLMs often lack a nuanced understanding of human cognition and behavior, limiting their effectiveness in social simulation and personalized applications. We posit that this limitation stems from a fundamental misalignment: standard LLM pretraining on vast, uncontextualized web data does not capture the continuous, situated context of an individual's decisions, thoughts, and behaviors over time. To bridge this gap, we introduce HumanLLM, a foundation model designed for personalized understanding and simulation of individuals. We first construct the Cognitive Genome Dataset, a large-scale corpus curated from real-world user data on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Blogger, and Amazon. Through a rigorous, multi-stage pipeline involving data filtering, synthesis, and quality control, we automatically extract over 5.5 million user logs to distill rich profiles, behaviors, and thinking patterns. We then formulate diverse learning tasks and perform supervised fine-tuning to empower the model to predict a wide range of individualized human behaviors, thoughts, and experiences. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that HumanLLM achieves superior performance in predicting user actions and inner thoughts, more accurately mimics user writing styles and preferences, and generates more authentic user profiles compared to base models. Furthermore, HumanLLM shows significant gains on out-of-domain social intelligence benchmarks, indicating enhanced generalization.

Humans talk in free-form while negotiating the expressed meanings or common ground. Despite the impressive conversational abilities of the large generative language models, they do not consider the individual differences in contextual understanding in a shared situated environment. In this work, we propose MindDial, a novel conversational framework that can generate situated free-form responses to negotiate common ground. We design an explicit mind module that can track three-level beliefs -- the speaker's belief, the speaker's prediction of the listener's belief, and the common belief based on the gap between the first two. Then the speaking act classification head will decide to continue to talk, end this turn, or take task-related action. We augment a common ground alignment dataset MutualFriend with belief dynamics annotation, of which the goal is to find a single mutual friend based on the free chat between two agents. Experiments show that our model with mental state modeling can resemble human responses when aligning common ground meanwhile mimic the natural human conversation flow. The ablation study further validates the third-level common belief can aggregate information of the first and second-order beliefs and align common ground more efficiently.

With the development in cognitive science and Large Language Models (LLMs), increasing connections have come to light between these two distinct fields. Building upon these connections, we propose a conjecture suggesting the existence of a duality between LLMs and Tulving's theory of memory. We identify a potential correspondence between Tulving's synergistic ecphory model (SEM) of retrieval and the emergent abilities observed in LLMs, serving as supporting evidence for our conjecture. Furthermore, we speculate that consciousness may be considered a form of emergent ability based on this duality. We also discuss how other theories of consciousness intersect with our research.

With the widespread use of large language models (LLMs) in NLP tasks, researchers have discovered the potential of Chain-of-thought (CoT) to assist LLMs in accomplishing complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate steps. However, human thought processes are often non-linear, rather than simply sequential chains of thoughts. Therefore, we propose Graph-of-Thought (GoT) reasoning, which models human thought processes not only as a chain but also as a graph. By representing thought units as nodes and connections between them as edges, our approach captures the non-sequential nature of human thinking and allows for a more realistic modeling of thought processes. Similar to Multimodal-CoT, we modeled GoT reasoning as a two-stage framework, generating rationales first and then producing the final answer. Specifically, we employ an additional graph-of-thoughts encoder for GoT representation learning and fuse the GoT representation with the original input representation through a gated fusion mechanism. We implement a GoT reasoning model on the T5 pre-trained model and evaluate its performance on a text-only reasoning task (GSM8K) and a multimodal reasoning task (ScienceQA). Our model achieves significant improvement over the strong CoT baseline with 3.41% and 5.08% on the GSM8K test set with T5-base and T5-large architectures, respectively. Additionally, our model boosts accuracy from 84.91% to 91.54% using the T5-base model and from 91.68% to 92.77% using the T5-large model over the state-of-the-art Multimodal-CoT on the ScienceQA test set. Experiments have shown that GoT achieves comparable results to Multimodal-CoT(large) with over 700M parameters, despite having fewer than 250M backbone model parameters, demonstrating the effectiveness of GoT.

Mental rotation -- the ability to compare objects seen from different viewpoints -- is a fundamental example of mental simulation and spatial world modelling in humans. Here we propose a mechanistic model of human mental rotation, leveraging advances in deep, equivariant, and neuro-symbolic learning. Our model consists of three stacked components: (1) an equivariant neural encoder, taking images as input and producing 3D spatial representations of objects, (2) a neuro-symbolic object encoder, deriving symbolic descriptions of objects from these spatial representations, and (3) a neural decision agent, comparing these symbolic descriptions to prescribe rotation simulations in 3D latent space via a recurrent pathway. Our model design is guided by the abundant experimental literature on mental rotation, which we complemented with experiments in VR where participants could at times manipulate the objects to compare, providing us with additional insights into the cognitive process of mental rotation. Our model captures well the performance, response times and behavior of participants in our and others' experiments. The necessity of each model component is shown through systematic ablations. Our work adds to a recent collection of deep neural models of human spatial reasoning, further demonstrating the potency of integrating deep, equivariant, and symbolic representations to model the human mind.

The adaptation of Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents to execute tasks via natural language prompts represents a significant advancement, notably eliminating the need for explicit retraining or fine tuning, but are constrained by the comprehensiveness and diversity of the provided examples, leading to outputs that often diverge significantly from expected results, especially when it comes to the open-ended questions. This paper introduces the Memory Sharing, a framework which integrates the real-time memory filter, storage and retrieval to enhance the In-Context Learning process. This framework allows for the sharing of memories among multiple agents, whereby the interactions and shared memories between different agents effectively enhance the diversity of the memories. The collective self-enhancement through interactive learning among multiple agents facilitates the evolution from individual intelligence to collective intelligence. Besides, the dynamically growing memory pool is utilized not only to improve the quality of responses but also to train and enhance the retriever. We evaluated our framework across three distinct domains involving specialized tasks of agents. The experimental results demonstrate that the MS framework significantly improves the agents' performance in addressing open-ended questions.

Many interpretable AI approaches have been proposed to provide plausible explanations for a model's decision-making. However, configuring an explainable model that effectively communicates among computational modules has received less attention. A recently proposed shared global workspace theory showed that networks of distributed modules can benefit from sharing information with a bottlenecked memory because the communication constraints encourage specialization, compositionality, and synchronization among the modules. Inspired by this, we propose Concept-Centric Transformers, a simple yet effective configuration of the shared global workspace for interpretability, consisting of: i) an object-centric-based memory module for extracting semantic concepts from input features, ii) a cross-attention mechanism between the learned concept and input embeddings, and iii) standard classification and explanation losses to allow human analysts to directly assess an explanation for the model's classification reasoning. We test our approach against other existing concept-based methods on classification tasks for various datasets, including CIFAR100, CUB-200-2011, and ImageNet, and we show that our model achieves better classification accuracy than all baselines across all problems but also generates more consistent concept-based explanations of classification output.

