GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs

AbstractTrue general intelligence requires not only a model of the physical world but also a social world model: the capacity to infer how individual mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. Despite notable progress in individual-level Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning, existing multimodal large language models systematically fail at this: collective behavior emerges non-linearly from social tensions, conformity dynamics, and structural constraints, and cannot be recovered by summing individual intentions. We present ***GroupToM-Bench***, the first multimodal benchmark for group-level ToM, built around a causal chain spanning micro-level BDI states (belief, desire, intention), meso-level group tension and structural constraints, and macro-level outcome prediction and mechanistic attribution. To probe this full arc, we develop a seven-level cognitive audit framework. Experiments reveal that frontier models perform significantly below human levels, exposing fundamental blind spots in modeling social structures and nonlinear collective behavior.