Benchmarking Dynamic Affective Reasoning: A Viewer-Centric Video Emotion Dataset

Abstract

Video emotion analysis is typically framed as a static classification problem, treating each clip as an independent labeled unit. However, such a formulation overlooks a key psychological fact: emotions change as a result of cumulative reactions to consecutive causal events. To bridge this gap, we introduce Dynamic Affective Reasoning, the first large-scale benchmark for viewer-centric affect transitions and causal reasoning over consecutive video events. DAR contains 15,087 videos and 36,908 event-aligned affective segments annotated with 27 emotion categories. Unlike existing video-based emotion datasets, DAR presents a new viewer-centric perspective on fine-grained emotional expressions and transitions, and provides dense, temporally grounded, and causally explicit reasoning chains. Based on DAR, we formally define three challenging tasks: affective segmentation, fine-grained emotion classification, and affective reasoning. Complementing this benchmark, we propose DAR-R1, a two-stage framework that combines supervised fine-tuning with Group Relative Policy Optimization. Experiments across 10+ MLLMs show that DAR-R1 sets a new state-of-the-art for dynamic affective reasoning, in terms of both emotional localization and affective reasoning. Project page: https://github.com/Zhang-Zhiyan/DAR.