DeSIQ: Towards an Unbiased, Challenging Benchmark for Social Intelligence Understanding

Abstract: Social intelligence is essential for understanding and reasoning about human expressions, intents and interactions. One representative benchmark for its study is Social Intelligence Queries (Social-IQ), a dataset of multiple-choice questions on videos of complex social interactions. We define a comprehensive methodology to study the soundness of Social-IQ, as the soundness of such benchmark datasets is crucial to the investigation of the underlying research problem. Our analysis reveals that Social-IQ contains substantial biases, which can be exploited by a moderately strong LLM to learn spurious correlations to achieve perfect performance without being given the context or even the question. We introduce DeSIQ, a new challenging dataset, constructed by applying simple perturbations to Social-IQ. Our empirical analysis shows DeSIQ significantly reduces the biases in the original Social-IQ dataset. Furthermore, we examine and shed light on the effect of model size, model style, learning settings, commonsense knowledge, and multi-modality on the new benchmark performance. Our new dataset, observations and findings open up important research questions for the study of social intelligence.