Social Caption: Evaluating Social Understanding in Multimodal Models

Social understanding abilities are crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret human social interactions. We introduce Social Caption, a framework grounded in interaction theory to evaluate social understanding abilities of MLLMs along three dimensions: Social Inference (SI), the ability to make accurate inferences about interactions; Holistic Social Analysis (HSA), the ability to generate comprehensive descriptions of interactions; Directed Social Analysis (DSA), the ability to extract relevant social information from interactions. We analyze factors influencing model performance in social understanding, such as scale, architectural design, and spoken context. Experiments with MLLM judges contribute insights about scaling automated evaluation of multimodal social understanding.

American Sign Language Video to Text Translation

Sign language to text is a crucial technology that can break down communication barriers for individuals with hearing difficulties. We replicate and try to improve on a recently published study. We evaluate models using BLEU and rBLEU metrics to ensure translation quality. During our ablation study, we found that the model's performance is significantly influenced by optimizers, activation functions, and label smoothing. Further research aims to refine visual feature capturing, enhance decoder utilization, and integrate pre-trained decoders for better translation outcomes. Our source code is available to facilitate replication of our results and encourage future research.