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Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Yifan Yang, Hui Wang, Bing Han, Shujie Liu, Jinyu Li, Yong Qin, Xie Chen

Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) technology have enabled systems to generate speech that is often indistinguishable from human speech, bringing benefits to accessibility, content creation, and human-computer interaction. However, current evaluation practices are increasingly inadequate for capturing the full range of capabilities, limitations, and societal impacts of modern TTS systems. This position paper introduces the concept of Responsible Evaluation and argues that it is essential and urgent for the next phase of TTS development, structured through three progressive levels: (1) ensuring the faithful and accurate reflection of a model's true capabilities and limitations, with more robust, discriminative, and comprehensive objective and subjective scoring methodologies; (2) enabling comparability, standardization, and transferability through standardized benchmarks, transparent reporting, and transferable evaluation metrics; and (3) assessing and mitigating ethical risks associated with forgery, misuse, privacy violations, and security vulnerabilities. Through this concept, we critically examine current evaluation practices, identify systemic shortcomings, and propose actionable recommendations. We hope this concept will not only foster more reliable and trustworthy TTS technology but also guide its development toward ethically sound and societally beneficial applications.

Applications · Computer Vision

Lancheng Gao, Ziheng Jia, Zixuan Xing, Wei Sun, Huiyu Duan, Guangtao Zhai, Xiongkuo Min

Understanding the multi-dimensional attributes and intensity nuances of image-evoked emotions is pivotal for advancing machine empathy and empowering diverse human-computer interaction applications. However, existing models are still limited to coarse-grained emotion perception or deficient reasoning capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce **EEmoDB**, the largest image-evoked emotion understanding dataset to date. It features $5$ analysis dimensions spanning $5$ distinct task categories, facilitating comprehensive interpretation. Specifically, we compile $1.2M$ question-answering (QA) pairs (EEmoDB-QA) from $125k$ images via automated generation, alongside a $36k$ dataset (EEmoDB-Assess) curated from $25k$ images for fine-grained assessment. Furthermore, we propose **EEmo-Logic**, an **all-in-one** multimodal large language model (MLLM) developed via instruction fine-tuning and task-customized group relative preference optimization (GRPO) with novel reward design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EEmo-Logic achieves robust performance in in-domain and cross-domain datasets, excelling in emotion QA and fine-grained assessment. The code is available at [https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EEmoLogic](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EEmoLogic).

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Zheng Lian, Licai Sun, Lan Chen, Haoyu Chen, Zebang Cheng, Fan Zhang, Ziyu Jia, Ziyang Ma, Fei Ma, Xiaojiang Peng 等

Descriptive Multimodal Emotion Recognition (DMER) has garnered increasing research attention. Unlike traditional discriminative paradigms that rely on predefined emotion taxonomies, DMER aims to describe human emotional state using free-form natural language, enabling finer-grained and more interpretable emotion representations. However, this free-form prediction paradigm introduces new challenges regarding its evaluation. Previous works depend on ground-truth descriptions, but emotions are inherently tied to diverse human behaviors, and generating a comprehensive and accurate description is inherently demanding. Other researchers reformulate this problem into a more tractable human preference learning task, but pairwise preference annotation involves substantial manual effort. This leads to a question: *can we leverage multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to achieve more cost-efficient preference annotation?* To answer this, we propose **EmoPrefer**, a pioneering work exploring the potential of LLMs in decoding human emotion preferences. Specifically, we construct the first emotion preference dataset, **EmoPrefer-Data**, featuring high-quality preference annotations from experts. Additionally, we introduce **EmoPrefer-Bench**, which evaluates the performance of various MLLMs and prompting techniques in preference prediction, while also revealing new strategies to enhance their performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work exploring the capabilities of LLMs in understanding human emotion preferences. Our work advances the field of DMER and lays the foundation for more intelligent human-computer interaction. Our data and code are released at https://github.com/zeroQiaoba/AffectGPT/tree/master/EmoPrefer.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Guocong Li, Jinjian Zhang, Ping Wang, Dongnan Liu, Tian Liang, Qiuyi Qi, Hao Huang, Siyan Guo, Mutian Bao, Wei Zhou 等

