CoMMET is a new multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate Theory of Mind (ToM) in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). It expands beyond existing text-only, belief-focused tests by covering a wider range of mental states, incorporating moral evaluation, and enabling multi-turn, open-ended interactions. The dataset is grounded in psychological theory and provides a comprehensive assessment across different model families and sizes, revealing strengths, limitations, and future improvement directions.
By Ruirui Chen, Weifeng Jiang, Chengwei Qin, Kaiwen Wei, Yanzhen Yue, Cheston Tan
Humans possess an innate ability to understand fine-grained interpersonal relationships, which is central to everyday social interactions. Although such reasoning is inherently multimodal, it remains largely unexplored by existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
PIVOTSBench is a benchmark designed to assess multimodal large language models’ ability to reason about fine‑grained interpersonal relationships. It is constructed from Social‑IQ 2.0 and YouTube data and evaluates models on predicting bidirectional relationship dimensions grounded in psychology research. The benchmark also includes auxiliary tasks that test models’ capacity to identify and use critical visual cues, and it examines the impact of visual modalities, social role information, and different prediction settings on model performance.
By Shuxiang Zhang, Yiting Yin, Wenxuan Song, Yuhang Wu, Miao Liu
The study compares human deliberation in Wason selection tasks with large language model (LLM) agent groups that are seeded with participants’ pre-discussion beliefs. Across various scoring definitions, human consensus rates ranged from 24.0% to 57.0%, whereas LLM agents consistently achieved higher consensus, with gaps of 34–44 percentage points in two sensitivity analyses. Even when early stopping was removed or memorizable answers were eliminated, LLM groups still reached near-unanimous agreement, often on incorrect answers, indicating that simulated consensus does not reflect collective accuracy.
By Tengfei Shao
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.
By Eunkyu Park, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Gunhee Kim, Motahhare Eslami, Maarten Sap
arXiv:2607. 28649v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: COSI-Lab presents a multimodal, multi-sensor dataset of an interdisciplinary scientific workshop containing 32 academics at an international conference.
By Zonghuan Li, Litian Li, Arthur Mercier, Gara Dorta, Balint Dioszegi, Jose Morales-Vargas, Chenxu Hao, Ivan Kondyurin, Vanessa Begemann, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, Bernd Dudzik, Saunaq Chakrabarty, Sotiris Vacanas, Laura Cabrera-Quir\'os, Anne L. J. ter Wal, Vitaliy Popov, Jorge Castro-God\'inez, Chirag Raman, Stephanie Tan, Hayley Hung
arXiv:2601. 14569v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Social understanding abilities are crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret human social interactions.
By Leena Mathur, Bhaavanaa Thumu, Youssouf Kebe, Louis-Philippe Morency
arXiv:2606.08081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Repeated reference games test whether interlocutors replace their initially long descriptions with shorter, partner-specific expressions grou...
By Po-Ya Angela Wang, Chinmaya Mishra, Asl{\i} \"Ozy\"urek, Paula Rubio-Fern\'andez, Esam Ghaleb
arXiv:2607. 29602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reading a social situation often depends on behavior, not words alone.
By Jeffrey M. Girard, Jason Z. Zheng, Jacqueline R. Vertino, Antony D'Avirro, Benjamin Peloquin
arXiv:2609.09628v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Inferring speaker relationships from spoken conversations is an important step towards socially aware speech understanding. However, this task remain...
By Yaohan Guan, Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Junhyeok Lee, Jesus Villalba, Laureano Moro Velazquez, Thomas Thebaud, Najim Dehak
arXiv:2606. 08081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Repeated reference games test whether interlocutors replace their initially long descriptions with shorter, partner-specific conventions grounded in shared interaction history.
By Po-Ya Angela Wang, Chinmaya Mishra, Asl{\i} \"Ozy\"urek, Paula Rubio-Fern\'andez, Esam Ghaleb
arXiv:2608. 10665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models often generate reasoning chains containing subtle errors that lead to incorrect answers.
By Rohit Sinha, Kunal Tilaganji, Tanuja Ganu, Nagarajan Natarajan, Amit Sharma, Vineeth Balasubramanian