Theory of Mind (ToM)—the cognitive ability to reason about mental states of ourselves and others, is the foundation of social interaction. Although ToM comes naturally to humans, it poses a significant challenge to even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to the complex logical chains in ToM reasoning, especially in higher-order ToM questions, simply utilizing reasoning methods like Chain of Thought (CoT) will not improve the ToM capabilities of LLMs. We present TimeToM, which constructs a temporal space and uses it as the foundation to improve the ToM capabilities of LLMs in multiple scenarios. Specifically, within the temporal space, we construct Temporal Belief State Chain (TBSC) for each character and inspired by the cognition perspective of the social world model, we divide TBSC into self-world beliefs and social world beliefs, aligning with first-order ToM (first-order beliefs) and higher-order ToM (higher-order beliefs) questions, respectively. Moreover, we design a novel tool-belief solver that, by considering belief communication between characters in temporal space, can transform a character’s higher-order beliefs into another character’s first-order beliefs under belief communication period.

Understanding sentiment is arguably an advanced and important capability of AI agents in the physical world. In previous works, many efforts have been devoted to individual sentiment subtasks, without considering interrelated sentiment knowledge among these subtasks. Although some recent works model multiple sentiment subtasks in a unified manner, they merely simply combine these subtasks without deeply exploring the hierarchical relationships among subtasks. In this paper, we introduce GSA-7B, an open-source large language model specific to the sentiment domain. Specifically, we deeply explore the hierarchical relationships between sentiment subtasks, proposing progressive sentiment reasoning benchmark and progressive task instructions. Subsequently, we use Llama2-7B as the backbone model and propose parameter-efficient progressive tuning paradigm which is implemented by constructing chain of LoRA, resulting in the creation of GSA-7B. Experimental results show that GSA-7B as a unified model performs well across all datasets in the progressive sentiment reasoning benchmark. Additionally, under the few-shot setting, GSA-7B also exhibits good generalization ability for sentiment subtasks and datasets that were not encountered during its training phase.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit robust problem-solving capabilities for diverse tasks. However, most LLM-based agents are designed as specific task solvers with sophisticated prompt engineering, rather than agents capable of learning and evolving through interactions. These task solvers necessitate manually crafted prompts to inform task rules and regulate LLM behaviors, inherently incapacitating to address complex dynamic scenarios e.g., large interactive games. In light of this, we propose Agent-Pro: an LLM-based Agent with Policy-level Reflection and Optimization that can learn a wealth of expertise from interactive experiences and progressively elevate its behavioral policy. Specifically, it involves a dynamic belief generation and reflection process for policy evolution. Rather than action-level reflection, Agent-Pro iteratively reflects on past trajectories and beliefs, “fine-tuning” its irrational beliefs for a better policy. Moreover, a depth-first search is employed for policy optimization, ensuring continual enhancement in policy payoffs. Agent-Pro is evaluated across two games: Blackjack and Texas Hold’em, outperforming vanilla LLM and specialized models. Our results show Agent-Pro can learn and evolve in complex and dynamic scenes, which also benefits numerous LLM-based applications.

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has attracted increasing attention in natural language processing community. Previous work commonly first extract semantic-view features via fine-tuning PLMs, then models context-view features based on the obtained semantic-view features by various graph neural networks. However, it is difficult to fully model interaction between utterances simply through a graph neural network and the features at semantic-view and context-view are not well aligned. Moreover, the previous parametric learning paradigm struggle to learn the patterns of tail class given fewer instances. To this end, we treat the pre-trained conversation model as a prior knowledge base and from which we elicit correlations between utterances by a probing procedure. And we adopt supervised contrastive learning to align semantic-view and context-view features, these two views of features work together in a complementary manner, contributing to ERC from distinct perspectives. Meanwhile, we propose a new semi-parametric paradigm of inferencing through memorization to solve the recognition problem of tail class samples. We consistently achieve state-of-the-art results on four widely used benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed multi-view feature alignment and memorization.