We present Mixture-of-Length (MoL), an approach for Question Answering (QA) with context that aims to improve the balance between reasoning quality and response efficiency. Our method introduces a principled difficulty assessment based on information-theoretic principles and a dual-objective reward mechanism that adaptively modulates response length. In our experiments, MoL exhibits an emergent behavior termed "intelligent brevity": the model tends to produce shorter responses for simpler queries and longer ones for more complex inputs. This property is desirable for human-computer interaction and can reduce inference costs. A post-hoc analysis of internal activations suggests a correlation between this output adaptivity and the effective number of layers that contribute during inference. On multiple QA benchmarks, MoL demonstrates competitive accuracy while substantially reducing tokens compared to baselines, indicating that difficulty-aware length modulation is a promising direction for efficient QA with context.

Loka Li, Wong Kang, Minghao Fu, Guangyi Chen, Zhenhao Chen, Gongxu Luo, Yuewen Sun, Salman Khan, Peter Spirtes, Kun Zhang

Understanding human behavior traits is central to applications in human-computer interaction, computational social science, and personalized AI systems. Such understanding often requires integrating multiple modalities to capture nuanced patterns and relationships. However, existing resources rarely provide datasets that combine behavioral descriptors with complementary modalities such as facial attributes and biographical information. To address this gap, we present PersonaX, a curated collection of multimodal datasets designed to enable comprehensive analysis of public traits across modalities. PersonaX consists of (1) CelebPersona, featuring 9444 public figures from diverse occupations, and (2) AthlePersona, covering 4181 professional athletes across 7 major sports leagues. Each dataset includes behavioral trait assessments inferred by three high-performing large language models, alongside facial imagery and structured biographical features. We analyze PersonaX at two complementary levels. First, we abstract high-level trait scores from text descriptions and apply five statistical independence tests to examine their relationships with other modalities. Second, we introduce a novel causal representation learning (CRL) framework tailored to multimodal and multi-measurement data, providing theoretical identifiability guarantees. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. By unifying structured and unstructured analysis, PersonaX establishes a foundation for studying LLM-inferred behavioral traits in conjunction with visual and biographical attributes, advancing multimodal trait analysis and causal reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/lokali/PersonaX.

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Rui LYU, Juncheng Mo, Tianyi Chu, Chen Rao, Hongyi Jing, Jiajie Teng, Jiafu Chen, Shiqi Zhang, Liangzi Ding, Shuo Fang 等

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agent is pivotal to advancing intelligent human-computer interaction paradigms. Constructing powerful GUI agents necessitates the large-scale annotation of high-quality user-behavior trajectory data (i.e., intent–trajectory pairs) for training. However, manual annotation methods and current GUI agent data mining approaches typically face three critical challenges: high construction cost, poor data quality, and low data richness. To address these issues, we propose M$^2$-Miner, the first low-cost and automated mobile GUI agent data-mining framework based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). For better data mining efficiency and quality, we present a collaborative multi-agent framework, comprising InferAgent, OrchestraAgent, and JudgeAgent for guidance, acceleration, and evaluation. To further enhance the efficiency of mining and enrich intent diversity, we design an intent recycling strategy to extract extra valuable interaction trajectories. Additionally, a progressive model-in-the-loop training strategy is introduced to improve the success rate of data mining. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the GUI agent fine-tuned using our mined data achieves state-of-the-art performance on several commonly used mobile GUI benchmarks. Our work will be released to facilitate the community research.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Shanglin Li, Chu Shiwen, Okan Koc, Yi Ding, Qibin Zhao, Motoaki Kawanabe, Ziheng Chen

