PsycheMME: A Psychology-Informed Benchmark for Social Understanding and Interaction in Videos

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.

Self-disclosures on the Web support diverse psychological analyses, from recognizing expressed experiences to identifying symptom-relevant information. We study a shared, question-conditioned decision interface for this heterogeneous problem in content analysis. We organize PsyJudgeBench, comprising 13 annotated datasets and 82 questions across six psychological areas, while preserving source-specific criteria and masks for unobserved labels. We introduce PsyJev, a System-1 model that directly produces distributions over answers specified in each request. Joint supervised training establishes the shared judgment function, followed by Judgment-Anchored RLCD (JA-RLCD), which adapts logit-space reward optimization to heterogeneous psychological judgments through balanced supervision, selective retention of correct SFT predictions, and question-group reward optimization. The Qwen3.5-based 2B, 4B, and 9B models achieve 64.33, 66.21, and 67.56 average test F1, respectively. The 9B model exceeds the strongest external comparison by 2.54 points. Controlled 2B comparisons examine the training stages and anchored refinement. Further analyses examine question-conditioned judgment, inference cost, and probability quality, complemented by qualitative comparisons across models.

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. In this context, we report three findings. First, IntentBench is highly noisy: $\sim$7% of questions are broken and $\sim$23% are trivially answerable without the video input. We remove the affected questions and release Intentbench-Prime. Second, current reasoning approaches are expensive and surprisingly ineffective. A simple Vanilla SFT baseline matches or outperforms existing reasoning methods across three benchmarks at a fraction of the cost, establishing it as an essential baseline for evaluating novel fine-tuning techniques. Third, our analysis reveals that substantial priors can be learned solely from the text modality and that using a textual caption instead of the video yields performance on par with Vanilla SFT. These surprising findings reveal the limitations of current MLLMs when it comes to social understanding. IntentBench-Prime, Vanilla SFT model, and code are publicly available.