Adam Bawatneh
PhD Student and Graduate Research Assistant | Social Reasoning, Theory of Mind, and AI
Orlando, FL
I am Adam Bawatneh, a Computer Science PhD student and Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Central Florida. My primary research focus is social reasoning and Theory of Mind, including mental-state representations and how AI systems use social context. My current work includes language-model research, and I am interested in exploring these questions across language and multimodal settings, including generative AI and agent systems.
I led OmniToM, accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations and Datasets Track. OmniToM evaluates whether models can recover structured, actor-specific beliefs from social narratives, beyond answering an endpoint question. The project page and benchmark are public.
My broader work includes NLP and computer vision. I am mentoring undergraduate REU student Valerie Lopez on CADS, an NLP system for detecting context-dependent slang and specialized language. I have also contributed to government research proposal development, including IARPA-focused proposals. I also review papers for NeurIPS, AAAI, and ACL.
Research Focus
- Social reasoning and Theory of Mind, mental-state representations, and social context in AI.
- Evaluation methods and human-calibrated benchmarks for language models.
- NLP methods for context-dependent language and specialized terminology.
- Multimodal evaluation and responsible computer vision.
Selected Projects
- CADS: Context-Aware Detection of Specialized Language, ongoing REU research mentorship.
- OmniToM, accepted to NeurIPS 2026.
I am seeking research internships centered on social reasoning and Theory of Mind, and I am open to related work across language, multimodal AI, generative AI, and agent systems.