ECHo: Event Causality Inference via Human-centric Reasoning

We introduce ECHo, a diagnostic dataset of event causality inference grounded in visual-and-linguistic social scenarios. ECHo employs real-world human-centric deductive information collected from crime drama, bridging the gap in multimodal reasoning towards higher social intelligence through the elicitation of intermediate Theory-of-Mind (ToM). We propose a unified framework aligned with the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm to assess the reasoning capability of current AI systems. This ToM-enhanced CoT pipeline can accommodate and integrate various large foundation models in zero-shot visual-and-linguistic understanding. With this framework, we scrutinize the advanced large language and multimodal models via three complementary human-centric ECHo tasks. Further analysis demonstrates ECHo as a challenging dataset to expose imperfections and inconsistencies in reasoning.