While text-to-image generation has achieved unprecedented fidelity, the vast majority of existing models function fundamentally as static text-to-pixel decoders. Consequently, they often fail to grasp implicit user intentions. Although emerging unified understanding-generation models have improved intent comprehension, they still struggle to accomplish tasks involving complex knowledge reasoning within a single model. Moreover, constrained by static internal priors, these models remain unable to adapt to the evolving dynamics of the real world. To bridge these gaps, we introduce Mind-Brush, a unified agentic framework that transforms generation into a dynamic, knowledge-driven workflow. Simulating a human-like 'think-research-create' paradigm, Mind-Brush actively retrieves multimodal evidence to ground out-of-distribution concepts and employs reasoning tools to resolve implicit visual constraints. To rigorously evaluate these capabilities, we propose Mind-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 500 distinct samples spanning real-time news, emerging concepts, and domains such as mathematical and Geo-Reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mind-Brush significantly enhances the capabilities of unified models, realizing a zero-to-one capability leap for the Qwen-Image baseline on Mind-Bench, while achieving superior results on established benchmarks like WISE and RISE.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged with remarkable capabilities in complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought reasoning, practical resource constraints have sparked interest in transferring these abilities to smaller models. However, achieving both domain performance and cross-domain generalization remains challenging. Existing approaches typically restrict students to following a single golden rationale and treat different reasoning paths independently. Due to distinct inductive biases and intrinsic preferences, alongside the student's evolving capacity and reasoning preferences during training, a teacher's "optimal" rationale could act as out-of-distribution noise. This misalignment leads to a degeneration of the student's latent reasoning distribution, causing suboptimal performance. To bridge this gap, we propose MIND, a capability-adaptive framework that transitions distillation from passive mimicry to active cognitive construction. We synthesize diverse teacher perspectives through a novel "Teaching Assistant" network. By employing a Feedback-Driven Inertia Calibration mechanism, this network utilizes inertia-filtered training loss to align supervision with the student's current adaptability, effectively enhancing performance while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIND achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks, and our sophisticated latent space analysis further confirms the mechanism of reasoning ability internalization.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the capacity to comprehend the mental states of distinct individuals, is essential for numerous practical applications. With the development of large language models, there is a heated debate about whether they are able to perform ToM tasks. Previous studies have used different tasks and prompts to test the ToM on large language models and the results are inconsistent: some studies asserted these models are capable of exhibiting ToM, while others suggest the opposite. In this study, We present ToMChallenges, a dataset for comprehensively evaluating Theory of Mind based on Sally-Anne and Smarties tests. We created 30 variations of each test (e.g., changing the person's name, location, and items). For each variation, we test the model's understanding of different aspects: reality, belief, 1st order belief, and 2nd order belief. We adapt our data for various tasks by creating unique prompts tailored for each task category: Fill-in-the-Blank, Multiple Choice, True/False, Chain-of-Thought True/False, Question Answering, and Text Completion. If the model has a robust ToM, it should be able to achieve good performance for different prompts across different tests. We evaluated two GPT-3.5 models, text-davinci-003 and gpt-3.5-turbo-0301, with our datasets. Our results indicate that consistent performance in ToM tasks remains a challenge.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language generation, understanding, and few-shot learning in recent years. An extensive body of work has explored how their performance may be further improved through the tools of prompting, ranging from verification, self-consistency, or intermediate scratchpads. In this paper, we present a complementary approach to improve language responses where multiple language model instances propose and debate their individual responses and reasoning processes over multiple rounds to arrive at a common final answer. Our findings indicate that this approach significantly enhances mathematical and strategic reasoning across a number of tasks. We also demonstrate that our approach improves the factual validity of generated content, reducing fallacious answers and hallucinations that contemporary models are prone to. Our approach may be directly applied to existing black-box models and uses identical procedure and prompts for all tasks we investigate. Overall, our findings suggest that such "society of minds" approach has the potential to significantly advance the capabilities of LLMs and pave the way for further breakthroughs in language generation and understanding.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional results on current benchmarks when working individually. The advancement in their capabilities, along with a reduction in parameter size and inference times, has facilitated the use of these models as agents, enabling interactions among multiple models to execute complex tasks. Such collaborations offer several advantages, including the use of specialized models (e.g. coding), improved confidence through multiple computations, and enhanced divergent thinking, leading to more diverse outputs. Thus, the collaborative use of language models is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. In this work, we evaluate the behavior of a network of models collaborating through debate under the influence of an adversary. We introduce pertinent metrics to assess the adversary's effectiveness, focusing on system accuracy and model agreement. Our findings highlight the importance of a model's persuasive ability in influencing others. Additionally, we explore inference-time methods to generate more compelling arguments and evaluate the potential of prompt-based mitigation as a defensive strategy.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in general natural language processing tasks but often fall short in complex reasoning tasks. Recent studies have explored human-like problem-solving strategies, such as self-correct, to push further the boundary of single-model reasoning ability. In this work, we let a single model "step outside the box" by engaging multiple models to correct each other. We introduce a multi-agent collaboration strategy that emulates the academic peer review process. Each agent independently constructs its own solution, provides reviews on the solutions of others, and assigns confidence levels to its reviews. Upon receiving peer reviews, agents revise their initial solutions. Extensive experiments on three different types of reasoning tasks show that our collaboration approach delivers superior accuracy across all ten datasets compared to existing methods. Further study underscores the effectiveness of integrating confidence in reviews, demonstrates the superiority of feedback exchange over mere solution sharing, and highlights the role of capability and diversity in fostering successful collaboration.

Language model (LM) assistants are increasingly used in applications such as brainstorming and research. Improvements in memory and context size have allowed these models to become more autonomous, which has also resulted in more text accumulation in their context windows without explicit user intervention. This comes with a latent risk: the belief profiles of models -- their understanding of the world as manifested in their responses or actions -- may silently change as context accumulates. This can lead to subtly inconsistent user experiences, or shifts in behavior that deviate from the original alignment of the models. In this paper, we explore how accumulating context by engaging in interactions and processing text -- talking and reading -- can change the beliefs of language models, as manifested in their responses and behaviors. Our results reveal that models' belief profiles are highly malleable: GPT-5 exhibits a 54.7% shift in its stated beliefs after 10 rounds of discussion about moral dilemmas and queries about safety, while Grok 4 shows a 27.2% shift on political issues after reading texts from the opposing position. We also examine models' behavioral changes by designing tasks that require tool use, where each tool selection corresponds to an implicit belief. We find that these changes align with stated belief shifts, suggesting that belief shifts will be reflected in actual behavior in agentic systems. Our analysis exposes the hidden risk of belief shift as models undergo extended sessions of talking or reading, rendering their opinions and actions unreliable.

Knowing others' intentions and taking others' perspectives are two core components of human intelligence that are considered to be instantiations of theory-of-mind. Infiltrating machines with these abilities is an important step towards building human-level artificial intelligence. Here, to investigate intentionality understanding and level-2 perspective-taking in Vision Language Models (VLMs), we constructed the IntentBench and PerspectBench, which together contains over 300 cognitive experiments grounded in real-world scenarios and classic cognitive tasks. We found VLMs achieving high performance on intentionality understanding but low performance on level-2 perspective-taking. This suggests a potential dissociation between simulation-based and theory-based theory-of-mind abilities in VLMs, highlighting the concern that they are not capable of using model-based reasoning to infer others' mental states. See https://growing-ai-like-a-child.github.io/{Website}

Language models (LM or LLM) are increasingly deployed in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and its applications, but the question arises as to whether they can be a common resource managed and maintained by a community of users. Indeed, the dominance of private companies with exclusive access to massive data and language processing resources can create inequalities and biases in LM, as well as obstacles to innovation for those who do not have the same resources necessary for their implementation. In this contribution, we examine the concept of the commons and its relevance for thinking about LM. We highlight the potential benefits of treating the data and resources needed to create LMs as commons, including increased accessibility, equity, and transparency in the development and use of AI technologies. Finally, we present a case study centered on the Hugging Face platform, an open-source platform for deep learning designed to encourage collaboration and sharing among AI designers.

The recent advancements in artificial intelligence highlight the potential of language models in psychological health support. While models trained on data from mental health service platform have achieved preliminary success, challenges persist in areas such as data scarcity, quality, and ensuring a solid foundation in psychological techniques. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel approach to enhance the precision and efficacy of psychological support through large language models. Specifically, we design a specific prompt derived from principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and have generated the CBT QA dataset, specifically for Chinese psychological health Q&A based on CBT structured intervention strategies. Unlike previous methods, our dataset emphasizes professional and structured response. Utilizing this dataset, we fine-tuned the large language model, giving birth to CBT-LLM, the large-scale language model specifically designed for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that CBT-LLM excels in generating structured, professional, and highly relevant responses in psychological health support tasks, showcasing its practicality and quality. The model is available on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/Hongbin37/CBT-LLM.

