MME-Emotion: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence in Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have catalyzed transformative progress in affective computing, enabling models to exhibit emergent emotional intelligence. Despite substantial methodological progress, current emotional benchmarks remain limited, as it is still unknown: (a) the generalization abilities of MLLMs across distinct scenarios, and (b) their reasoning capabilities to identify the triggering factors behind emotional states. To bridge these gaps, we present MME-Emotion, a systematic benchmark that assesses both emotional understanding and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, enjoying scalable capacity, diverse settings, and unified protocols. As the largest emotional intelligence benchmark for MLLMs, MME-Emotion contains over 6,000 curated video clips with task-specific questioning-answering (QA) pairs, spanning broad scenarios to formulate eight emotional tasks. It further incorporates a holistic evaluation suite with hybrid metrics for emotion recognition and reasoning, analyzed through a multi-agent system framework. Through a rigorous evaluation of 20 advanced MLLMs, we uncover both their strengths and limitations, yielding several key insights: ❶ Current MLLMs exhibit unsatisfactory emotional intelligence, with the best-performing model achieving only 39.3% recognition score and 56.0% Chain-of-Thought (CoT) score on our benchmark. ❷ Generalist models (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-4o) derive emotional intelligence from generalized multimodal understanding capabilities, while specialist models (e.g., R1-Omni and AffectGPT) can achieve comparable performance through domain-specific posttraining adaptation. By introducing MME-Emotion, we hope that it can serve as a foundation for advancing the emotional intelligence of MLLMs in the future. Project Page: https://mme-emotion.github.io/ .