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces facilitate direct communication with a computer, enabling promising applications in human-computer interactions. However, their utility is currently limited because EEG decoding often suffers from poor generalization due to distribution shifts across domains (e.g., subjects). Learning robust representations that capture underlying task-relevant information would mitigate these shifts and improve generalization. One promising approach is to exploit the underlying hierarchical structure in EEG, as recent studies suggest that hierarchical cognitive processes, such as visual processing, can be encoded in EEG. Yet, most existing decoding methods rely on Euclidean embeddings, which are not well-suited for capturing hierarchical structures. In contrast, hyperbolic spaces, regarded as the continuous analogue of tree structures, provide a natural geometry for representing hierarchical data. In this study, we first demonstrate that EEG data exhibit hyperbolicity and show that hyperbolic embeddings improve generalization. Motivated by these findings, we propose HEEGNet, a hybrid hyperbolic network architecture to capture the hierarchical structure in EEG and learn domain-invariant hyperbolic embeddings. To this end, HEEGNet combines both Euclidean and hyperbolic encoders and employs a novel coarse-to-fine domain adaptation strategy. Extensive experiments on multiple public EEG datasets, covering visual evoked potentials, emotion recognition, and intracranial EEG, demonstrate that HEEGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Computer Vision · Classification and Understanding

Masoumeh Sharafi, Soufiane Belharbi, Muhammad Zeeshan, HOUSSEM Salem, Ali Etemad, Alessandro Lameiras Koerich, Marco Pedersoli, Simon L Bacon, Eric Granger

Facial expression recognition (FER) models are employed in many video-based affective computing applications, such as human-computer interaction and healthcare monitoring. However, deep FER models often struggle with subtle expressions and high inter-subject variability, limiting their performance in real-world applications. To improve performance, source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) methods have been proposed to personalize a pretrained source model using only unlabeled target domain data, thereby avoiding data privacy, storage, and trans- mission constraints. This paper addresses a common challenging scenario where source data is unavailable for adaptation, and only unlabeled target data consisting solely of neutral expressions is available. SFDA methods are not typically designed to adapt using target data from only a single class. Further, using models to generate facial images with non-neutral expressions can be unstable and computationally intensive. In this paper, the Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Personalized Feature Translation (SFDA-PFT) method is proposed for SFDA. Unlike current image translation methods for SFDA, our lightweight method op- erates in the latent space. We first pre-train the translator on source domain data to transform the subject-specific style features from one source subject into another. Expression information is preserved by optimizing a combination of expression consistency and style-aware objectives. Then, the translator is adapted to neutral target data, without using source data or image synthesis. By translating in the latent space, SFDA-PFT avoids the complexity and noise of face expression generation, producing discriminative embeddings optimized for classification. Using SFDA-PFT eliminates the need for image synthesis, reduces computational overhead, and only adapts a lightweight translator, making the method efficient compared to image-based translation. Our extensive experiments on four challenging video FER benchmark datasets, BioVid, stressID, BAH, and Af-Wild2, show that PFT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SFDA methods, providing a cost-effective approach that is suitable for real-world, privacy-sensitive FER applications. Our code is publicly available at: github.com/MasoumehSharafi/SFDA-PFT.

Computer Vision · Classification and Understanding

siheng wang, Yanshu Li, Bohan Hu, Zhengdao Li, HaiboZhan, Linshan Li, Weiming Liu, Ruizhi Qian, Guangxin Wu, Hao Zhang 等

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) plays a critical role in autonomous driving and human-computer interaction by enabling perception beyond closed-set categories. However, current approaches predominantly rely on multimodal fusion, facing dual limitations: multimodal fusion methods incur heavy computational overhead from text encoders, while task-coupled designs compromise between detection precision and open-world generalization. To address these challenges, we propose Decoupled Cognition DETR, a vision framework featuring a three-stage cognitive distillation mechanism: Dynamic Hierarchical Concept Pool constructs self-evolving concept prototypes using LLaVA-generated region descriptions filtered by CLIP alignment, aiming to replace costly text encoders and reduce computational overhead; Hierarchical Knowledge Distillation decouples visual-semantic space mapping via prototype-centric projection, avoiding task coupling to enhance open-world generalization; Parametric Decoupling Training coordinates localization and cognition through dual-stream gradient isolation, further optimizing detection precision. Extensive experiments on the common OVOD evaluation protocol demonstrated that DeCo-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing OVOD methods. It provides a new paradigm for extending OVOD to more real-world applications.