Mental health disorders affect hundreds of millions globally, and the Web now serves as a primary medium for accessing support, information, and assessment. Large language models (LLMs) offer scalable and accessible assistance, yet their deployment in mental-health settings remains risky when their reasoning is incomplete, inconsistent, or ungrounded. Existing psychological LLMs emphasize emotional understanding or knowledge recall but overlook the step-wise, clinically aligned reasoning required for appraisal, diagnosis, intervention planning, abstraction, and verification. To address these issues, we introduce MentraSuite, a unified framework for advancing reliable mental-health reasoning. We propose MentraBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning five core reasoning aspects, six tasks, and 13 datasets, evaluating both task performance and reasoning quality across five dimensions: conciseness, coherence, hallucination avoidance, task understanding, and internal consistency. We further present Mindora, a post-trained model optimized through a hybrid SFT-RL framework with an inconsistency-detection reward to enforce faithful and coherent reasoning. To support training, we construct high-quality trajectories using a novel reasoning trajectory generation strategy, that strategically filters difficult samples and applies a structured, consistency-oriented rewriting process to produce concise, readable, and well-balanced trajectories. Across 20 evaluated LLMs, Mindora achieves the highest average performance on MentraBench and shows remarkable performances in reasoning reliability, demonstrating its effectiveness for complex mental-health scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in solving mathematical reasoning tasks, leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data as a vital component in guiding answer generation. Current paradigms typically generate CoT and answers directly for a given problem, diverging from human problem-solving strategies to some extent. Humans often solve problems by recalling analogous cases and leveraging their solutions to reason about the current task. Inspired by this cognitive process, we propose MetaLadder, a novel framework that explicitly prompts LLMs to recall and reflect on meta-problems, those structurally or semantically analogous problems, alongside their CoT solutions before addressing the target problem. Additionally, we introduce a problem-restating mechanism to enhance the model's comprehension of the target problem by regenerating the original question, which further improves reasoning accuracy. Therefore, the model can achieve reasoning transfer from analogical problems, mimicking human-like "learning from examples" and generalization abilities. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our MetaLadder significantly boosts LLMs' problem-solving accuracy, largely outperforming standard CoT-based methods (10.3\% accuracy gain) and other methods. Our code and data has been released at https://github.com/LHL3341/MetaLadder.

Humans regularly engage in analogical thinking, relating personal experiences to current situations (X is analogous to Y because of Z). Analogical thinking allows humans to solve problems in creative ways, grasp difficult concepts, and articulate ideas more effectively. Can language models (LMs) do the same? To answer this question, we propose ANALOBENCH, a benchmark to determine analogical reasoning ability in LMs. Our benchmarking approach focuses on aspects of this ability that are common among humans: (i) recalling related experiences from a large amount of information, and (ii) applying analogical reasoning to complex and lengthy scenarios. We test a broad collection of proprietary models (e.g., GPT family, Claude V2) and open source models such as LLaMA2. As in prior results, scaling up LMs results in some performance boosts. Surprisingly, scale offers minimal gains when, (i) analogies involve lengthy scenarios, or (ii) recalling relevant scenarios from a large pool of information, a process analogous to finding a needle in a haystack. We hope these observations encourage further research in this field.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) extend large language models (LLMs) from independent single-model reasoning to coordinative system-level intelligence. While existing LLM agents depend on text-based mediation for reasoning and communication, we take a step forward by enabling models to collaborate directly within the continuous latent space. We introduce LatentMAS, an end-to-end training-free framework that enables pure latent collaboration among LLM agents. In LatentMAS, each agent first performs auto-regressive latent thoughts generation through last-layer hidden embeddings. A shared latent working memory then preserves and transfers each agent's internal representations, ensuring lossless information exchange. We provide theoretical analyses establishing that LatentMAS attains higher expressiveness and lossless information preservation with substantially lower complexity than vanilla text-based MAS. In addition, empirical evaluations across 9 comprehensive benchmarks spanning math and science reasoning, commonsense understanding, and code generation show that LatentMAS consistently outperforms strong single-model and text-based MAS baselines, achieving up to 14.6% higher accuracy, reducing output token usage by 70.8%-83.7%, and providing 4x-4.3x faster end-to-end inference. These results demonstrate that our new latent collaboration framework enhances system-level reasoning quality while offering substantial efficiency gains without any additional training. Code and data are fully open-sourced at https://github.com/Gen-Verse/LatentMAS.

A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is inspired by cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness, seen as a bottleneck through which just a few elements, after having been selected by attention from a broader pool, are then broadcast and condition further processing, both in perception and decision-making. The set of recently selected elements one becomes aware of is seen as forming a low-dimensional conscious state. This conscious state is combining the few concepts constituting a conscious thought, i.e., what one is immediately conscious of at a particular moment. We claim that this architectural and information-processing constraint corresponds to assumptions about the joint distribution between high-level concepts. To the extent that these assumptions are generally true (and the form of natural language seems consistent with them), they can form a useful prior for representation learning. A low-dimensional thought or conscious state is analogous to a sentence: it involves only a few variables and yet can make a statement with very high probability of being true. This is consistent with a joint distribution (over high-level concepts) which has the form of a sparse factor graph, i.e., where the dependencies captured by each factor of the factor graph involve only very few variables while creating a strong dip in the overall energy function. The consciousness prior also makes it natural to map conscious states to natural language utterances or to express classical AI knowledge in a form similar to facts and rules, albeit capturing uncertainty as well as efficient search mechanisms implemented by attention mechanisms.

Large language models are known to suffer from the hallucination problem in that they are prone to output statements that are false or inconsistent, indicating a lack of knowledge. A proposed solution to this is to provide the model with additional data modalities that complements the knowledge obtained through text. We investigate the use of visual data to complement the knowledge of large language models by proposing a method for evaluating visual knowledge transfer to text for uni- or multimodal language models. The method is based on two steps, 1) a novel task querying for knowledge of memory colors, i.e. typical colors of well-known objects, and 2) filtering of model training data to clearly separate knowledge contributions. Additionally, we introduce a model architecture that involves a visual imagination step and evaluate it with our proposed method. We find that our method can successfully be used to measure visual knowledge transfer capabilities in models and that our novel model architecture shows promising results for leveraging multimodal knowledge in a unimodal setting.

Merging various task-specific Transformer-based models trained on different tasks into a single unified model can execute all the tasks concurrently. Previous methods, exemplified by task arithmetic, have been proven to be both effective and scalable. Existing methods have primarily focused on seeking a static optimal solution within the original model parameter space. A notable challenge is mitigating the interference between parameters of different models, which can substantially deteriorate performance. In this paper, we propose to merge most of the parameters while upscaling the MLP of the Transformer layers to a weight-ensembling mixture of experts (MoE) module, which can dynamically integrate shared and task-specific knowledge based on the input, thereby providing a more flexible solution that can adapt to the specific needs of each instance. Our key insight is that by identifying and separating shared knowledge and task-specific knowledge, and then dynamically integrating them, we can mitigate the parameter interference problem to a great extent. We conduct the conventional multi-task model merging experiments and evaluate the generalization and robustness of our method. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and provide a comprehensive understanding of our method. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/weight-ensembling_MoE-67C9/

