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VIBE: Can a VLM Read the Room?

Published: June 11, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2506.11162v1

By: Tania Chakraborty, Eylon Caplan, Dan Goldwasser

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers understand feelings from pictures.

Business Areas:
Natural Language Processing Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Software

Understanding human social behavior such as recognizing emotions and the social dynamics causing them is an important and challenging problem. While LLMs have made remarkable advances, they are limited to the textual domain and cannot account for the major role that non-verbal cues play in understanding social situations. Vision Language Models (VLMs) can potentially account for this gap, however their ability to make correct inferences over such social cues has received little attention. In this paper, we explore the capabilities of VLMs at social reasoning. We identify a previously overlooked limitation in VLMs: the Visual Social-Pragmatic Inference gap. To target this gap, we propose a new task for VLMs: Visual Social-Pragmatic Inference. We construct a high quality dataset to test the abilities of a VLM for this task and benchmark the performance of several VLMs on it.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
15 pages

Category
Computer Science:
CV and Pattern Recognition