ToM-LM: Delegating Theory of Mind Reasoning to External Symbolic Executors in Large Language Models

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability of individuals to attribute mental states to others. While LLMs have shown some promise with ToM ability, they still struggle with complex ToM reasoning. Our approach leverages an external symbolic executor, specifically the SMCDEL model checker, and fine-tuning to improve the ToM reasoning ability of LLMs. In our approach, an LLM is first fine-tuned through pairs of natural language and symbolic formulation representation of ToM problems and is then instructed to generate the symbolic formulation with a one-shot in-context example. The generated symbolic formulation is then executed by the SMCDEL model checker to perform transparent and verifiable ToM reasoning and give the final result. We demonstrate that our approach, ToM-LM, shows a significant improvement over all the constructed baselines. Our study proposes a novel view about externalizing a particular component of ToM reasoning, mainly reasoning about beliefs, and suggests generalizing it to other aspects of ToM reasoning.