Can Agents Read the Room? Benchmarking Visual Social Intelligence in Multimodal Simulation

Title:Can Agents Read the Room? Benchmarking Visual Social Intelligence in Multimodal Simulation

Abstract:Social interaction depends on both language and visible social signals, such as facial expressions, posture, gaze, and emotional shifts. Yet existing social-agent benchmarks are largely text-based and rarely test whether multimodal agents can use visual cues to guide interaction. We introduce \textsc{\benchmarkname{}}, a benchmark evaluating visual social intelligence in multimodal social simulation. It contains 240 scenarios, 585 role instances, and 2,340 role-task instances, combining aligned textual-visual evidence, structured role profiles, and four role-level tasks: expression task, characteristic task, interaction regulation task, and interaction outcome task. Evaluating seven recent MLLMs under verbalized-vision and direct-vision reveals a clear gap between local role enactment and interaction management: role-specific expression and conflict handling are near saturation, whereas interaction regulation and visually grounded outcome achievement remain substantially more difficult. The code is released at this https URL, and the dataset is available at this https URL.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2606.15152 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.15152v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.15152 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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