Commonsense intelligence in machines is often assessed by static benchmarks that compare a model's output against human-prescribed correct labels. An important, albeit implicit, assumption of these labels is that they accurately capture what any human would think, effectively treating human common sense as homogeneous. However, recent empirical work has shown that humans vary enormously in what they consider commonsensical; thus what appears self-evident to one benchmark designer may not be so to another. Here, we propose a novel method for evaluating common sense in artificial intelligence (AI), specifically in large language models (LLMs), that incorporates empirically observed heterogeneity among humans by measuring the correspondence between a model's judgment and that of a human population. We first find that, when treated as independent survey respondents, most LLMs remain below the human median in their individual commonsense competence. Second, when used as simulators of a hypothetical population, LLMs correlate with real humans only modestly in the extent to which they agree on the same set of statements. In both cases, smaller, open-weight models are surprisingly more competitive than larger, proprietary frontier models. Our evaluation framework, which ties commonsense intelligence to its cultural basis, contributes to the growing call for adapting AI models to human collectivities that possess different, often incompatible, social stocks of knowledge.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on large-scale pretrained foundation models (PFMs) such as vision-language models, large language models (LLMs), diffusion models and vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated the ability to solve complex and truly non-trivial AI problems in a wide variety of domains and contexts. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), in particular, learn from vast and diverse data sources, allowing rich and nuanced representations of the world and, thereby, providing extensive capabilities, including the ability to reason, engage in meaningful dialog; collaborate with humans and other agents to jointly solve complex problems; and understand social and emotional aspects of humans. Despite this impressive feat, the cognitive abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs trained on large-scale datasets are still superficial and brittle. Consequently, generic LLMs are severely limited in their generalist capabilities. A number of foundational problems -- embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory -- are required to be addressed for LLMs to attain human-level general intelligence. These concepts are more aligned with human cognition and provide LLMs with inherent human-like cognitive properties that support the realization of physically-plausible, semantically meaningful, flexible and more generalizable knowledge and intelligence. In this work, we discuss the aforementioned foundational issues and survey state-of-the art approaches for implementing these concepts in LLMs. Specifically, we discuss how the principles of embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory can be leveraged toward the attainment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in an organic manner.

In the social world, humans possess the capability to infer and reason about others mental states (such as emotions, beliefs, and intentions), known as the Theory of Mind (ToM). Simultaneously, humans own mental states evolve in response to social situations, a capability we refer to as socialization. Together, these capabilities form the foundation of human social interaction. In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), especially with the development of large language models (LLMs), we raise an intriguing question: How do LLMs perform in terms of ToM and socialization capabilities? And more broadly, can these AI models truly enter and navigate the real social world? Existing research evaluating LLMs ToM and socialization capabilities by positioning LLMs as passive observers from a third person perspective, rather than as active participants. However, compared to the third-person perspective, observing and understanding the world from an egocentric first person perspective is a natural approach for both humans and AI agents. The ToM and socialization capabilities of LLMs from a first person perspective, a crucial attribute for advancing embodied AI agents, remain unexplored. To answer the aforementioned questions and bridge the research gap, we introduce EgoSocialArena, a novel framework designed to evaluate and investigate the ToM and socialization capabilities of LLMs from a first person perspective. It encompasses two evaluation environments: static environment and interactive environment, with seven scenarios: Daily Life, Counterfactual, New World, Blackjack, Number Guessing, and Limit Texas Hold em, totaling 2,195 data entries. With EgoSocialArena, we have conducted a comprehensive evaluation of nine advanced LLMs and observed some key insights regarding the future development of LLMs as well as the capabilities levels of the most advanced LLMs currently available.

As the research community aims to build better AI assistants that are more dynamic and personalized to the diversity of humans that they interact with, there is increased interest in evaluating the theory of mind capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Indeed, several recent studies suggest that LLM theory of mind capabilities are quite impressive, approximating human-level performance. Our paper aims to rebuke this narrative and argues instead that past studies were not directly measuring agent performance, potentially leading to findings that are illusory in nature as a result. We draw a strong distinction between what we call literal theory of mind i.e. measuring the agent's ability to predict the behavior of others and functional theory of mind i.e. adapting to agents in-context based on a rational response to predictions of their behavior. We find that top performing open source LLMs may display strong capabilities in literal theory of mind, depending on how they are prompted, but seem to struggle with functional theory of mind -- even when partner policies are exceedingly simple. Our work serves to highlight the double sided nature of inductive bias in LLMs when adapting to new situations. While this bias can lead to strong performance over limited horizons, it often hinders convergence to optimal long-term behavior.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, understanding their ability to comprehend human mental states becomes critical for ensuring effective interactions. However, despite the recent attempts to assess the Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning capabilities of LLMs, the degree to which these models can align with human ToM remains a nuanced topic of exploration. This is primarily due to two distinct challenges: (1) the presence of inconsistent results from previous evaluations, and (2) concerns surrounding the validity of existing evaluation methodologies. To address these challenges, we present a novel framework for procedurally generating evaluations with LLMs by populating causal templates. Using our framework, we create a new social reasoning benchmark (BigToM) for LLMs which consists of 25 controls and 5,000 model-written evaluations. We find that human participants rate the quality of our benchmark higher than previous crowd-sourced evaluations and comparable to expert-written evaluations. Using BigToM, we evaluate the social reasoning capabilities of a variety of LLMs and compare model performances with human performance. Our results suggest that GPT4 has ToM capabilities that mirror human inference patterns, though less reliable, while other LLMs struggle.

Modern large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown remarkable performance on general language tasks but still struggle on complex reasoning tasks, which drives the research on cognitive behaviors of LLMs to explore human-like problem-solving strategies. Along this direction, one representative strategy is self-reflection, which asks an LLM to refine the solution with the feedback generated by itself iteratively. However, our study shows that such reflection-style methods suffer from the Degeneration-of-Thought (DoT) problem: once the LLM has established confidence in its solutions, it is unable to generate novel thoughts later through reflection even if its initial stance is incorrect. To address the DoT problem, we propose a Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) framework, in which multiple agents express their arguments in the state of "tit for tat" and a judge manages the debate process to obtain a final solution. Clearly, our MAD framework encourages divergent thinking in LLMs which would be helpful for tasks that require deep levels of contemplation. Experiment results on two challenging datasets, commonsense machine translation and counter-intuitive arithmetic reasoning, demonstrate the effectiveness of our MAD framework. Extensive analyses suggest that the adaptive break of debate and the modest level of "tit for tat" state are required for MAD to obtain good performance. Moreover, we find that LLMs might not be a fair judge if different LLMs are used for agents. Codes: https://github.com/Skytliang/Multi-Agents-Debate

This work stems from prior complementary observations on the dynamics of Chain-of-Thought (CoT): Large Language Models (LLMs) is shown latent planning of subsequent reasoning prior to CoT emergence, thereby diminishing the significance of explicit CoT; whereas CoT remains critical for tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. To deepen the understanding between LLM's internal states and its verbalized reasoning trajectories, we investigate the latent planning strength of LLMs, through our probing method, Tele-Lens, applying to hidden states across diverse task domains. Our empirical results indicate that LLMs exhibit a myopic horizon, primarily conducting incremental transitions without precise global planning. Leveraging this characteristic, we propose a hypothesis on enhancing uncertainty estimation of CoT, which we validate that a small subset of CoT positions can effectively represent the uncertainty of the entire path. We further underscore the significance of exploiting CoT dynamics, and demonstrate that automatic recognition of CoT bypass can be achieved without performance degradation. Our code, data and models are released at https://github.com/lxucs/tele-lens.

