EmoBench-M: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence for Multimodal Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hu, He, You, Lianzhong, Xu, Hongbo, Wang, Qianning, Yu, Fei Richard, Ma, Fei, Cheng, Zebang, Lian, Zheng, Zhou, Yucheng, Cui, Laizhong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hu, He
You, Lianzhong
Xu, Hongbo
Wang, Qianning
Yu, Fei Richard
Ma, Fei
Cheng, Zebang
Lian, Zheng
Zhou, Yucheng
Cui, Laizhong
author_facet Hu, He
You, Lianzhong
Xu, Hongbo
Wang, Qianning
Yu, Fei Richard
Ma, Fei
Cheng, Zebang
Lian, Zheng
Zhou, Yucheng
Cui, Laizhong
contents With the integration of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) into robotic systems and AI applications, embedding emotional intelligence (EI) capabilities is essential for enabling these models to perceive, interpret, and respond to human emotions effectively in real-world scenarios. Existing static, text-based, or text-image benchmarks overlook the multimodal complexities of real interactions and fail to capture the dynamic, context-dependent nature of emotional expressions, rendering them inadequate for evaluating MLLMs' EI capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce EmoBench-M, a systematic benchmark grounded in established psychological theories, designed to evaluate MLLMs across 13 evaluation scenarios spanning three hierarchical dimensions: foundational emotion recognition (FER), conversational emotion understanding (CEU), and socially complex emotion analysis (SCEA). Evaluation was conducted on 27 state-of-the-art MLLMs, using both objective task-specific metrics and LLM-based evaluation, revealing a substantial performance gap relative to human-level competence. Even the best performing models, Gemini-3.0-Pro and GPT-5.2, achieve the highest scores on EmoBench-M, 70.5 and 66.5 points respectively. Specialized models such as AffectGPT exhibit uneven performance across EmoBench-M, demonstrating strengths in certain scenarios but generally lacking comprehensive emotional intelligence. By providing a comprehensive, multimodal evaluation framework, EmoBench-M captures both the strengths and weaknesses of current MLLMs across diverse emotional contexts. All benchmark resources, including datasets and code, are publicly available at https://emo-gml.github.io/, facilitating further research and advancement in MLLM emotional intelligence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04424
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EmoBench-M: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence for Multimodal Large Language Models
Hu, He
You, Lianzhong
Xu, Hongbo
Wang, Qianning
Yu, Fei Richard
Ma, Fei
Cheng, Zebang
Lian, Zheng
Zhou, Yucheng
Cui, Laizhong
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
With the integration of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) into robotic systems and AI applications, embedding emotional intelligence (EI) capabilities is essential for enabling these models to perceive, interpret, and respond to human emotions effectively in real-world scenarios. Existing static, text-based, or text-image benchmarks overlook the multimodal complexities of real interactions and fail to capture the dynamic, context-dependent nature of emotional expressions, rendering them inadequate for evaluating MLLMs' EI capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce EmoBench-M, a systematic benchmark grounded in established psychological theories, designed to evaluate MLLMs across 13 evaluation scenarios spanning three hierarchical dimensions: foundational emotion recognition (FER), conversational emotion understanding (CEU), and socially complex emotion analysis (SCEA). Evaluation was conducted on 27 state-of-the-art MLLMs, using both objective task-specific metrics and LLM-based evaluation, revealing a substantial performance gap relative to human-level competence. Even the best performing models, Gemini-3.0-Pro and GPT-5.2, achieve the highest scores on EmoBench-M, 70.5 and 66.5 points respectively. Specialized models such as AffectGPT exhibit uneven performance across EmoBench-M, demonstrating strengths in certain scenarios but generally lacking comprehensive emotional intelligence. By providing a comprehensive, multimodal evaluation framework, EmoBench-M captures both the strengths and weaknesses of current MLLMs across diverse emotional contexts. All benchmark resources, including datasets and code, are publicly available at https://emo-gml.github.io/, facilitating further research and advancement in MLLM emotional intelligence.
title EmoBench-M: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence for Multimodal Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04424