DeSIQ: Towards an Unbiased, Challenging Benchmark for Social
  Intelligence Understanding
Xiao-Yu Guo Yuan-Fang Li Gholamreza Haffari
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 language model 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.