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Shunchi Zhang

6 accepted papers

2026

MindZero: Learning Online Mental Reasoning With Zero Annotations

ICML 2026poster

Effective real-world assistance requires AI agents with robust Theory of Mind (ToM): inferring human mental states from their behavior. Despite recent advances, several key challenges remain, including (1) online inference with robust uncertainty updates over multiple hypotheses; (2) efficient reaso…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

WoW!: World Models in a Closed-Loop World

ICLR 2026oral

Generative world models (WMs) can now simulate worlds with striking visual realism, which naturally raises the question of whether they can endow embodied agents with predictive perception for decision making. Progress on this question has been limited by fragmented evaluation: most existing benchma…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AutoToM: Scaling Model-based Mental Inference via Automated Agent Modeling

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people's minds based on their behavior, is key to developing socially intelligent agents. Current approaches to ToM reasoning either rely on prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), which are prone to systematic errors, or use handcrafted, rigid agent m…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

The Essence of Contextual Understanding in Theory of Mind: A Study on Question Answering with Story Characters

ACL 2025long

Theory-of-Mind (ToM) is a fundamental psychological capability that allows humans to understand and interpret the mental states of others. Humans infer others’ thoughts by integrating causal cues and indirect clues from broad contextual information, often derived from past interactions. In other wor…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Stochastic Parrot on LLM’s Shoulder: A Summative Assessment of Physical Concept Understanding

NAACL 2025long

In a systematic way, we investigate a widely asked question: Do LLMs really understand what they say?, which relates to the more familiar term Stochastic Parrot. To this end, we propose a summative assessment over a carefully designed physical concept understanding task, P HYSI C O. Our task allevia…

2024

Few-Shot Character Understanding in Movies as an Assessment to Meta-Learning of Theory-of-Mind

ICML 2024poster

When reading a story, humans can quickly understand new fictional characters with a few observations, mainly by drawing analogies to fictional and real people they already know. This reflects the few-shot and meta-learning essence of humans' inference of characters' mental states, *i.e.*, theory-of-…