Think Thrice Before You Speak: Dual knowledge-enhanced Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Persuasive Agents

Abstract: Persuasive dialogue requires reasoning about others' latent mental states, a capability known as Theory of Mind (ToM). However, due to reliance on simple prompting strategies and insufficient ToM knowledge, existing LLMs often fail to capture the intrinsic dependencies among mental states, leading to fragmented representations and unstable reasoning. To address these challenges, we introduce the ToM-based Persuasive Dialogue (ToM-PD) task, grounded in the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) framework, which explicitly models the sequential dependencies among mental states in multi-turn dialogues. To facilitate research on this task, we construct a large-scale annotated dataset, ToM-based Broad Persuasive Dialogues (ToM-BPD), capturing fine-grained mental states and corresponding persuasive strategies. We further propose Think Thrice Before You Speak (TTBYS), a knowledge-enhanced stepwise reasoning framework that leverages both explicit and implicit prior experiences to improve LLMs' inference of desires, beliefs, and persuasive strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that Qwen3-8B equipped with TTBYS outperforms GPT-5 by 1.20%, 22.80%, and 16.97% in predicting desires, beliefs, and persuasive strategies, respectively. Case studies further show that our approach enhances interpretability and consistency in reasoning.