Giuseppe Cartella, Vittorio Cuculo, Alessandro D'Amelio, Marcella Cornia, Giuseppe Boccignone, Rita Cucchiara

Predicting human gaze scanpaths is crucial for understanding visual attention, with applications in human-computer interaction, autonomous systems, and cognitive robotics. While deep learning models have advanced scanpath prediction, most existing approaches generate averaged behaviors, failing to capture the variability of human visual exploration. In this work, we present ScanDiff, a novel architecture that combines diffusion models with Vision Transformers to generate diverse and realistic scanpaths. Our method explicitly models scanpath variability by leveraging the stochastic nature of diffusion models, producing a wide range of plausible gaze trajectories. Additionally, we introduce textual conditioning to enable task-driven scanpath generation, allowing the model to adapt to different visual search objectives. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that ScanDiff surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both free-viewing and task-driven scenarios, producing more diverse and accurate scanpaths. These results highlight its ability to better capture the complexity of human visual behavior, pushing forward gaze prediction research. Source code and models are publicly available at https://aimagelab.github.io/ScanDiff.

Fa-Ting Hong, Zunnan Xu, Zixiang Zhou, Jun Zhou, Xiu Li, Qin Lin, Qinglin Lu, Dan Xu

Talking head synthesis is vital for virtual avatars and human-computer interaction. However, most existing methods are typically limited to accepting control from a single primary modality, restricting their practical utility. To this end, we introduce ACTalker, an end-to-end video diffusion framework that supports both multi-signals control and single-signal control for talking head video generation. For multiple control, we design a parallel mamba structure with multiple branches, each utilizing a separate driving signal to control specific facial regions. A gate mechanism is applied across all branches, providing flexible control over video generation. To ensure natural coordination of the controlled video both temporally and spatially, we employ the mamba structure, which enables driving signals to manipulate feature tokens across both dimensions in each branch. Additionally, we introduce a mask-drop strategy that allows each driving signal to independently control its corresponding facial region within the mamba structure, preventing control conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces natural-looking facial videos driven by diverse signals and that the mamba layer seamlessly integrates multiple driving modalities without conflict.

Alexander C. Ogren, Berthy T. Feng, Jihoon Ahn, Katherine L. Bouman, Chiara Daraio

Wave propagation on the surface of a material contains information about physical properties beneath its surface. We propose a method for inferring the thickness and stiffness of a structure from just a video of waves on its surface. Our method works by extracting a dispersion relation from the video and then solving a physics-based optimization problem to find the best-fitting thickness and stiffness parameters. We validate our method on both simulated and real data, in both cases showing strong agreement with ground-truth measurements. Our technique provides a proof-of-concept for at-home health monitoring of medically-informative tissue properties, and it is further applicable to fields such as human-computer interaction.

Anh Thai, Songyou Peng, Kyle Genova, Leonidas Guibas, Thomas Funkhouser

Language-guided 3D scene understanding is important for advancing applications in robotics, AR/VR, and human-computer interaction, enabling models to comprehend and interact with 3D environments through natural language. While 2D vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in 2D VQA tasks, progress in the 3D domain has been significantly slower due to the complexity of 3D data and the high cost of manual annotations. In this work, we introduce SplatTalk, a novel method that uses a generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework to produce 3D tokens suitable for direct input into a pretrained LLM, enabling effective zero-shot 3D visual question answering (3D VQA) for scenes with only posed images. During experiments on multiple benchmarks, our approach outperforms both 3D models trained specifically for the task and previous 2D-LMM-based models utilizing only images (our setting), while achieving competitive performance with state-of-the-art 3D LMMs that additionally utilize 3D inputs.