Large shared displays, such as digital whiteboards, are useful for supporting co-located team collaborations by helping members perform cognitive tasks such as brainstorming, organizing ideas, and making comparisons. While recent advancement in Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed AI support for these displays, most existing systems either only offer limited capabilities or diminish human control, neglecting the potential benefits of natural group dynamics. Our formative study identified cognitive challenges teams encounter, such as diverse ideation, knowledge sharing, mutual awareness, idea organization, and synchronization of live discussions with the external workspace. In response, we introduce LADICA, a large shared display interface that helps collaborative teams brainstorm, organize, and analyze ideas through multiple analytical lenses, while fostering mutual awareness of ideas and concepts. Furthermore, LADICA facilitates the real-time extraction of key information from verbal discussions and identifies relevant entities. A lab study confirmed LADICA's usability and usefulness.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized decision-making by breaking down complex problems into more manageable language sequences referred to as ``thoughts''. An effective thought design should consider three key perspectives: performance, efficiency, and flexibility. However, existing thought can at most exhibit two of these attributes. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel thought prompting approach called ``Everything of Thoughts'' (XoT) to defy the law of ``Penrose triangle of existing thought paradigms. XoT leverages pretrained reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to incorporate external domain knowledge into thoughts, thereby enhancing LLMs' capabilities and enabling them to generalize to unseen problems efficiently. Through the utilization of the MCTS-LLM collaborative thought revision framework, this approach autonomously produces high-quality comprehensive cognitive mappings with minimal LLM interactions. Additionally, XoT empowers LLMs to engage in unconstrained thinking, allowing for flexible cognitive mappings for problems with multiple solutions.

Building generalist embodied agents requires a unified system that can interpret multimodal goals, model environment dynamics, and execute reliable actions across diverse real-world tasks. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer strong semantic priors and cross-modal generalization, while world models (WMs) provide actionable latent dynamics for prediction and control. Their combination holds promise for open-ended embodied intelligence, yet introduces two key challenges: (1) establishing a tight coupling between the semantic intent from MLLMs and the dynamic state representations within the WM's latent space, and (2) achieving task-aware adaptability that supports multi-task learning and cross-environment generalization. To address these limitations, we propose BiTAgent, a task-aware dynamic joint framework that enables bidirectional coupling between MLLMs and WMs. BiTAgent establishes two complementary pathways: a forward path that injects MLLM representations into the WM's latent space for semantically guided imagination, and a backward path where WM-generated feedback refines the MLLM's semantic space via dense text-conditioned rewards. This bidirectional interaction is realized through three synergistic components: Task-Aware Dynamic Joint Learning, Task-Aware Behavior Learning, and MLLM-WM Joint Optimization, which together harmonize semantic reasoning and dynamic prediction. Extensive experiments across multi-task and cross-environment settings demonstrate superior stability and generalization over state-of-the-art baselines, marking a step toward open-ended embodied learning.

Mathematical reasoning is a cornerstone of artificial general intelligence and a primary benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While state-of-the-art models show promise, they often falter when faced with complex problems that demand deep conceptual understanding and intricate, multi-step deliberation. To address this challenge, we introduce JT-Math-8B, a series of open-source models comprising base, instruct, and thinking versions, built upon a systematic, multi-stage optimization framework. Our pre-training corpus is a high-quality, 210B-token dataset curated through a dedicated data pipeline that uses model-based validation to ensure quality and diversity. The Instruct Model is optimized for direct, concise answers through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and a GRPO-based reinforcement learning (RL) method. The Thinking Model is trained for complex problem-solving using a Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) approach, combining SFT with a novel, multi-stage RL curriculum that progressively increases task difficulty and context length up to 32K tokens. JT-Math-8B achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source models of similar size, surpassing prominent models like OpenAI's O1-mini and GPT-4o , and demonstrating superior performance on competition-level mathematics.

Recent advances in test-time scaling have led to the emergence of thinking LLMs that exhibit self-reflective behaviors and multi-step reasoning. While RL drives this self-improvement paradigm, a recent study (Gandhi et al., 2025) shows that RL alone does not truly instill these new reasoning abilities - it merely draws out behaviors already present in the base models. This raises a question: How can we train the models that don't exhibit such thinking behavior to develop it in the first place? To this end, we propose ThinkTuning, a GRPO-based interactive training approach where we augment the rollouts of a student model with the guidance from a teacher model. A simple idea from classroom practice inspires our method: a teacher poses a problem, lets the student try an answer, then gives corrective feedback -- enough to point the mind in the right direction and then show the solution. Each piece of feedback reshapes the student's thoughts, leading them to arrive at the correct solution. Similarly, we find that this type of implicit supervision through feedback from a teacher model of the same size improves the reasoning capabilities of the student model. In particular, on average, our method shows a 3.85% improvement over zero-shot baselines across benchmarks, and on MATH-500, AIME and GPQA-Diamond it shows 2.08%, 2.23% and 3.99% improvements over the vanilla-GRPO baseline. Source code is available at https://github.com/3rdAT/ThinkTuning.

Compressing long chain-of-thought (CoT) from large language models (LLMs) is an emerging strategy to improve the reasoning efficiency of LLMs. Despite its promising benefits, existing studies equally compress all thoughts within a long CoT, hindering more concise and effective reasoning. To this end, we first investigate the importance of different thoughts by examining their effectiveness and efficiency in contributing to reasoning through automatic long CoT chunking and Monte Carlo rollouts. Building upon the insights, we propose a theoretically bounded metric to jointly measure the effectiveness and efficiency of different thoughts. We then propose LongotimesShort, an efficient reasoning framework that enables two LLMs to collaboratively solve the problem: a long-thought LLM for more effectively generating important thoughts, while a short-thought LLM for efficiently generating remaining thoughts. Specifically, we begin by synthesizing a small amount of cold-start data to fine-tune LLMs for long-thought and short-thought reasoning styles, respectively. Furthermore, we propose a synergizing-oriented multi-turn reinforcement learning, focusing on the model self-evolution and collaboration between long-thought and short-thought LLMs. Experimental results show that our method enables Qwen2.5-7B and Llama3.1-8B to achieve comparable performance compared to DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B, while reducing token length by over 80% across the MATH500, AIME24/25, AMC23, and GPQA Diamond benchmarks. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/yasNing/Long-otimes-Short/.

Spoken Language Models (SLMs) are designed to take speech inputs and produce spoken responses. However, current SLMs lack the ability to perform an internal, unspoken thinking process before responding. In contrast, humans typically engage in complex mental reasoning internally, enabling them to communicate ideas clearly and concisely. Thus, integrating an unspoken thought process into SLMs is highly desirable. While naively generating a complete chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning before starting to talk can enable thinking for SLMs, this induces additional latency for the speech response, as the CoT reasoning can be arbitrarily long. To solve this issue, we propose Stitch, a novel generation method that alternates between the generation of unspoken reasoning chunks and spoken response chunks. Since the audio duration of a chunk of spoken response is much longer than the time to generate the tokens in a chunk of spoken response, we use the remaining free time to generate the unspoken reasoning tokens. When a chunk of audio is played to the user, the model continues to generate the next unspoken reasoning chunk, achieving simultaneous thinking and talking. Remarkably, Stitch matches the latency of baselines that cannot generate unspoken CoT by design while outperforming those baselines by 15% on math reasoning datasets; Stitch also performs equally well on non-reasoning datasets as those baseline models. Some animations and demonstrations are on the project page: https://d223302.github.io/STITCH.

