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. Existing evaluations predominantly examine static text or isolated visual snapshots, which do not reflect the cumulative nature of real-world behavioral drivers.
arXiv:2609.39168v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing...
By Zhihan Zhang, Lizi Liao
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
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.
By Zheyu Huang, Zijing Shi, Haozhe Luo, Huadong Tang, Mingyu Liu, Meng Fang, Ling Chen
arXiv:2610.15129v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Human social perception is incremental: we infer intent before an utterance is complete, revise our interpretation as new cues arrive, and attend to sp...
By Zonghuan Li, Hayley Hung, Chirag Raman
The paper introduces Humanity's Sixth Sense (HSS), a benchmark designed to evaluate intuitive visual reasoning in multimodal large language models. HSS covers a wide range of image and video inputs, organizes them under a structured taxonomy, and pairs each with human‑written prompts that probe implicit temporal, spatial, social, and abstract cues that humans can infer at a glance. Current state‑of‑the‑art models, including GPT‑6‑astra, achieve far lower accuracy than humans (53.6 % vs. 93.1 %), highlighting a significant gap in intuitive visual understanding.
By Xingang Guo, Jing Gu, Brian Jang, Renxiong Wang, Utkarsh Tyagi, Daniel Quigley, Steven Li, David Yan, Daniel Yue Zhang, Darvin Yi, Forrest Huang, HiJae Kim, Tianyi Zhang, Jared Lichtarge, Jihua Huang, Le Xue, Manan Tomar, Qiuyi Richard Zhang, Ruofei Yu, Seth Neel, Yaning Hu, Marcella Valentine, Xinzhe Jiang, Daniel Evans, Chenguang Wang, Dustin Tran, Tong Zhao, Yinfei Yang, Yunzhong He
arXiv:2605.16638v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that Universal Multimodal Embedding (UME) benefits significantly from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In this pa...
By Jianpeng Cheng, Xian Wu, Jiangfan Zhang, Wentao Bao, Chaitanya Ahuja, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Xuanming Cui, Hanchao Yu, Yang Gao, Fan Xia, Haixing Dai, Frankie Yuan, Zihao Wang, Xiaobing Chen, Qi Guo, Shaodan Zhai, Aashu Singh, Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao
arXiv:2602. 02465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation.
By Jana Zeller, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Fanfei Li, Thomas Klein, Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Matthias Bethge, Felix Wichmann, Ryan Cotterell, Wieland Brendel
Training Multimodal Large Language Models for audio-visual social understanding is a crucial step toward embodied social intelligence. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the dominant approach, with HumanOmniV2 and its IntentBench benchmark as a prominent reference point.
M$^3$R-Bench is a new benchmark comprising 1,000 human‑annotated image‑text pairs that jointly label metaphor occurrence, Target‑Source mapping, and sentiment, and provide step‑by‑step explanations for evidence identification, mapping, and sentiment inference. Existing models often rely on textual shortcuts and produce mappings that conflict with visual evidence, as shown by evaluations on this dataset. To address this, the authors propose M$^3$R‑Reasoner, a model that uses curriculum‑based reasoning supervision and task‑aware reinforcement learning, achieving a 37.90% Joint Label Accuracy and outperforming both proprietary baselines and GPT‑5.5 on evidence and sentiment justification.
By Hong Jiang, Junnan Zhu, Jingwang Huang, Xiao Sun, Yuming Yang, Jiang Zhong, Ruirui Chen, Jingman Shi, Hao Wu, Nayu Liu, Xinyi Jiang, Kaiwen Wei
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
arXiv:2609.16070v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Generative recommendation reformulates item prediction as semantic identifier generation, yet episodic content introduces a fundamentally different s...
By Chenxing Wang, Nantao Zheng, Hao Miao, Juyuan Wang, Xinke Jiang, Yuchen Fang, Aolin Li, Haijun Wu