SMILE-Next: Teaching Large Language Models to Detect, Classify, and Reason about Laughter

Laughter is a complex social signal that conveys communicative intent beyond amusement. While prior work has focused on isolated laughter analysis tasks, a comprehensive understanding of laughter in real-world scenarios remains underexplored. Therefore, we introduce SMILE-Next, a dataset for real-world laughter understanding with multimodal textual representations and question-answer annotations across three tasks: laughter detection, laughter type classification, and laughter reasoning. Building upon SMILE-Next, we aim to develop a laughter-specialized large language model capable of nuanced understanding of laughter in real-world contexts. To this end, we propose two key components: laughter-specific Self-Instruct and the Mixture-of-Laugh-Experts (MoLE) framework. Laughter-specific Self-Instruct enhances generalization across tasks and domains by automatically synthesizing diverse laughter-centric instructions. MoLE introduces a task-adaptive expert routing mechanism that dynamically selects specialized experts tailored to each laughter-related task, improving task-specific performance and efficiency. Experimental results show that the combination of our proposed components substantially outperforms multimodal LLM baselines, advancing robust real-world laughter understanding. Project page is at: https://mok0102.github.io/smile-next/.