Do brains and language models converge toward the same internal representations of the world? Recent years have seen a rise in studies of neural activations and model alignment. In this work, we review 25 fMRI-based studies published between 2023 and 2025 and explicitly confront their findings with two key hypotheses: (i) the Platonic Representation Hypothesis -- that as models scale and improve, they converge to a representation of the real world, and (ii) the Intermediate-Layer Advantage -- that intermediate (mid-depth) layers often encode richer, more generalizable features. Our findings provide converging evidence that models and brains may share abstract representational structures, supporting both hypotheses and motivating further research on brain-model alignment.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, particularly with the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) built on the transformer architecture, has redefined the capabilities of natural language processing. These models now exhibit remarkable performance across various language-related tasks, such as text generation, question answering, translation, and summarization, often rivaling human-like comprehension. More intriguingly, LLMs have demonstrated emergent abilities extending beyond their core functions, showing proficiency in tasks like commonsense reasoning, code generation, and arithmetic. This survey paper explores the foundational components, scaling mechanisms, and architectural strategies that drive these capabilities. Emphasizing models like GPT and LLaMA, we analyze the impact of exponential data and computational growth on LLM performance, while also addressing the trade-offs associated with scaling. We also examine LLM applications across sectors, such as healthcare, finance, education, and law, highlighting their adaptability and potential to solve domain-specific challenges. Central to this work are the questions of how LLMs generalize across diverse tasks, exhibit planning, and reasoning abilities, and whether these emergent abilities can be systematically elicited or enhanced. In particular, we provide some insights into the CoT (Chain of Thought) and PoT (Plan of Thought) abilities within LLMs, focusing on how pre-training data influences their emergence. Additionally, we investigate LLM-modulo frameworks that integrate external systems, allowing LLMs to handle complex, dynamic tasks. By analyzing these factors, this paper aims to foster the ongoing discussion on the capabilities and limits of LLMs, promoting their responsible development and application in novel and increasingly complex environments.

To increase social bonding with interlocutors, humans naturally acquire the ability to respond appropriately in a given situation by considering which conversational skill is most suitable for the response - a process we call skill-of-mind. For large language model (LLM)-based conversational agents, planning appropriate conversational skills, as humans do, is challenging due to the complexity of social dialogue, especially in interactive scenarios. To address this, we propose a skill-of-mind-annotated conversation dataset, named Multifaceted Skill-of-Mind, which includes multi-turn and multifaceted conversational skills across various interactive scenarios (e.g., long-term, counseling, task-oriented), grounded in diverse social contexts (e.g., demographics, persona, rules of thumb). This dataset consists of roughly 100K conversations. Using this dataset, we introduce a new family of skill-of-mind-infused LLMs, named Thanos, with model sizes of 1B, 3B, and 8B parameters. With extensive experiments, these models successfully demonstrate the skill-of-mind process and exhibit strong generalizability in inferring multifaceted skills across a variety of domains. Moreover, we show that Thanos significantly enhances the quality of responses generated by LLM-based conversational agents and promotes prosocial behavior in human evaluations.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to others, is fundamental for human social intelligence and a critical capability for advanced Artificial Intelligence. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance on ToM benchmarks, raising the question: Do these benchmarks necessitate explicit human-like reasoning processes, or can models succeed through alternative strategies? We investigate this question empirically by applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to LLMs of varying scales (0.5B to 7B parameters) and evaluating them across multiple ToM datasets. Our results reveal a scale-dependent impact of RL: while RL significantly improves accuracy and fosters high-quality, interpretable, and transferable belief-tracking reasoning in larger models (7B), it leads to "reasoning collapse" in smaller models (leq3B), where high accuracy and generalization ability are achieved via drastically shortened, less meaningful responses. Surprisingly, further SFT achieves competitive and generalizable performance across these benchmarks, often matching or exceeding RL models in accuracy, despite not being explicitly trained to produce structured reasoning traces. These findings highlight a critical discrepancy between benchmark accuracy and the nature of learned reasoning. Our work suggests that current ToM benchmarks may be solvable without requiring the explicit, human-like simulation of mental states they were designed to probe. LLMs, particularly when scale is limited or training signals focus solely on output correctness, may leverage alternative rules effective for benchmark data structures.

World Model, the supposed algorithmic surrogate of the real-world environment which biological agents experience with and act upon, has been an emerging topic in recent years because of the rising needs to develop virtual agents with artificial (general) intelligence. There has been much debate on what a world model really is, how to build it, how to use it, and how to evaluate it. In this essay, starting from the imagination in the famed Sci-Fi classic Dune, and drawing inspiration from the concept of "hypothetical thinking" in psychology literature, we offer critiques of several schools of thoughts on world modeling, and argue the primary goal of a world model to be simulating all actionable possibilities of the real world for purposeful reasoning and acting. Building on the critiques, we propose a new architecture for a general-purpose world model, based on hierarchical, multi-level, and mixed continuous/discrete representations, and a generative and self-supervision learning framework, with an outlook of a Physical, Agentic, and Nested (PAN) AGI system enabled by such a model.

Although pre-trained language models~(PLMs) have recently advanced the research progress in mathematical reasoning, they are not specially designed as a capable multi-task solver, suffering from high cost for multi-task deployment (\eg a model copy for a task) and inferior performance on complex mathematical problems in practical applications. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose JiuZhang~2.0, a unified Chinese PLM specially for multi-task mathematical problem solving. Our idea is to maintain a moderate-sized model and employ the cross-task knowledge sharing to improve the model capacity in a multi-task setting. Specially, we construct a Mixture-of-Experts~(MoE) architecture for modeling mathematical text, so as to capture the common mathematical knowledge across tasks. For optimizing the MoE architecture, we design multi-task continual pre-training and multi-task fine-tuning strategies for multi-task adaptation. These training strategies can effectively decompose the knowledge from the task data and establish the cross-task sharing via expert networks. In order to further improve the general capacity of solving different complex tasks, we leverage large language models~(LLMs) as complementary models to iteratively refine the generated solution by our PLM, via in-context learning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive accomplishments in both reasoning and planning, their abilities in multi-agent collaborations remains largely unexplored. This study evaluates LLM-based agents in a multi-agent cooperative text game with Theory of Mind (ToM) inference tasks, comparing their performance with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) and planning-based baselines. We observed evidence of emergent collaborative behaviors and high-order Theory of Mind capabilities among LLM-based agents. Our results reveal limitations in LLM-based agents' planning optimization due to systematic failures in managing long-horizon contexts and hallucination about the task state. We explore the use of explicit belief state representations to mitigate these issues, finding that it enhances task performance and the accuracy of ToM inferences for LLM-based agents.

Human problem-solving is never the repetition of a single mindset, by which we mean a distinct mode of cognitive processing. When tackling a specific task, we do not rely on a single mindset; instead, we integrate multiple mindsets within the single solution process. However, existing LLM reasoning methods fall into a common trap: they apply the same fixed mindset across all steps, overlooking that different stages of solving the same problem require fundamentally different mindsets. This single-minded assumption prevents models from reaching the next level of intelligence. To address this limitation, we propose Chain of Mindset (CoM), a training-free agentic framework that enables step-level adaptive mindset orchestration. CoM decomposes reasoning into four functionally heterogeneous mindsets: Spatial, Convergent, Divergent, and Algorithmic. A Meta-Agent dynamically selects the optimal mindset based on the evolving reasoning state, while a bidirectional Context Gate filters cross-module information flow to maintain effectiveness and efficiency. Experiments across six challenging benchmarks spanning mathematics, code generation, scientific QA, and spatial reasoning demonstrate that CoM achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the strongest baseline by 4.96\% and 4.72\% in overall accuracy on Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct and Gemini-2.0-Flash, while balancing reasoning efficiency. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset}.

