Mind the Perspective: Let's Reason Recursively for Theory of Mind

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 10 Jun 2026] Mind the Perspective: Let's Reason Recursively for Theory of Mind Chao Lei, Guang Hu, Meng Yang, Yanbei Jiang, Nir Lipovetzky Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning requires inferring agents' beliefs from partial and asymmetric observations, which remains an open challenge for LLMs. Existing prompting-based approaches improve ToM reasoning through observable-event filtering or temporal belief chains, without explicitly modeling nested beliefs. We introduce RecToM, an inference-time framework for ToM reasoning that models nested beliefs via recursive perspective construction. RecToM constructs each character perspective from the preceding character perspective along the character chain specified by the question, reducing higher-order belief questions to actual-world questions within the final constructed perspective. We further provide a KD45 analysis showing that RecToM's perspective construction induces a well-formed belief modality beyond simple event filtering. Experiments on ToM benchmarks, including Hi-ToM, Big-ToM, and FanToM, across multiple LLM backbones show that RecToM consistently outperforms recent advanced approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Notably, RecToM reaches 100\% accuracy on Hi-ToM with GPT-5.4 and Qwen3.5, a benchmark requiring higher-order ToM reasoning. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.11724 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.11724v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.11724 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Chao Lei [view email] [v1] Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:58:24 UTC (431 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)