Papers › Solving the Baby Intuitions Benchmark with a Hierarchically Bayesian Theory of Mind

Solving the Baby Intuitions Benchmark with a Hierarchically Bayesian Theory of Mind

4 Aug 2022arXiv:2208.02914archive 2025-07-28

Tan Zhi-Xuan, Nishad Gothoskar, Falk Pollok, Dan Gutfreund, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Vikash K. Mansinghka

To facilitate the development of new models to bridge the gap between machine and human social intelligence, the recently proposed Baby Intuitions Benchmark (arXiv:2102.11938) provides a suite of tasks designed to evaluate commonsense reasoning about agents' goals and actions that even young infants exhibit. Here we present a principled Bayesian solution to this benchmark, based on a hierarchically Bayesian Theory of Mind (HBToM). By including hierarchical priors on agent goals and dispositions, inference over our HBToM model enables few-shot learning of the efficiency and preferences of an agent, which can then be used in commonsense plausibility judgements about subsequent agent behavior. This approach achieves near-perfect accuracy on most benchmark tasks, outperforming deep learning and imitation learning baselines while producing interpretable human-like inferences, demonstrating the advantages of structured Bayesian models of human social cognition.

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Few-Shot LearningImitation Learning

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