Benchmarking Mental State Representations in Language Models
Authors: name: Matteo Bortoletto, name: Constantin Ruhdorfer, name: Lei Shi, name: Andreas Bulling

While numerous works have assessed the generative performance of language
models (LMs) on tasks requiring Theory of Mind reasoning, research into the
models' internal representation of mental states remains limited. Recent work
has used probing to demonstrate that LMs can represent beliefs of themselves
and others. However, these claims are accompanied by limited evaluation, making
it difficult to assess how mental state representations are affected by model
design and training choices. We report an extensive benchmark with various LM
types with different model sizes, fine-tuning approaches, and prompt designs to
study the robustness of mental state representations and memorisation issues
within the probes. Our results show that the quality of models' internal
representations of the beliefs of others increases with model size and, more
crucially, with fine-tuning. We are the first to study how prompt variations
impact probing performance on theory of mind tasks. We demonstrate that models'
representations are sensitive to prompt variations, even when such variations
should be beneficial. Finally, we complement previous activation editing
experiments on Theory of Mind tasks and show that it is possible to improve
models' reasoning performance by steering their activations without the need to
train any probe.