Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models
Natalie Shapira, Mosh Levy, Seyed Hossein Alavi, Xuhui Zhou, Yejin Choi, Yoav Goldberg, Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz
Abstract
The escalating debate on AI’s capabilities warrants developing reliable metrics to assess machine “intelligence.” Recently, many anecdotal examples were used to suggest that newer Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibit Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM); however, prior work reached conflicting conclusions regarding those abilities. We investigate the extent of LLMs’ N-ToM through an extensive evaluation of 6 tasks and find that while LLMs exhibit certain N-ToM abilities, this behavior is far from being robust. We further examine the factors impacting performance on N-ToM tasks and discover that LLMs struggle with adversarial examples, indicating reliance on shallow heuristics rather than robust ToM abilities. We caution against drawing conclusions from anecdotal examples, limited benchmark testing, and using human-designed psychological tests to evaluate models.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.eacl-long.138
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St. Julian’s, Malta
- Editors:
- Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2257–2273
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.138
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Natalie Shapira, Mosh Levy, Seyed Hossein Alavi, Xuhui Zhou, Yejin Choi, Yoav Goldberg, Maarten Sap, and Vered Shwartz. 2024. Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2257–2273, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models (Shapira et al., EACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2024.eacl-long.138.pdf