@inproceedings{kong-etal-2026-siv,
title = "{SIV}-Bench: A Video Benchmark for Social Interaction Understanding and Reasoning",
author = "Kong, Fanqi and
Zu, Weiqin and
Chen, Xinyu and
Yang, Yaodong and
Zhu, Song-Chun and
Feng, Xue",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1863/",
pages = "37379--37403",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Understanding social interaction, which encompasses perceiving numerous and subtle multimodal cues, inferring unobservable mental states and relations, and dynamically predicting others' behavior, is the foundation for achieving human-machine interaction. Despite rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the rich and multifaceted nature of social interaction has hindered the development of benchmarks that holistically evaluate and guide their social interaction abilities. Based on social relation theory, which has been widely regarded as a foundational framework for understanding social behavior, we provide SIV-Bench, a novel video benchmark for systematically evaluating MLLMs' capabilities across Social Scene Understanding (SSU), Social State Reasoning (SSR), and Social Dynamics Prediction (SDP). SIV-Bench features 2,792 originally collected video clips and 5,455 meticulously generated question-answer pairs derived from a human-LLM collaborative pipeline. It covers 14 typical relationships, diverse video lengths, genres, presentation styles, and linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Our comprehensive experiments show that leading MLLMs perform relatively well on SSU but remain weak on SSR and SDP, with the systematic confusion in relation inference as a key bottleneck. An in-depth analysis of the reasoning process attributes MLLMs' suboptimal performance to misalignment with human thoughts and insufficient reasoning depth. Moreover, we find audio and subtitles aid in reasoning-intensive SSR and SDP. Together, SIV-Bench offers a unified testbed to measure progress, expose limitations, and guide future research toward more socially intelligent MLLMs."
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<abstract>Understanding social interaction, which encompasses perceiving numerous and subtle multimodal cues, inferring unobservable mental states and relations, and dynamically predicting others’ behavior, is the foundation for achieving human-machine interaction. Despite rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the rich and multifaceted nature of social interaction has hindered the development of benchmarks that holistically evaluate and guide their social interaction abilities. Based on social relation theory, which has been widely regarded as a foundational framework for understanding social behavior, we provide SIV-Bench, a novel video benchmark for systematically evaluating MLLMs’ capabilities across Social Scene Understanding (SSU), Social State Reasoning (SSR), and Social Dynamics Prediction (SDP). SIV-Bench features 2,792 originally collected video clips and 5,455 meticulously generated question-answer pairs derived from a human-LLM collaborative pipeline. It covers 14 typical relationships, diverse video lengths, genres, presentation styles, and linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Our comprehensive experiments show that leading MLLMs perform relatively well on SSU but remain weak on SSR and SDP, with the systematic confusion in relation inference as a key bottleneck. An in-depth analysis of the reasoning process attributes MLLMs’ suboptimal performance to misalignment with human thoughts and insufficient reasoning depth. Moreover, we find audio and subtitles aid in reasoning-intensive SSR and SDP. Together, SIV-Bench offers a unified testbed to measure progress, expose limitations, and guide future research toward more socially intelligent MLLMs.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T SIV-Bench: A Video Benchmark for Social Interaction Understanding and Reasoning
%A Kong, Fanqi
%A Zu, Weiqin
%A Chen, Xinyu
%A Yang, Yaodong
%A Zhu, Song-Chun
%A Feng, Xue
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F kong-etal-2026-siv
%X Understanding social interaction, which encompasses perceiving numerous and subtle multimodal cues, inferring unobservable mental states and relations, and dynamically predicting others’ behavior, is the foundation for achieving human-machine interaction. Despite rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the rich and multifaceted nature of social interaction has hindered the development of benchmarks that holistically evaluate and guide their social interaction abilities. Based on social relation theory, which has been widely regarded as a foundational framework for understanding social behavior, we provide SIV-Bench, a novel video benchmark for systematically evaluating MLLMs’ capabilities across Social Scene Understanding (SSU), Social State Reasoning (SSR), and Social Dynamics Prediction (SDP). SIV-Bench features 2,792 originally collected video clips and 5,455 meticulously generated question-answer pairs derived from a human-LLM collaborative pipeline. It covers 14 typical relationships, diverse video lengths, genres, presentation styles, and linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Our comprehensive experiments show that leading MLLMs perform relatively well on SSU but remain weak on SSR and SDP, with the systematic confusion in relation inference as a key bottleneck. An in-depth analysis of the reasoning process attributes MLLMs’ suboptimal performance to misalignment with human thoughts and insufficient reasoning depth. Moreover, we find audio and subtitles aid in reasoning-intensive SSR and SDP. Together, SIV-Bench offers a unified testbed to measure progress, expose limitations, and guide future research toward more socially intelligent MLLMs.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1863/
%P 37379-37403
Markdown (Informal)
[SIV-Bench: A Video Benchmark for Social Interaction Understanding and Reasoning](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1863/) (Kong et al., Findings 2026)
ACL