Scaling LLMs’ Social Reasoning: Sprinkle Cognitive “Aha Moment” into Fundamental Long-thought Logical Capabilities

Humans continually engage in reasoning about others' mental states, a capability known as Theory of Mind (ToM), is essential for social interactions.While this social reasoning capability emerges naturally in human cognitive development, how has the social reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) evolved during their development process?Various datasets have been proposed to assess LLMs' social reasoning capabilities, but each is designed with a distinct focus, and none have explored how models' social reasoning capabilities evolve during model size scaling or reasoning tokens scaling.In light of this, we optimize the evaluation of LLMs' social reasoning from both data and model perspectives, constructing progressively difficult levels of social reasoning data and systematically exploring how LLMs' social reasoning capabilities evolve.Furthermore, through an indepth analysis of DeepSeek-R1's reasoning trajectories, we identify notable cognitive "Aha Moment" and the reasons for its reasoning errors.Experiments reveal that long-thought logical capabilities and cognitive thinking are key to scaling LLMs' social reasoning capabilities.By equipping the Qwen2.5-32B-Instructmodel with long-thought logical capabilities and cognitive thinking, we achieve an improvement of 19.0 points, attaining social reasoning performance comparable to o1-preview model.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.162
Primary Topic
Complex Systems and Decision Making
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

Funders

Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

Scaling LLMs’ Social Reasoning: Sprinkle Cognitive “Aha Moment” into Fundamental Long-thought Logical Capabilities

Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lü, Wenqi Zhang, Zhe Zheng et al.
Complex Systems and Decision Making
article

Scaling LLMs’ Social Reasoning: Sprinkle Cognitive “Aha Moment” into Fundamental Long-thought Logical Capabilities

Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lü, Wenqi Zhang, Zhe Zheng, Guiyang Hou
article en

Abstract

Humans continually engage in reasoning about others' mental states, a capability known as Theory of Mind (ToM), is essential for social interactions.While this social reasoning capability emerges naturally in human cognitive development, how has the social reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) evolved during their development process?Various datasets have been proposed to assess LLMs' social reasoning capabilities, but each is designed with a distinct focus, and none have explored how models' social reasoning capabilities evolve during model size scaling or reasoning tokens scaling.In light of this, we optimize the evaluation of LLMs' social reasoning from both data and model perspectives, constructing progressively difficult levels of social reasoning data and systematically exploring how LLMs' social reasoning capabilities evolve.Furthermore, through an indepth analysis of DeepSeek-R1's reasoning trajectories, we identify notable cognitive "Aha Moment" and the reasons for its reasoning errors.Experiments reveal that long-thought logical capabilities and cognitive thinking are key to scaling LLMs' social reasoning capabilities.By equipping the Qwen2.5-32B-Instructmodel with long-thought logical capabilities and cognitive thinking, we achieve an improvement of 19.0 points, attaining social reasoning performance comparable to o1-preview model.

Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
Reduced inequalities
Openalex Percentile: Top 77%
Complex Systems and Decision Making
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.

Scaling LLMs’ Social Reasoning: Sprinkle Cognitive “Aha Moment” into Fundamental Long-thought Logical Capabilities — Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lü, et al. · (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS