arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

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

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2607.29602 (cs)
[Submitted on 31 Jul 2026]

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

View a PDF of the paper titled FriendBench: Benchmarking Dyadic Familiarity Inference in Humans and Multimodal Large Language Models, by Jeffrey M. Girard and 4 other authors
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Abstract: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 type of prompt, so only the manner of interaction can reveal the answer. Across text, audio, and video, we compare 26 models from seven companies against matched human panels over 96 balanced dyads. The best model and the human crowd are statistically indistinguishable on accuracy in every modality, but reach it differently: humans stay balanced across the two answers, while the strongest models lean toward "stranger"---a difference in effective prior, not discrimination. Richer channels help both unequally, and only humans gain from visible behavior on top of speech. We release the stimuli, human ratings, and model predictions.
Comments: 15 pages, 3 figures
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.29602 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2607.29602v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.29602
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Jeffrey Girard [view email]
[v1] Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:33:39 UTC (305 KB)
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