Recent studies show evidence for emergent cognitive abilities in Large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). The increasing cognitive alignment of these models has made them candidates for cognitive science theories. Prior research into the emergent cognitive abilities of PLMs has largely been path-independent to model training, i.e., has focused on the final model weights and not the intermediate steps. However, building plausible models of human cognition using PLMs would benefit from considering the developmental alignment of their performance during training to the trajectories of children's thinking. Guided by psychometric tests of human intelligence, we choose four sets of tasks to investigate the alignment of ten popular families of PLMs and evaluate their available intermediate and final training steps. These tasks are Numerical ability, Linguistic abilities, Conceptual understanding, and Fluid reasoning. We find a striking regularity: regardless of model size, the developmental trajectories of PLMs consistently exhibit a window of maximal alignment to human cognitive development. Before that window, training appears to endow "blank slate" models with the requisite structure to be poised to rapidly learn from experience. After that window, training appears to serve the engineering goal of reducing loss but not the scientific goal of increasing alignment with human cognition.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), which autonomously produce a reasoning Chain of Thought (CoT) before producing final responses, offer a promising approach to interpreting and monitoring model behaviors. Inspired by the observation that certain CoT patterns -- e.g., ``Wait, did I miss anything?'' -- consistently emerge across tasks, we explore whether LRMs exhibit human-like cognitive habits. Building on Habits of Mind, a well-established framework of cognitive habits associated with successful human problem-solving, we introduce CogTest, a principled benchmark designed to evaluate LRMs' cognitive habits. CogTest includes 16 cognitive habits, each instantiated with 25 diverse tasks, and employs an evidence-first extraction method to ensure reliable habit identification. With CogTest, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 16 widely used LLMs (13 LRMs and 3 non-reasoning ones). Our findings reveal that LRMs, unlike conventional LLMs, not only exhibit human-like habits but also adaptively deploy them according to different tasks. Finer-grained analyses further uncover patterns of similarity and difference in LRMs' cognitive habit profiles, particularly certain inter-family similarity (e.g., Qwen-3 models and DeepSeek-R1). Extending the study to safety-related tasks, we observe that certain habits, such as Taking Responsible Risks, are strongly associated with the generation of harmful responses. These findings suggest that studying persistent behavioral patterns in LRMs' CoTs is a valuable step toward deeper understanding of LLM misbehavior. The code is available at: https://github.com/jianshuod/CogTest.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer mental states in others, is pivotal for human social cognition. Existing evaluations of ToM in LLMs are largely limited to English, neglecting the linguistic diversity that shapes human cognition. This limitation raises a critical question: can LLMs exhibit Multilingual Theory of Mind, which is the capacity to reason about mental states across diverse linguistic contexts? To address this gap, we present XToM, a rigorously validated multilingual benchmark that evaluates ToM across five languages and incorporates diverse, contextually rich task scenarios. Using XToM, we systematically evaluate LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek R1), revealing a pronounced dissonance: while models excel in multilingual language understanding, their ToM performance varies across languages. Our findings expose limitations in LLMs' ability to replicate human-like mentalizing across linguistic contexts.

Real-time Spoken Language Models (SLMs) struggle to leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning due to the prohibitive latency of generating the entire thought process sequentially. Enabling SLMs to think while speaking, similar to humans, is attracting increasing attention. We present, for the first time, Mind-Paced Speaking (MPS), a brain-inspired framework that enables high-fidelity, real-time reasoning. Similar to how humans utilize distinct brain regions for thinking and responding, we propose a novel dual-brain approach, employing a "Formulation Brain" for high-level reasoning to pace and guide a separate "Articulation Brain" for fluent speech generation. This division of labor eliminates mode-switching, preserving the integrity of the reasoning process. Experiments show that MPS significantly outperforms existing think-while-speaking methods and achieves reasoning performance comparable to models that pre-compute the full CoT before speaking, while drastically reducing latency. Under a zero-latency configuration, the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 92.8% on the mathematical reasoning task Spoken-MQA and attains a score of 82.5 on the speech conversation task URO-Bench. Our work effectively bridges the gap between high-quality reasoning and real-time interaction.

Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) tackles the long-standing problem of endowing agents with skills that generalize across a variety of problems. To this end, sharing representations plays a fundamental role in capturing both unique and common characteristics of the tasks. Tasks may exhibit similarities in terms of skills, objects, or physical properties while leveraging their representations eases the achievement of a universal policy. Nevertheless, the pursuit of learning a shared set of diverse representations is still an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for representation learning in MTRL that encapsulates common structures among the tasks using orthogonal representations to promote diversity. Our method, named Mixture Of Orthogonal Experts (MOORE), leverages a Gram-Schmidt process to shape a shared subspace of representations generated by a mixture of experts. When task-specific information is provided, MOORE generates relevant representations from this shared subspace. We assess the effectiveness of our approach on two MTRL benchmarks, namely MiniGrid and MetaWorld, showing that MOORE surpasses related baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art result on MetaWorld.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks. However, the mechanisms by which these models encode tasks of varying complexities remain poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that LLMs process concepts of varying complexities in different layers, introducing the idea of "Concept Depth" to suggest that more complex concepts are typically acquired in deeper layers. Specifically, we categorize concepts based on their level of abstraction, defining them in the order of increasing complexity within factual, emotional, and inferential tasks. We conduct extensive probing experiments using layer-wise representations across various LLM families (Gemma, LLaMA, QWen) on various datasets spanning the three domains of tasks. Our findings reveal that models could efficiently conduct probing for simpler tasks in shallow layers, and more complex tasks typically necessitate deeper layers for accurate understanding. Additionally, we examine how external factors, such as adding noise to the input and quantizing the model weights, might affect layer-wise representations. Our findings suggest that these factors can impede the development of a conceptual understanding of LLMs until deeper layers are explored. We hope that our proposed concept and experimental insights will enhance the understanding of the mechanisms underlying LLMs. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Luckfort/CD.

Mental health disorders are one of the most serious diseases in the world. Most people with such a disease lack access to adequate care, which highlights the importance of training models for the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders. However, in the mental health domain, privacy concerns limit the accessibility of personalized treatment data, making it challenging to build powerful models. In this paper, we introduce MentalArena, a self-play framework to train language models by generating domain-specific personalized data, where we obtain a better model capable of making a personalized diagnosis and treatment (as a therapist) and providing information (as a patient). To accurately model human-like mental health patients, we devise Symptom Encoder, which simulates a real patient from both cognition and behavior perspectives. To address intent bias during patient-therapist interactions, we propose Symptom Decoder to compare diagnosed symptoms with encoded symptoms, and dynamically manage the dialogue between patient and therapist according to the identified deviations. We evaluated MentalArena against 6 benchmarks, including biomedicalQA and mental health tasks, compared to 6 advanced models. Our models, fine-tuned on both GPT-3.5 and Llama-3-8b, significantly outperform their counterparts, including GPT-4o. We hope that our work can inspire future research on personalized care. Code is available in https://github.com/Scarelette/MentalArena/tree/main

The surprising ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform well on complex reasoning with only few-shot chain-of-thought prompts is believed to emerge only in very large-scale models (100+ billion parameters). We show that such abilities can, in fact, be distilled down from GPT-3.5 (ge 175B) to T5 variants (le 11B). We propose model specialization, to specialize the model's ability towards a target task. The hypothesis is that large models (commonly viewed as larger than 100B) have strong modeling power, but are spread on a large spectrum of tasks. Small models (commonly viewed as smaller than 10B) have limited model capacity, but if we concentrate their capacity on a specific target task, the model can achieve a decent improved performance. We use multi-step math reasoning as our testbed because it is a very typical emergent ability. We show two important aspects of model abilities: (1). there exists a very complex balance/ tradeoff between language models' multi-dimensional abilities; (2). by paying the price of decreased generic ability, we can clearly lift up the scaling curve of models smaller than 10B towards a specialized multi-step math reasoning ability. We further give comprehensive discussions about important design choices for better generalization, including the tuning data format, the start model checkpoint, and a new model selection method. We hope our practice and discoveries can serve as an important attempt towards specialized smaller models in the new research paradigm set by LLMs.

