SeriesBench: A Benchmark for Narrative-Driven Drama Series Understanding

With the rapid development of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), an increasing number of benchmarks have been established to evaluate the video understanding capabilities of these models. However, these benchmarks focus solely on standalone videos and assess only “visual elements” in videos, such as human actions and object states. In reality, contemporary videos often encompass complex and continuous narratives, typically presented as a series. To address this challenge, we propose SeriesBench, a benchmark consisting of 105 carefully curated narrative-driven series, covering 28 specialized tasks that require deep narrative understanding to solve. Specifically, we first select a diverse set of drama series spanning various genres. Then, we introduce a novel long-span narrative annotation method, combined with a full-information transformation approach to convert manual annotations into diverse task formats. To further enhance the model's capacity for detailed analysis of plot structures and character relationships within series, we propose a novel narrative reasoning framework, PC-DCoT. Extensive results on SeriesBench indicate that existing MLLMs still face significant challenges in understanding narrative-driven series, while PC-DCoT enables these MLLMs to achieve performance improvements. Overall, our SeriesBench and PC-DCoT highlight the critical necessity of advancing model capabilities for understanding narrative-driven series, guiding future MLLM development.