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

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ma, Minghui, Guo, Bin, Yang, Runze, Chen, Mengqi, Liu, Yan, Liu, Jingqi, Pei, Yahan, Ma, Xuehao, Zhang, Qiuyun, Yu, Zhiwen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ma, Minghui
Guo, Bin
Yang, Runze
Chen, Mengqi
Liu, Yan
Liu, Jingqi
Pei, Yahan
Ma, Xuehao
Zhang, Qiuyun
Yu, Zhiwen
author_facet Ma, Minghui
Guo, Bin
Yang, Runze
Chen, Mengqi
Liu, Yan
Liu, Jingqi
Pei, Yahan
Ma, Xuehao
Zhang, Qiuyun
Yu, Zhiwen
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_22602
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Think Thrice Before You Speak: Dual knowledge-enhanced Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Persuasive Agents
Ma, Minghui
Guo, Bin
Yang, Runze
Chen, Mengqi
Liu, Yan
Liu, Jingqi
Pei, Yahan
Ma, Xuehao
Zhang, Qiuyun
Yu, Zhiwen
Artificial Intelligence
68Q32 (Primary), 68T07, 68T05 (Secondary)
I.2.7; I.2.6; H.5.2
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.
title Think Thrice Before You Speak: Dual knowledge-enhanced Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Persuasive Agents
topic Artificial Intelligence
68Q32 (Primary), 68T07, 68T05 (Secondary)
I.2.7; I.2.6; H.5.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22602