Theory of Mind in Large Language Models (LLMs)

Seminar Description

This seminar examines whether and how large language models exhibit theory of mind: the capacity to reason about others' beliefs, desires, intentions, knowledge, and perspectives. We will begin by introducing theory of mind from cognitive psychology, including classic notions such as false belief reasoning, perspective taking, and mental state attribution. We will then translate these ideas into the context of language models, asking what it means for an LLM to model another mind through text prediction, dialogue, and social reasoning.

Requirements: Participants are expected to have a basic understanding of large language models, including concepts such as pretraining, prompting, instruction tuning, and evaluation benchmarks.