@inproceedings{gong-etal-2026-theory,
    title = "Does Theory of Mind Improvement Really Benefit Human-{AI} Interactions? Empirical Findings from Interactive Evaluations",
    author = "Gong, Nanxu  and
      Chen, Zixin  and
      Li, Haotian  and
      Zhao, Zishu  and
      Lian, Jianxun  and
      Qu, Huamin  and
      Fu, Yanjie  and
      Xie, Xing",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2125/",
    pages = "42831--42860",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Improving the Theory of Mind (ToM) capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for effective social interactions between these AI models and humans. However, the existing benchmarks often measure ToM capability improvement through story-reading, multiple-choice questions from a third-person perspective, while ignoring the first-person, dynamic, and open-ended nature of human-AI (HAI) interactions. To directly examine how ToM improvement techniques benefit HAI interactions, we first proposed the new paradigm of interactive ToM evaluation with both perspective and metric shifts. Next, following the paradigm, we conducted a systematic study of four representative ToM enhancement techniques using both four real-world datasets and a user study, covering both goal-oriented tasks (e.g., coding, math) and experience-oriented tasks (e.g., counseling). Our findings reveal that improvements on static benchmarks do not always translate to better performance in dynamic HAI interactions. This paper offers critical insights into ToM evaluation, showing the necessity of interaction-based assessments in developing next-generation, socially aware LLMs for HAI symbiosis."
}