With the integration of Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) into robotic systems and various AI applications, embedding emotional intelligence (EI) capabilities into these models is essential for enabling robots to effectively address human emotional needs and interact seamlessly in real-world scenarios. Existing static, text-based, or text-image benchmarks overlook the multimodal complexities of real-world interactions and fail to capture the dynamic, multimodal nature of emotional expressions, making them inadequate for evaluating MLLMs' EI. Based on established psychological theories of EI, we build EmoBench-M, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the EI capability of MLLMs across 13 valuation scenarios from three key dimensions: foundational emotion recognition, conversational emotion understanding, and socially complex emotion analysis. Evaluations of both open-source and closed-source MLLMs on EmoBench-M reveal a significant performance gap between them and humans, highlighting the need to further advance their EI capabilities. All benchmark resources, including code and datasets, are publicly available at https://emo-gml.github.io/.

Currently training a large event-text model still poses a huge challenge due to the shortage of paired event-text data. In response to this challenge, CEIA learns to align event and image data as an alternative instead of directly aligning event and text data. Specifically, we leverage the rich event-image datasets to learn an event embedding space aligned with the image space of CLIP through contrastive learning. In this way, event and text data are naturally aligned via using image data as a bridge. Particularly, CEIA offers two distinct advantages. First, it allows us to take full advantage of the existing event-image datasets to make up the shortage of large-scale event-text datasets. Second, leveraging more training data, it also exhibits the flexibility to boost performance, ensuring scalable capability. In highlighting the versatility of our framework, we make extensive evaluations through a diverse range of event-based multi-modal applications, such as object recognition, event-image retrieval, event-text retrieval, and domain adaptation. The outcomes demonstrate CEIA's distinct zero-shot superiority over existing methods on these applications.