SeriesBench: A Benchmark for Narrative-Driven Drama Series Understanding

With the rapid development of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), an increasing number of benchmarks have been established to evaluate the video understanding capabilities of these models. However, these benchmarks focus on \textbf{standalone} videos and mainly assess ``visual elements'' like human actions and object states. In reality, contemporary videos often encompass complex and continuous narratives, typically presented as a \textbf{series}. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{SeriesBench}, a benchmark consisting of 105 carefully curated narrative-driven series, covering 28 specialized tasks that require deep narrative understanding. Specifically, we first select a diverse set of drama series spanning various genres. Then, we introduce a novel long-span narrative annotation method, combined with a full-information transformation approach to convert manual annotations into diverse task formats. To further enhance model capacity for detailed analysis of plot structures and character relationships within series, we propose a novel narrative reasoning framework, \textbf{PC-DCoT}. Extensive results on \textbf{SeriesBench} indicate that existing MLLMs still face significant challenges in understanding narrative-driven series, while \textbf{PC-DCoT} enables these MLLMs to achieve performance improvements. Overall, our \textbf{SeriesBench} and \textbf{PC-DCoT} highlight the critical necessity of advancing model capabilities to understand narrative-driven series, guiding the future development of MLLMs. SeriesBench is publicly available at https://github.com/zackhxn/SeriesBench-CVPR2025.