Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Advancing Artificial Intelligence through Theory of Mind

This volume includes a selection of papers presented at the Workshop on Advancing Artificial Intelligence through Theory of Mind held at AAAI 2025 in Philadelphia US on 3rd March 2025. The purpose of this volume is to provide an open access and curated anthology for the ToM and AI research community.

Exploring Cognitive Attributes in Financial Decision-Making

Cognitive attributes are fundamental to metacognition, shaping how individuals process information, evaluate choices, and make decisions. To develop metacognitive artificial intelligence (AI) models that reflect human reasoning, it is essential to account for the attributes that influence reasoning patterns and decision-maker behavior, often leading to different or even conflicting choices. This makes it crucial to incorporate cognitive attributes in designing AI models that align with human decision-making processes, especially in high-stakes domains such as finance, where decisions have significant real-world consequences. However, existing AI alignment research has primarily focused on value alignment, often overlooking the role of individual cognitive attributes that distinguish decision-makers. To address this issue, this paper (1) analyzes the literature on cognitive attributes, (2) establishes five criteria for defining them, and (3) categorizes 19 domain-specific cognitive attributes relevant to financial decision-making. These three components provide a strong basis for developing AI systems that accurately reflect and align with human decision-making processes in financial contexts.

How Well Can Vison-Language Models Understand Humans' Intention? An Open-ended Theory of Mind Question Evaluation Benchmark

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks; However, their ability to perform Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks such as accurately inferring human intentions, beliefs, and other mental states remains underexplored. In this work, we propose an open-ended question framework to comprehensively evaluate VLMs' performance across diverse categories of ToM tasks. We curated and annotated a benchmark dataset composed of 30 images. We then assessed the performance of four VLMs of varying sizes on this dataset. Our experimental results show that the GPT-4 model outperformed all others, with only one smaller model, GPT-4o-mini, achieving comparable performance. Additionally, we observed that VLMs often struggle to accurately infer intentions in complex scenarios such as bullying or cheating. Moreover, our findings also reveal that smaller models can sometimes infer correct intentions despite relying on incorrect visual cues.

What's meant by explainable model: A Scoping Review

We often see the term explainable in the titles of papers that describe applications based on artificial intelligence (AI). However, the literature in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) indicates that explanations in XAI are application- and domain-specific, hence requiring evaluation whenever they are employed to explain a model that makes decisions for a specific application problem. Additionally, the literature reveals that the performance of post-hoc methods, particularly feature attribution methods, varies substantially hinting that they do not represent a solution to AI explainability. Therefore, when using XAI methods, the quality and suitability of their information outputs should be evaluated within the specific application. For these reasons, we used a scoping review methodology to investigate papers that apply AI models and adopt methods to generate post-hoc explanations while referring to said models as explainable. This paper investigates whether the term explainable model is adopted by authors under the assumption that incorporating a post-hoc XAI method suffices to characterize a model as explainable. To inspect this problem, our review analyzes whether these papers conducted evaluations. We found that 81% of the application papers that refer to their approaches as an explainable model do not conduct any form of evaluation on the XAI method they used.