A Survey of Theory of Mind in Large Language Models: Evaluations, Representations, and Safety Risks

Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to others and predict their behaviour, is fundamental to social intelligence. In this paper, we survey studies evaluating behavioural and representational ToM in LLMs, identify important safety risks from advanced LLM ToM capabilities, and suggest several research directions for effective evaluation and mitigation of these risks.