OSCToM: RL-Guided Adversarial Generation for High-Order Theory of Mind

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on many language tasks, but their Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning is still uneven in complex social settings. Existing benchmarks, including ExploreToM, do not always test the recursive beliefs and information asymmetries that make these settings difficult. This paper presents OSCToM (Observer-Self Conflict Theory of Mind), an approach for modeling nested belief conflicts in LLM-based ToM tasks. The key case is one in which an observer's view of another agent conflicts with the observer's own belief state. Such cases go beyond simple perspective-taking and require recursive, multi-layered reasoning. OSCToM combines reinforcement learning (RL), an extended domain-specific language, and compositional surrogate models to generate observer-self conflicts. In our experiments, OSCToM-8B gives the best overall result among the systems tested. It improves on the reported ExploreToM results on FANToM and remains competitive on Hi-ToM and BigToM. On the information-asymmetric FANToM benchmark, OSCToM reaches 76% accuracy, compared with the 0.2% reported by ExploreToM. The data-synthesis procedure is also 6x more efficient, indicating that targeted training data can help smaller models handle advanced cognitive reasoning. The project code is available at https://github.com/sharminsrishty/osct.

TextDiffuser-RL: Efficient and Robust Text Layout Optimization for High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Synthesis

Text-embedded image generation plays a critical role in industries such as graphic design, advertising, and digital content creation. Text-to-Image generation methods leveraging diffusion models, such as TextDiffuser-2, have demonstrated promising results in producing images with embedded text. TextDiffuser-2 effectively generates bounding box layouts that guide the rendering of visual text, achieving high fidelity and coherence. However, existing approaches often rely on resource-intensive processes and are limited in their ability to run efficiently on both CPU and GPU platforms. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage pipeline that integrates reinforcement learning (RL) for rapid and optimized text layout generation with a diffusion-based image synthesis model. Our RL-based approach significantly accelerates the bounding box prediction step while reducing overlaps, allowing the system to run efficiently on both CPUs and GPUs. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework maintains or surpasses TextDiffuser-2's quality in text placement and image synthesis, with markedly faster runtime and increased flexibility. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework maintains or surpasses TextDiffuser-2's quality in text placement and image synthesis, with markedly faster runtime and increased flexibility. Our approach has been evaluated on the MARIOEval benchmark, achieving OCR and CLIPScore metrics close to state-of-the-art models, while being 97.64% more faster and requiring only 2MB of memory to run.