A benchmark for evaluating whether models can infer the implicit, non-linear, and rhetorically layered meanings of social media videos that appear nonsensical on the surface but convey deliberate pragmatic meanings, and a diagnostic setting for measuring the gap between multimodal perception and pragmatic comprehension.
Abstract
Social media videos often communicate meanings that go beyond their visible actions, captions, or speech. A mundane clip may become humorous, ironic, or satire only through the interaction of multimodal cues and cultural context, making such content a difficult test case for video-language models. In this paper, we introduce \textit{DrivelHub+}, a benchmark for evaluating whether models can infer the implicit, non-linear, and rhetorically layered meanings of social media videos that appear nonsensical on the surface but convey deliberate pragmatic meanings. DrivelHub+ consists of 1,000 videos collected from social media, each annotated with a human-written implicit narrative explanation. Unlike conventional video understanding tasks focused on recognition or description, we present a benchmark that targets contextual multimodal reasoning. We evaluate current video-language models from two perspectives: explanation, where models must explain the pragmatic comprehension of a video in natural language; and representation, where we adapt reasoning-as-retrieval to test whether model representations align videos with their corresponding implicit narratives in both video-to-text and text-to-video retrieval. Our benchmark provides a diagnostic setting for measuring the gap between multimodal perception and pragmatic comprehension, asking whether current models can move beyond describing what is shown to inferring what is meant.
Human social communication, such as affection and intent, is often conveyed in highly implicit ways, where underlying meanings are expressed through indirect, socially and culturally grounded signals rather than explicit statements. Such implicit social contexts are pervasive in real-world interactions, yet there remains a lack of a formal and systematic framework for studying them. In this paper, we introduce Implicit Social Context Analysis (MoCA), a novel task that systematically models implicit social scenarios along three key dimensions: affection, intent, and stance. We construct a high-quality benchmark containing 3,108 multimodal instances collected from real-world sources, with fine-grained cognitive annotations revealing who expresses what toward whom, as well as how and why it is conveyed. Using the MoCA dataset, we show that state-of-the-art multimodal large language models struggle significantly with this task because of their reliance on explicit cues and limited ability to reason over latent social contexts. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict-Driven Abductive Reasoning (CoDAR), a novel framework that models the discrepancy between observed expressions and expected truthful behavior as cognitive conflict, thereby enabling the inference of hidden mental states. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoDAR substantially improves model performance. Nevertheless, a large gap from human reasoning remains, highlighting the fundamental difficulty of implicit social understanding.
Wenhao Xu, Kaiwen Zhang, Hao Li et al.· 0 citations
NARU, a benchmark designed to evaluate Narrative evolution and Reasoning on cultural Understanding in Japanese long-form video, is introduced, a hierarchical memory-based annotation pipeline that transforms raw video into structured event, narrative, and cultural annotations, then generates questions via task-oriented synthesis and iterative shortcut removal.
Yuheng Huang, Jianlang Chen, Jiayang Song et al.· 0 citations
Understanding spoken dialogue requires joint reasoning over lexical content and paralinguistic acoustic signals such as emotion and conversational intent. However, existing evaluations often allow shortcuts based on transcripts or single-modality solutions, obscuring whether models genuinely ground predictions in speech. We formalize this failure mode as cross-modal disagreement, where transcripts suggest plausible but incorrect surface interpretations while acoustic cues such as prosody or speaking style support different answers. We develop a scalable framework that identifies text-biased surface interpretations and converts disagreement regions into conflict QA examples. We also include consistent cases where transcript-based and speech-grounded interpretations agree, enabling evaluation beyond adversarial audio dependence. This results in ContraTalk, a controlled benchmark containing 501 questions across five discourse dimensions: interaction behavior, emotion state, dialogue act, social stance, and conversational intent. We further develop an agentic-style reasoning framework that converts speech into an Audio Twin, a text-readable representation of localized acoustic cues that exposes acoustic evidence to the reasoning model. Experiments show that strong text-only LLMs exceed 90% accuracy in consistent cases but drop to 33-48% in conflict cases. Direct AudioLLMs provide only partial grounding, still selecting the transcript-biased trap in roughly 30-40% of conflict cases. Our Audio Twin framework improves conflict-case accuracy while reducing trap selection, but its consistent-case behavior remains backbone-dependent. These results identify transcript-based shortcuts as an important failure mode in spoken dialogue understanding and show that explicit acoustic evidence aggregation provides a more controllable interface for diagnosing and improving speech-grounded reasoning.
Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan et al.· 0 citations
Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have greatly improved video understanding, yet their ability to reason about human-centered social situations remains limited. Existing benchmarks typically rely on videos with a single observed trajectory, making it difficult to determine whether models truly understand social dynamics or merely exploit recurring narrative patterns. We introduce SocialReasonBench, a video multiple-choice QA benchmark for evaluating socially grounded reasoning in scenarios derived from interactive narratives. Built from gameplay videos of Detroit: Become Human, the benchmark leverages branching storylines where player decisions lead to alternative social outcomes that can be checked against the game's own script, flowchart, and recorded branches. We develop a multi-agent curation pipeline that localizes socially meaningful clips, grounds answer labels in game-state signals, and generates theory-guided questions with diagnostic distractors. SocialReasonBench covers seven reasoning dimensions, including intent recognition, emotional empathy, moral dilemma, counterfactual reasoning, and causal antecedent. Experiments on contemporary LMMs show that models perform reasonably well on basic social understanding but struggle with counterfactual and causal reasoning. Further ablation and diagnostic error analyses reveal that models often depend on incomplete modality cues and fall into reasoning traps such as visual shortcuts, highlighting a gap between observable event recognition and deeper reasoning over latent social states.
Zhe-Yu Huang, Zi-Jing Shi, Hao-Zhe Luo et al.· 0 citations
Image memes are a pervasive form of online communication, widely used to convey humor, opinions, and cultural references. Prior work has explored making memes accessible to blind users, primarily through auto-generated descriptive captions. While these approaches improve comprehensibility and sometimes incorporate prosodic or emotional cues, they often fail to capture the humor, narrative structure, and contextual nuances that make memes engaging. We present MemeBuddy, a system that models memes as dialog, generating structured, multi-turn audio representations using role-based speakers. MemeBuddy reinterprets a meme as a conversation between two speakers, integrating extracted meme text with contextual knowledge implicitly inferred by a multimodal LLM (e.g., recognition of common meme templates and cultural references) to convey intent, timing, and implicit meaning through conversational interaction. We evaluate MemeBuddy in a user study with 14 blind participants. Results show that dialog-style meme representations consistently improve engagement and user satisfaction compared to caption-style descriptions, while maintaining comparable comprehension.
Chirag Bhansali, Vikas Ashok, H. Lee· SIGDIAL Conferences· 0 citations
Internet memes intertwine visual cues, textual content, and cultural context, making them particularly challenging to interpret in scenarios where humor, sarcasm, and harmful intent coexist. These complexities highlight the need for explainable meme understanding systems that can provide reliable and structured reasoning to support both accurate classification and human interpretability. However, existing multimodal classifiers either overlook these interdependencies or provide only limited interpretability. In this paper, we introduce MAR-12, a novel framework that leverages Vision Language Models (VLMs) for meme detection and understanding in settings where humorous and hateful elements may coexist. The framework first interprets each meme through twelve structured perspectives derived from humor and hate theories. It then applies a role-aware soft-gated attention mechanism to learn how much each perspective should contribute, followed by a prototype-based classifier for the final prediction. Finally, explanations are synthesized using both perspective-specific reasoning and learned attention weights, ensuring transparent and context-grounded justifications. We evaluate MAR-12 on the PrideMM and Memotion datasets, where it achieves up to 80.3% accuracy for humor detection and 75.9% accuracy for hate detection, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, both human and GPT-4-based evaluations confirm that MAR-12 produces coherent and persuasive explanations, particularly for memes in which humorous and harmful cues co-occur.
Shanhong Liu, Pai Chet Ng, D. Soh et al.· 0 citations