SocialReasonBench is a new video‑multiple‑choice QA benchmark designed to test socially grounded reasoning in interactive narrative videos. It uses branching gameplay footage from *Detroit: Become Human*, where player choices create alternative social outcomes that can be verified against the game’s script and flowchart. The benchmark includes seven reasoning dimensions—such as intent recognition, emotional empathy, moral dilemma, counterfactual reasoning, and causal antecedent—and employs a multi‑agent pipeline to curate clips, ground answer labels, and generate theory‑guided questions with diagnostic distractors.
arXiv:2606. 04806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs and agentic systems are increasingly deployed in social environments, making normative competence critical for safe and appropriate behavior.
AgentVidBench is a new multi‑hop video question‑answering benchmark designed to evaluate spatial, temporal, and causal reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Unlike existing tests that focus on simple scene queries or global summaries, AgentVidBench includes step‑by‑step solution traces to assess whether agents gather the necessary evidence to justify their answers. Experiments with 12 MLLMs show limited single‑turn performance, but integrating these models into agentic workflows improves both accuracy and trajectory scores, establishing AgentVidBench as a comprehensive testbed for future research on agentic video understanding.
arXiv:2604. 11741v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in perceptual tasks, yet they degrade in complex multi-hop reasoning under multiplayer game settings with imperfect and deceptive information.
The paper introduces Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT), a structured reasoning framework for vision‑language models that divides multimodal social reasoning into three cognitively inspired stages: Perception, Situation, and Norm. CoCoT improves performance across diverse tasks—multimodal intent disambiguation, theory of mind, social commonsense reasoning, and safety instruction following—by 5.9% to 4.6% on average. Fine‑tuning on CoCoT‑structured traces further boosts accuracy by 5–6% without explicit prompting, indicating that models internalize the structured reasoning pattern and that the approach enhances interpretability and social alignment in multimodal systems.
arXiv:2608.23330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video understanding requires intelligent agents to transcend mere recognition of visual facts and comprehend the underlying intents behind human action...
arXiv:2601. 01095v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive progress in vision-language reasoning, yet their ability to understand temporally unfolding narratives in videos remains underexplored.
TempCloze is a video cloze benchmark designed to evaluate visual temporal reasoning in Video-LLMs. The task presents a video’s beginning and ending clips and asks models to select the correct missing middle from four candidates, focusing on semantic, alignment, and progression aspects while minimizing appearance cues. Evaluation of 31 models shows that temporal alignment is the main challenge, with models performing better on semantic content and event progression but struggling to place events correctly in time.
CinematicVQA is a new benchmark for evaluating large vision‑language models on film‑grammar reasoning. It introduces the Cinematic Scene Graph, a structured representation linking filming techniques to perceptual effects and narrative functions, and tests models on tasks beyond low‑level technique recognition. The study finds a semantic gap where models excel at describing visuals but struggle to identify underlying techniques, and shows that fine‑tuning improves performance on narrative function and multi‑hop reasoning.
arXiv:2609.36776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotional Video Captioning aims to generate factually accurate and emotionally empathetic descriptions. While recent methods have recognized the import...
arXiv:2607. 26465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models have sparked significant interest due to their potential for social intelligence; however, their ability to perform sequential motivation reasoning remains insufficiently studied.
The paper introduces the Very Big Video Reasoning (VBVR) Dataset, a large-scale collection of over one million video clips organized into 200 curated reasoning tasks. It also presents VBVR-Bench, a benchmark framework that uses rule-based, human-aligned scorers for reproducible evaluation of video reasoning models. The authors conduct a large-scale scaling study, noting early signs of emergent generalization to unseen reasoning tasks, and make all resources publicly available.
STRAND is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models’ ability to track objects, their states, and relationships over time in videos. It evaluates intermediate reasoning by breaking queries into sub‑questions and uses Faithful Accuracy to ensure all parts of an answer are correct. The authors also propose an object‑centric framework that builds structured trajectories and shows reduced hallucinations and better temporal consistency compared to existing models.