# Verifiable Social Reasoning for LLM Assistants

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17496 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17496/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 24 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09251/) (2022)
- [Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16388/) (2023)
- [SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11667/) (2023)
- [Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04024/) (2022)
- [Gemma 4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02770/) (2026)
- [LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10109/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Moral Beliefs Encoded in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14324/) (2023)
- [Assessing Cross-Cultural Alignment between ChatGPT and Human Societies: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17466/) (2023)
- [SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07045/) (2023)
- [FANToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind in Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15421/) (2023)
- [ELEPHANT: Measuring and understanding social sycophancy in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13995/) (2025)
- [Generative agent-based modeling with actions grounded in physical, social, or digital space using Concordia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03664/) (2023)
- [ForecastBench: A Dynamic Benchmark of AI Forecasting Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19839/) (2024)
- [SycEval: Evaluating LLM Sycophancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08177/) (2025)
- [Approaching Human-Level Forecasting with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18563/) (2024)
- [Sycophancy in Large Language Models: Causes and Mitigations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15287/) (2024)
- [Finetuning LLMs for Human Behavior Prediction in Social Science Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05830/) (2025)
- [OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14199/) (2026)
- [A clinically validated framework for auditing AI chatbot behavior in mental health interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01347/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Alignment of Behavioral Dispositions in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11328/) (2026)
- [VERA-MH Concept Paper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15297/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Baseline Assessment for the Agentic Web Technology Stack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13703/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLM assistants are widely used for daily social advice, yet evaluating their social reasoning in such consultation settings remains challenging since (i) it requires setups where the assistant learns about social situations from subjective user narratives, and (ii) social properties, such as others' intentions, typically lack verifiable ground truth. To address these challenges, we introduce Fuse, a multi-agent simulation framework for studying user-mediated social reasoning. In Fuse, a target agent with a hidden motive interacts with other agents including one representing the user, who then consults the evaluated assistant to infer the target's motive, providing verifiable ground truth by construction. Simulation faithfulness is validated through a human study with 24k annotations. We apply Fuse to 12 LLMs and demonstrate its analytical utility by systematically isolating key factors, showing that (i) user mediation compounds the inherent difficulty of social reasoning; (ii) LLMs exhibit systematic sensitivity to biased user framing; (iii) models can require more details than humans need to reach a correct prediction; and (iv) longer conversations do not always improve performance despite providing opportunities for clarifying questions. We open-source Fuse and a dataset with 21k examples.