InsightVQA: High-Dimensional Emotion-Cognitive Visual Question Answering Benchmark

Visual emotion understanding requires models not only to recognize emotional states, but also to why they arise and perform higher-level cognitive reasoning. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on emotion recognition, offering limited support for grounded understanding and response-oriented analysis. To address this gap, we introduce InsightVQA, a large-scale dataset for hierarchical visual question answering on emotion understanding and cognitive reasoning. Building from 351K images collected from six public sources, we apply a rigorous multi-stage filtering pipeline to curate 138K high-confidence images. Each image is annotated at three hierarchical levels: perception QA for emotion and valence recognition, grounded understanding QA constructed from visual trigger extraction through constraint-guided generation, and cognition QA centered on response intent prediction and sequential insight reasoning. In total, InsightVQA contains 725K QA pairs. We further present InsightVQA-Bench, a high-quality evaluation benchmark comprising 30K samples for fine-grained evaluation. To support evaluation, we introduce InsightNet, an emotion-tuned baseline for MLLMs. Results demonstrate that InsightVQA poses significant challenges for grounded emotion understanding and reasoning.