Multimodal Intent Recognition (MIR) aims to understand complex user intentions by leveraging text, video, and audio signals. However, existing approaches face two key challenges: (1) overlooking intricate cross-modal interactions for distinguishing consistent and inconsistent cues, and (2) ineffectively modeling multimodal conflicts, leading to semantic cancellation. To address these, we propose a novel Cognitive Dual-Pathway Reasoning (CDPR) framework, which constructs a stable semantic foundation via the intuition pathway and mitigates high-level semantic conflicts through the reasoning pathway, cooperatively establishing deep semantic relations. Specifically, we first employ a representation disentanglement strategy to extract modality-invariant and specific features. Subsequently, the intuition pathway aggregates cross-modal consensus using shared features for solid global representations. The reasoning pathway introduces an inconsistency perception mechanism, combining semantic prototype matching with statistical probability calibration to precisely quantify conflict severity, and dynamically adjusting the weights between both pathways. Furthermore, a multi-view loss function is adopted to alleviate modality laziness and learn structured features at different stages. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks show that CDPR achieves SOTA performance and superior robustness in mitigating multimodal inconsistency. The code is available at https://github.com/Hebust-NLP/CDPR.

Multimodal language analysis is a rapidly evolving field that leverages multiple modalities to enhance the understanding of high-level semantics underlying human conversational utterances. Despite its significance, little research has investigated the capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to comprehend cognitive-level semantics. In this paper, we introduce MMLA, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to address this gap. MMLA comprises over 61K multimodal utterances drawn from both staged and real-world scenarios, covering six core dimensions of multimodal semantics: intent, emotion, dialogue act, sentiment, speaking style, and communication behavior. We evaluate eight mainstream branches of LLMs and MLLMs using three methods: zero-shot inference, supervised fine-tuning, and instruction tuning. Extensive experiments reveal that even fine-tuned models achieve only about 60~70% accuracy, underscoring the limitations of current MLLMs in understanding complex human language. We believe that MMLA will serve as a solid foundation for exploring the potential of large language models in multimodal language analysis and provide valuable resources to advance this field. The datasets and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/thuiar/MMLA.