Jun-Hee Kim, Jumin Han, Seong-Whan Lee

Standard 3D human pose estimation (HPE) benchmarks employ root-centering, which normalizes poses relative to the pelvis but discards absolute root position information. While effective for evaluation, this approach limits real-world applications such as motion tracking, AR/VR, and human-computer interaction, where absolute root position is essential. Moreover, incorporating root position into these models often leads to performance degradation. To address these limitations, we introduce PoseAnchor, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates root position estimation while improving overall pose accuracy. PoseAnchor leverages Iterative Hard Thresholding Robust Least Squares Regression (ITRR), a novel robust regression approach introduced to 3D HPE for the first time. ITRR effectively mitigates the impact of noisy 2D detections, enabling more accurate root position estimation. With ITRR, PoseAnchor enables zero-shot root localization, allowing existing models to estimate absolute root positions without retraining or architectural modifications. ITRR identifies a support set of reliable joints based on their spatial relationships to achieve robust root estimation, effectively filtering out unreliable joints. Beyond zero-shot localization, PoseAnchor incorporates ITRR into a Data-Driven Training framework that selectively utilizes the support set to optimize pose learning. By dynamically filtering high-confidence joint data, PoseAnchor mitigates noise while improving robustness.

Pengfei Ren, Jingyu Wang, Haifeng Sun, Qi Qi, Xingyu Liu, Menghao Zhang, Lei Zhang, Jing Wang, Jianxin Liao

3D hand pose estimation plays a critical role in various human-computer interaction tasks. Single-frame 3D hand pose estimation methods have poor temporal smoothness and are easily affected by self-occlusion, which severely impacts their practical applicability. Traditional joint-based sequential pose estimation methods primarily focus on the human body and struggle to handle the complex hand structure, high degrees of freedom in hand motion, and rapidly changing hand motion trends. To address these challenges, we propose a prior-aware dynamic temporal modeling framework for sequential 3D hand pose estimation. We introduce a flexible memory mechanism to model hand prior information, which alleviates the scale and depth ambiguity in single-frame hand pose estimation. Additionally, we propose a dynamic temporal convolution module that adjusts the receptive field size and feature aggregation weights based on the motion information at each moment, effectively capturing rapid motion trends. By decoupling dynamic temporal modeling at the joint and hand levels, our method captures both subtle short-term variations and long-term motion trends, significantly improving the smoothness and accuracy of hand pose estimation. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art results in terms of hand pose estimation accuracy and temporal smoothness.

Gen Li, Yutong Chen, Yiqian Wu, Kaifeng Zhao, Marc Pollefeys, Siyu Tang

Understanding multimodal signals in egocentric vision, such as RGB video, depth, camera poses, and gaze, is essential for applications in augmented reality, robotics, and human-computer interaction, enabling systems to better interpret the camera wearer's actions, intentions, and surrounding environment. However, building large-scale egocentric multimodal and multitask models presents unique challenges. Egocentric data are inherently heterogeneous, with large variations in modality coverage across devices and settings. Generating pseudo-labels for missing modalities, such as gaze or head-mounted camera trajectories, is often infeasible, making standard supervised learning approaches difficult to scale. Furthermore, dynamic camera motion and the complex temporal and spatial structure of first-person video pose additional challenges for the direct application of existing multimodal foundation models. To address these challenges, we introduce a set of efficient temporal tokenizers and propose EgoM2P, a masked modeling framework that learns from temporally-aware multimodal tokens to train a large, general-purpose model for egocentric 4D understanding. This unified design supports multitasking across diverse egocentric perception and synthesis tasks, including gaze prediction, egocentric camera tracking, and monocular depth estimation from egocentric video, and also serves as a generative model for conditional egocentric video synthesis. Across these tasks, EgoM2P matches or outperforms specialist models while being an order of magnitude faster. We will fully open-source EgoM2P to support the community and advance egocentric vision research.

