# HumanVBench: Probing Human-Centric Video Understanding in MLLMs with Automatically Synthesized Benchmarks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17574 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17574/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 42 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07533/) (2023)
- [LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15754/) (2024)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [LLaVA-Video: Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02713/) (2024)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [ShareGPT4Video: Improving Video Understanding and Generation with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04325/) (2024)
- [MLVU: Benchmarking Multi-task Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04264/) (2024)
- [CogVLM2: Visual Language Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16500/) (2024)
- [Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17432/) (2023)
- [OneLLM: One Framework to Align All Modalities with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03700/) (2023)
- [TVQA+: Spatio-Temporal Grounding for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11574/) (2019)
- [S3FD: Single Shot Scale-invariant Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05237/) (2017)
- [Beyond LLaVA-HD: Diving into High-Resolution Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08487/) (2024)
- [Natural Language Understanding and Inference with MLLM in Visual Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17558/) (2024)
- [ChatBridge: Bridging Modalities with Large Language Model as a Language Catalyst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16103/) (2023)
- [Data-Juicer: A One-Stop Data Processing System for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02033/) (2023)
- [A Light Weight Model for Active Speaker Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04439/) (2023)
- [HumanBench: Towards General Human-centric Perception with Projector Assisted Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05675/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Video-MMLU: A Massive Multi-Discipline Lecture Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14693/) (2025)
- [From Perception to Cognition: A Survey of Vision-Language Interactive Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25373/) (2025)
- [VistaDPO: Video Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Direct Preference Optimization for Large Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13122/) (2025)
- [MindGYM: What Matters in Question Synthesis for Thinking-Centric Fine-Tuning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09499/) (2025)
- [HumanVideo-MME: Benchmarking MLLMs for Human-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04909/) (2025)
- [Human-MME: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Human-Centric Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26165/) (2025)
- [FineBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Fine-grained Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19846/) (2026)
- [HumanPCR: Probing MLLM Capabilities in Diverse Human-Centric Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13692/) (2025)
- [MHPR: Multidimensional Human Perception and Reasoning Benchmark for Large Vision-Languate Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03485/) (2026)
- [HUG-VIS: A Multimodal Benchmark for Human-centered Understanding and Generation in Visual Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26517/) (2026)
- [HumanPhys: A Human-Centric Physical-World Perception Benchmark for Real-World Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14679/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating the nuanced human-centric video understanding capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains a great challenge, as existing benchmarks often overlook the intricacies of emotion, behavior, and cross-modal alignment. We introduce HumanVBench, a comprehensive video benchmark designed to rigorously probe these capabilities across 16 fine-grained tasks. A cornerstone of our work is a novel and scalable benchmark construction methodology, featuring two automated pipelines that synthesize high-quality video annotations and challenging multiple-choice questions with minimal human labor. By leveraging state-of-the-art models for annotation and systematically converting model-induced errors into plausible distractors, our framework provides a generalizable ``machine'' for creating nuanced evaluation suites. Our extensive evaluation of 30 leading MLLMs on HumanVBench reveals critical deficiencies, particularly in perceiving subtle emotions and aligning speech with visual cues, with even top proprietary models falling short of human performance. We open-source HumanVBench and our synthesis pipelines to catalyze the development of more socially intelligent and capable video MLLMs.