CoSToM: Causal-oriented Steering for Intrinsic Theory-of-Mind Alignment in Large Language Models

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission4260 Authors

Keywords: Theory of Mind, Dialogue Agents, LLM Interpretability and Alignment

Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to others, is a hallmark of social intelligence. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate promising performance on standard ToM benchmarks, we observe that they often fail to generalize to complex task-specific scenarios, relying heavily on prompt scaffolding to mimic reasoning. The critical misalignment between the internal knowledge and external behavior raises a fundamental question: Do LLMs truly posses intrinsic cognition, and can they externalize this internal knowledge into stable, high-quality behaviors? To answer this, we introduce CoSToM (Causal-oriented Steering for ToM alignment), a framework that transitions from mechanistic interpretation to active intervention. First, we employ causal tracing to map the internal distribution of ToM features, empirically uncovering the internal layers' characteristics in encoding fundamental ToM semantics. Building on this insight, we implement a lightweight alignment framework via targeted activation steering within these ToM-critical layers. Experiments demonstrate that CoSToM significantly enhances human-like social reasoning capabilities and downstream dialogue quality.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Dialogue and Interactive Systems

Research Area Keywords: commonsense reasoning, grounded dialog, dialogue state tracking, task-oriented

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 4260