The study investigates whether vision–language models (VLMs) can infer human engagement from gameplay videos using the GameVibe Few‑Shot dataset across nine first‑person shooter games. Three VLMs were tested under six prompting strategies—including zero‑shot, theory‑guided prompts based on Flow, GameFlow, Self‑Determination Theory, and MDA, and retrieval‑augmented prompting—evaluating both pointwise engagement prediction and pairwise prediction of engagement change. Results show that zero‑shot predictions are weak and often do not beat simple majority‑class baselines; retrieval‑augmented prompting improves pointwise prediction in some cases, while pairwise prediction remains difficult, and theory‑guided prompts do not reliably help and may reinforce superficial shortcuts.
"whyItMatters":"The findings highlight a perception–understanding gap in current VLMs, indicating that while they can recognize visible gameplay cues, they still struggle to robustly infer human engagement across games."
By Ziyi Wang, Qizan Guo, Rishitosh Singh, Xiyang Hu
Video2Reaction is a multimodal dataset that links short movie segments to the emotional reactions of viewers, gathered from social media comments. The dataset models reactions as distributions over categorical emotions, capturing the subjective and ambiguous nature of emotional perception. Experiments show that vision‑language models fine‑tuned with LoRA learn effectively from Video2Reaction and outperform specialized baselines, and that models pre‑fine‑tuned on this dataset transfer well to other emotion prediction tasks.
By Sidong Zhang, Trang Nguyen, Shiv Shankar, Gauri Jagatap, Deepak Chandran, Andrea Fanelli, Madalina Fiterau
arXiv:2610.07603v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: This article proposes Selective Affective Layer Fine-Tuning (SALFT), an efficient adaptation framework for Video Vision Transformers in player arousa...
By Yi Xia, Ibrahim Khan, Mury Fajar Dewantoro, Wenwen Ouyang, Ruck Thawonmas
arXiv:2603.02655v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Real-time video commentary generation provides textual descriptions of ongoing events in videos. It supports accessibility and engagement in...
By Anum Afzal, Yuki Saito, Hiroya Takamura, Katsuhito Sudoh, Shinnosuke Takamichi, Graham Neubig, Florian Matthes, Tatsuya Ishigaki
GameVerse is a new minute‑scale gameplay video dataset designed to support long‑horizon interactive world modeling. It contains 69.7K clips totaling 1,655 hours and 349.6 million frames, including 1,358 hours of continuous two‑minute sequences—an order of magnitude longer than prior datasets. Each clip is processed through a unified pipeline that provides scene‑consistent segmentation, quality filtering, camera pose estimation, and event‑based caption annotation, with temporally stable camera trajectories and captions that distinguish static context from dynamic events.
By Kang He, Wenshuo Peng, Chuanhao Li, Zihui Gao, Xiaojie Xu, Zhengyuan Lin, Yuzhe Ding, Donghong Ji, Kaipeng Zhang, Yongtao Ge
arXiv:2604. 15280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding emotions is a fundamental ability for intelligent systems to be able to interact with humans.
By Madhav Agarwal, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Steven McDonagh