Language Models (LMs) are being proposed for mental health applications where the heightened risk of adverse outcomes means predictive performance may not be a sufficient litmus test of a model's utility in clinical practice. A model that can be trusted for practice should have a correspondence between explanation and clinical determination, yet no prior research has examined the attention fidelity of these models and their effect on ground truth explanations. We introduce an evaluation design that focuses on the robustness and explainability of LMs in identifying Wellness Dimensions (WDs). We focus on two existing mental health and well-being datasets: (a) Multi-label Classification-based MultiWD, and (b) WellXplain for evaluating attention mechanism veracity against expert-labeled explanations. The labels are based on Halbert Dunn's theory of wellness, which gives grounding to our evaluation. We reveal four surprising results about LMs/LLMs: (1) Despite their human-like capabilities, GPT-3.5/4 lag behind RoBERTa, and MedAlpaca, a fine-tuned LLM on WellXplain fails to deliver any remarkable improvements in performance or explanations. (2) Re-examining LMs' predictions based on a confidence-oriented loss function reveals a significant performance drop. (3) Across all LMs/LLMs, the alignment between attention and explanations remains low, with LLMs scoring a dismal 0.0. (4) Most mental health-specific LMs/LLMs overlook domain-specific knowledge and undervalue explanations, causing these discrepancies. This study highlights the need for further research into their consistency and explanations in mental health and well-being.

Eleven Large Language Models (LLMs) were assessed using a custom-made battery of false-belief tasks, considered a gold standard in testing Theory of Mind (ToM) in humans. The battery included 640 prompts spread across 40 diverse tasks, each one including a false-belief scenario, three closely matched true-belief control scenarios, and the reversed versions of all four. To solve a single task, a model needed to correctly answer 16 prompts across all eight scenarios. Smaller and older models solved no tasks; GPT-3-davinci-003 (from November 2022) and ChatGPT-3.5-turbo (from March 2023) solved 20% of the tasks; ChatGPT-4 (from June 2023) solved 75% of the tasks, matching the performance of six-year-old children observed in past studies. We explore the potential interpretation of these findings, including the intriguing possibility that ToM, previously considered exclusive to humans, may have spontaneously emerged as a byproduct of LLMs' improving language skills.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently updated due to data or architecture changes to improve their performance. When updating models, developers often focus on increasing overall performance metrics with less emphasis on being compatible with previous model versions. However, users often build a mental model of the functionality and capabilities of a particular machine learning model they are interacting with. They have to adapt their mental model with every update -- a draining task that can lead to user dissatisfaction. In practice, fine-tuned downstream task adapters rely on pretrained LLM base models. When these base models are updated, these user-facing downstream task models experience instance regression or negative flips -- previously correct instances are now predicted incorrectly. This happens even when the downstream task training procedures remain identical. Our work aims to provide seamless model updates to a user in two ways. First, we provide evaluation metrics for a notion of compatibility to prior model versions, specifically for generative tasks but also applicable for discriminative tasks. We observe regression and inconsistencies between different model versions on a diverse set of tasks and model updates. Second, we propose a training strategy to minimize the number of inconsistencies in model updates, involving training of a compatibility model that can enhance task fine-tuned language models. We reduce negative flips -- instances where a prior model version was correct, but a new model incorrect -- by up to 40% from Llama 1 to Llama 2.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the power of reasoning through self-generated chains of thought. Multiple reasoning agents can collaborate to raise joint reasoning quality above individual outcomes. However, such agents typically interact in a turn-based manner, trading increased latency for improved quality. In this paper, we propose Group Think--a single LLM that acts as multiple concurrent reasoning agents, or thinkers. With shared visibility into each other's partial generation progress, Group Think introduces a new concurrent-reasoning paradigm in which multiple reasoning trajectories adapt dynamically to one another at the token level. For example, a reasoning thread may shift its generation mid-sentence upon detecting that another thread is better positioned to continue. This fine-grained, token-level collaboration enables Group Think to reduce redundant reasoning and improve quality while achieving significantly lower latency. Moreover, its concurrent nature allows for efficient utilization of idle computational resources, making it especially suitable for edge inference, where very small batch size often underutilizes local~GPUs. We give a simple and generalizable modification that enables any existing LLM to perform Group Think on a local GPU. We also present an evaluation strategy to benchmark reasoning latency and empirically demonstrate latency improvements using open-source LLMs that were not explicitly trained for Group Think. We hope this work paves the way for future LLMs to exhibit more sophisticated and more efficient collaborative behavior for higher quality generation.

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) and their capacity to simulate human cognition and behavior has given rise to LLM-based frameworks and tools that are evaluated and applied based on their ability to perform tasks traditionally performed by humans, namely those involving cognition, decision-making, and social interaction. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of such human-centric LLM capabilities, focusing on their performance in both individual tasks (where an LLM acts as a stand-in for a single human) and collective tasks (where multiple LLMs coordinate to mimic group dynamics). We first evaluate LLM competencies across key areas including reasoning, perception, and social cognition, comparing their abilities to human-like skills. Then, we explore real-world applications of LLMs in human-centric domains such as behavioral science, political science, and sociology, assessing their effectiveness in replicating human behaviors and interactions. Finally, we identify challenges and future research directions, such as improving LLM adaptability, emotional intelligence, and cultural sensitivity, while addressing inherent biases and enhancing frameworks for human-AI collaboration. This survey aims to provide a foundational understanding of LLMs from a human-centric perspective, offering insights into their current capabilities and potential for future development.

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information. Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour. Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4%-7%. Our findings demonstrate the importance for practitioners to evaluate model tendency to hallucinate rather than read, and show that our mitigation strategy encourages generalization to evolving information (i.e., time-dependent queries). To encourage these practices, we have released our framework for generating knowledge conflicts.

Large Language Models, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (aka. GPT-3), have been developed to understand language through the analysis of extensive text data, allowing them to identify patterns and connections between words. While LLMs have demonstrated impressive performance across various text-related tasks, they encounter challenges in tasks associated with reasoning. To address this challenge, Chain of Thought(CoT) prompting method has been proposed as a means to enhance LLMs' proficiency in complex reasoning tasks like solving math word problems and answering questions based on logical argumentative reasoning. The primary aim of this research is to assess how well four language models can grade reflective essays of third-year medical students. The assessment will specifically target the evaluation of critical thinking skills using CoT prompting. The research will provide the following contributions; to introduce and educate on the process of instructing models to evaluate reflective essays from a dataset they have not been previously trained on; to illustrate the use of CoT prompting as an instructional approach for training large models to carry out particular tasks. Our results suggest that among all the models, Llama-7b performs the least effectively, displaying the highest mean squared error. Conversely, ChatGPT emerges as the superior model, boasting a higher Cohen kappa score value of 0.53. Lastly, it's important to note that the selected models do prioritise user privacy by allowing users to delete their own conducted conversations.

The escalating debate on AI's capabilities warrants developing reliable metrics to assess machine "intelligence". Recently, many anecdotal examples were used to suggest that newer large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibit Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM); however, prior work reached conflicting conclusions regarding those abilities. We investigate the extent of LLMs' N-ToM through an extensive evaluation on 6 tasks and find that while LLMs exhibit certain N-ToM abilities, this behavior is far from being robust. We further examine the factors impacting performance on N-ToM tasks and discover that LLMs struggle with adversarial examples, indicating reliance on shallow heuristics rather than robust ToM abilities. We caution against drawing conclusions from anecdotal examples, limited benchmark testing, and using human-designed psychological tests to evaluate models.

Large Language Model can reasonably understand and generate human expressions but may lack of thorough thinking and reasoning mechanisms. Recently there have been several studies which enhance the thinking ability of language models but most of them are not data-driven or training-based. In this paper, we are motivated by the cognitive mechanism in the natural world, and design a novel model architecture called TaS which allows it to first consider the thoughts and then express the response based upon the query. We design several pipelines to annotate or generate the thought contents from prompt-response samples, then add language heads in a middle layer which behaves as the thinking layer. We train the language model by the thoughts-augmented data and successfully let the thinking layer automatically generate reasonable thoughts and finally output more reasonable responses. Both qualitative examples and quantitative results validate the effectiveness and performance of TaS. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TadE.