FriendBench: Benchmarking Dyadic Familiarity Inference in Humans and Multimodal Large Language Models

Reading a social situation often depends on behavior, not words alone.

Reading a social situation often depends on behavior, not words alone. We introduce FriendBench, a benchmark for inferring whether two people are already familiar or are meeting as strangers, from a 20-second clip of a dyadic ice-breaker conversation. Every pair answers the same…