AffToM: Benchmarking Recursive Affective Theory of Mind in Dynamic Multi-Party Interactions

Jinpeng Hu, Yiduo Jin, Erqiang Wang, Jia Li, Jingjing Wu +1

Understanding emotion in realistic social interactions requires more than recognizing facial expressions or assigning affective labels. The same event can elicit different emotions depending on what each participant knows, what they believe others know or feel, and how these nested mental states evolve over time. Existing benchmarks largely study higher-order epistemic Theory of Mind (ToM) and multimodal emotion reasoning in isolation, leaving recursive affective reasoning under asymmetric and dynamically changing information underexplored. Therefore, we introduce AffToM, a benchmark for affective ToM with 1,922 test pairs and 19,759 training pairs. AffToM evaluates Individual Affective Reasoning (IAR), which infers emotions from events and socio-cognitive context, and Multi-party Affective Reasoning (MPAR), which recursively tracks participants' nested beliefs and emotions as new evidence emerges. We develop an event-driven multi-agent generation pipeline grounded in dynamic character interaction graphs that explicitly capture event sequences, interpersonal relations, and mental-state updates. Furthermore, we propose AffToM-R1, a two-stage post-training framework combining…