MTLLFM: Multimodal-Temporal Laughter Localization: UR-FUNNY-Temporal and SMILE-Temporal Benchmarks with an Adaptive Multimodal Fusion Model
For researchers in affective computing and video understanding, this provides the first precise temporal laughter localization benchmarks and a lightweight method that outperforms large multimodal models.
The paper introduces two new temporal laughter localization datasets (UR-FUNNY-Temporal and SMILE-Temporal) covering 11,053 videos and a weakly-supervised framework that achieves 99% F1 and 68.1% localization precision on sports broadcast data, improving downstream laughter reasoning by 227% on CIDEr.
Detecting laughter in video is essential for affective computing and narrative understanding, yet existing approaches treat it as coarse clip-level classification, failing to capture precise temporal boundaries of brief, transient laughter events. We address this gap with two complementary contributions. First, we introduce UR-FUNNY-Temporal and SMILE-Temporal, fully annotated temporal laughter datasets extending two widely-used humor benchmarks. Our annotations cover over 11,053 videos (78.8 hours) and provide precise onset/offset boundaries for each laughter event, along with rich metadata distinguishing speaker vs. audience laughter, modality dominance (acoustic, visual, or both), and intensity levels. Second, we propose a lightweight weakly-supervised framework for temporal laughter localization. Our architecture combines fixed HuBERT and MAE encoders with temporal softmax pooling and adaptive modality gating, learning fine-grained temporal grounding from clip-level labels without requiring frame-level annotations during training. Experiments across three datasets demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms multimodal foundation models including Gemini 3 Flash, achieving 99% F1 and 68.1% localization precision on sports broadcast data. Ablations validate each architectural component. Furthermore, our precise temporal tags improve downstream laughter reasoning by 227% on CIDEr, enabling GPT-3.5 to outperform GPT-4o. The code, UR-FUNNY-Temporal and SMILE-Temporal datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/WSCSports/MTLLFM-temporal-laughter-localization.