What role does Theory-of-Mind capacity play in LLM multi-agent collaboration?

Ascertain the role that theory-of-mind reasoning capacity of large language models plays in collaboration among agents within multi-agent systems.

Background

The authors find that prompting LLM agents to consider others’ actions can increase goal-aligned coordination in their experimental task, while lower-capacity models (e.g., smaller LLMs) show limited benefit from such instructions. This suggests ToM-like capabilities might be important, but the extent and mechanisms remain unsettled.

A general understanding of how ToM capacity influences emergent coordination, role differentiation, and overall collaboration quality across varied tasks and model families is an open area of inquiry.