Language-Informed Synthesis of Rational Agent Models for Grounded Theory-of-Mind Reasoning On-The-Fly

Lance Ying; Ryan Truong; Katherine M. Collins; Cedegao E. Zhang; Megan Wei; Tyler Brooke-Wilson; Tan Zhi-Xuan; Lionel Wong; Joshua B. Tenenbaum

arXiv · 2506.16755

Language-Informed Synthesis of Rational Agent Models for Grounded Theory-of-Mind Reasoning On-The-Fly

Lance Ying·Ryan Truong·Katherine M. Collins·Cedegao E. Zhang·Megan Wei·Tyler Brooke-Wilson·Tan Zhi-Xuan·Lionel Wong·Joshua B. Tenenbaum

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Abstract

Drawing real world social inferences usually requires taking into account information from multiple modalities. Language is a particularly powerful source of information in social settings, especially in novel situations where language can provide both abstract information about the environment dynamics and concrete specifics about an agent that cannot be easily visually observed. In this paper, we propose Language-Informed Rational Agent Synthesis (LIRAS), a framework for drawing context-specific social inferences that integrate linguistic and visual inputs. LIRAS frames multimodal social reasoning as a process of constructing structured but situation-specific agent and environment representations - leveraging multimodal language models to parse language and visual inputs into unified symbolic representations, over which a Bayesian inverse planning engine can be run to produce granular probabilistic judgments. On a range of existing and new social reasoning tasks derived from cognitive science experiments, we find that our model (instantiated with a comparatively lightweight VLM) outperforms ablations and state-of-the-art models in capturing human judgments across all domains.

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Lance Ying, Ryan Truong, Katherine M. Collins, Cedegao E. Zhang, Megan Wei, Tyler Brooke-Wilson, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Lionel Wong, Joshua B. Tenenbaum. 2025-06-20. Language-Informed Synthesis of Rational Agent Models for Grounded Theory-of-Mind Reasoning On-The-Fly. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16755

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