UniToMBench: Integrating Perspective-Taking to Improve Theory of Mind in LLMs

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:this https URL.

@article{thiyagarajan2025_2506.09450,
  title={ UniToMBench: Integrating Perspective-Taking to Improve Theory of Mind in LLMs },
  author={ Prameshwar Thiyagarajan and Vaishnavi Parimi and Shamant Sai and Soumil Garg and Zhangir Meirbek and Nitin Yarlagadda and Kevin Zhu and Chris Kim },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.09450},
  year={ 2025 }
}