As large language models evolve, there is growing anticipation that they will emulate human-like Theory of Mind (ToM) to assist with routine tasks. However, existing methods for evaluating machine ToM focus primarily on unimodal models and largely treat these models as black boxes, lacking an interpretative exploration of their internal mechanisms. In response, this study adopts an approach based on internal mechanisms to provide an interpretability-driven assessment of ToM in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, we first construct a multimodal ToM test dataset, GridToM, which incorporates diverse belief testing tasks and perceptual information from multiple perspectives. Next, our analysis shows that attention heads in multimodal large models can distinguish cognitive information across perspectives, providing evidence of ToM capabilities. Furthermore, we present a lightweight, training-free approach that significantly enhances the model’s exhibited ToM by adjusting in the direction of the attention head.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are designed to prevent collisions, identify the condition of drivers while operating vehicles, and provide additional information to enhance drivers’ awareness of potential hazards on the road. Today, ADAS are capable of predicting drivers’ actions several seconds in advance, preparing for potential future hazards to prevent accidents or reduce injuries to occupants. Most previous works have achieved prediction results by analyzing and processing a vast amount of driving data from multiple drivers, based on the macro intention preferences of multiple drivers and external environmental features, collectively referred to as the generalized intention prediction network. This network utilizes extensive driving data to predict the common driving intentions of the overall driving population, without considering individualized driving styles. However, according to our research, different drivers exhibit distinct latent preferences in real-world driving scenarios. The generalized intention prediction network is influenced by these latent preferences, resulting in poor generalization capabilities and inaccurate predictions across different drivers. In this study, we propose a individualized driver intention prediction network. Based on Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), it extracts individualized driving intention feature preferences that influence driving intentions from the driver’s historical behavior to improve generalized prediction results and achieve individualized driving intention prediction. We demonstrate that preferences vary among different drivers in the driving domain, leading to biases in model predictions. Upon experimental validation, the method we have proposed demonstrates remarkable efficacy on both the Brain4Cars and IESDD datasets, thereby showcasing its enhanced applicability in real-world scenarios.