Yuchen Zhou, Jiayu Tang, Xiaoyan Xiao, Yueyao Lin, Linkai Liu, Zipeng Guo, Hao Fei, Xiaobo Xia, Chao Gou

Modeling task-driven attention in driving is a fundamental challenge for both autonomous vehicles and cognitive science. Existing methods primarily predict where drivers look by generating spatial heatmaps, but fail to capture the cognitive motivations behind attention allocation in specific contexts, which limits deeper understanding of attention mechanisms. To bridge this gap, we introduce Explainable Driver Attention Prediction, a novel task paradigm that jointly predicts spatial attention regions (where), parses attended semantics (what), and provides cognitive reasoning for attention allocation (why). To support this, we present W3DA, the first large-scale explainable driver attention dataset. It enriches existing benchmarks with detailed semantic and causal annotations across diverse driving scenarios, including normal conditions, safety-critical situations, and traffic accidents. We further propose LLada, a Large Language model-driven framework for driver attention prediction, which unifies pixel modeling, semantic parsing, and cognitive reasoning within an end-to-end architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LLada, exhibiting robust generalization across datasets and driving conditions. This work serves as a key step toward a deeper understanding of driver attention mechanisms, with significant implications for autonomous driving, intelligent driver training, and human-computer interaction.

Hao Fei 0001, Bobo Li 0001, Meng Luo 0010, Qian Liu 0012, Lizi Liao, Fei Li 0021, Min Zhang 0005, Björn W. Schuller, Mong-Li Lee, Erik Cambria

The 1st Workshop on Cognition-oriented Multimodal Affective and Empathetic Computing (CogMAEC) was held at ACM Multimedia 2025. It focused on moving emotional AI beyond basic recognition toward deeper cognitive understanding. While traditional multimodal affective computing has emphasized simple emotion detection, the rise of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has spurred interest in modeling how emotions emerge and evolve in context. The workshop gathered researchers on emotion reasoning, multimodal understanding, and human-computer empathy, exploring how machines can not only recognize emotions but also explain their causes and simulate human-like affective reasoning. The program featured invited talks, oral presentations, and posters spanning perception, interaction, causal modeling, and cognitive grounding. CogMAEC provided a platform to connect researchers across disciplines and foster future work on cognitively aware affective computing. Materials are available at https://CogMAEC.github.io/MM2025.

Aik Beng Ng, Yethoven Tukimin, Jeannie S. Lee, Megani Rajendran, Chek Tien Tan, Indriyati Atmosukarto

This workshop is part of the ACM Multimedia 2025 Conference and is organized by the ACM I2M Chapter, consisting of both industry and academia members. The rapid convergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and immersive multimedia is redefining the landscape of intelligent and adaptive digital experiences. As ACM Multimedia 2025 emphasizes cutting-edge multimedia systems, this workshop directly contributes to its vision by exploring AI's transformative role in immersive media. Through AI-driven multimedia interaction, adaptive virtual environments, and intelligent content generation, this workshop will showcase how AI is enhancing the creation and experience of digital worlds. The workshop proceedings can be found at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3728487

Yangchen Yu, Yin Chen, Jia Li 0013, Peng Jia, Yu Zhang 0082, Li Dai, Zhenzhen Hu 0004, Meng Wang 0001, Richang Hong

Accurate engagement estimation is essential for adaptive human-computer interaction systems, yet robust deployment is hindered by poor generalizability across diverse domains (e.g., cultures and languages) and challenges in modeling complex interaction dynamics. To tackle these issues, we propose DAPA (Domain-Adaptive Parallel Attention), a novel framework for generalizable conversational engagement modeling. DAPA introduces a Domain Prompting mechanism by prepending learnable domain-specific vectors to the input, explicitly conditioning the model on the data's origin to facilitate domain-aware adaptation while preserving generalizable engagement representations. To capture interactional synchrony, the framework also incorporates a Parallel Cross-Attention module that explicitly aligns reactive (forward BiLSTM) and anticipatory (backward BiLSTM) states between participants. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAPA establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on several cross-cultural and cross-linguistic benchmarks, notably achieving an absolute improvement of 0.45 in Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) over a strong baseline on the NoXi-J test set. The superiority of our method was also confirmed by winning the first place in the Multi-Domain Engagement Estimation Challenge at MultiMediate'25. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/MSA-LMC/DAPA.