Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global dependencies among input tokens. However, we reveal that the attention block in transformers suffers from inherent ill-conditioning, which hampers gradient-based optimization and leads to inefficient training. To address this, we develop a theoretical framework that establishes a direct relationship between the conditioning of the attention block and that of the embedded tokenized data. Building on this insight, we introduce conditioned embedded tokens, a method that systematically modifies the embedded tokens to improve the conditioning of the attention mechanism. Our analysis demonstrates that this approach significantly mitigates ill-conditioning, leading to more stable and efficient training. We validate our methodology across various transformer architectures, achieving consistent improvements in image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and natural language processing, highlighting its broad applicability and effectiveness.
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Amodal completion, the task of inferring the complete appearance of objects despite partial occlusions, is crucial for understanding complex human-object interactions (HOI) in computer vision and robotics. Existing methods, including pre-trained diffusion models, often struggle to generate plausible completions in dynamic scenarios due to their limited understanding of HOI. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages physical prior knowledge alongside a specialized multi-regional inpainting technique tailored for HOI. By incorporating physical constraints derived from human topology and contact information, we define two distinct regions: the primary region, where occluded object parts are most likely to reside, and the secondary region, where occlusions are less probable. Our multi-regional inpainting method employs customized denoising strategies across these regions within a diffusion model, thereby enhancing the accuracy and realism of generated completions in both shape and visual detail. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms existing methods in HOI scenarios, advancing machine perception toward a more human-like understanding of dynamic environments. Furthermore, we show that our pipeline remains robust even without ground-truth contact annotations, broadening its applicability to tasks such as 3D reconstruction and novel view/pose synthesis.
Policy learning focuses on devising strategies for agents in embodied artificial intelligence systems to perform optimal actions based on their perceived states. One of the key challenges in policy learning involves handling complex, long-horizon tasks that require managing extensive sequences of actions and observations with multiple modes. Wavelet analysis offers significant advantages in signal processing, notably in decomposing signals at multiple scales to capture both global trends and fine-grained details. In this work, we introduce a novel wavelet policy learning framework that utilizes wavelet transformations to enhance policy learning. Our approach leverages learnable multi-scale wavelet decomposition to facilitate detailed observation analysis and robust action planning over extended sequences. We detail the design and implementation of our wavelet policy, which incorporates lifting schemes for effective multi-resolution analysis and action generation. This framework is evaluated across multiple complex scenarios, including robotic manipulation, self-driving, and multi-robot collaboration, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in improving the precision and reliability of the learned policy.
A 3D scene graph represents a compact scene model by capturing both the objects present and the semantic relationships between them, making it a promising structure for robotic applications. To effectively interact with users, an embodied intelligent agent should be able to answer a wide range of natural language queries about the surrounding 3D environment. Large Language Models (LLMs) are beneficial solutions for user-robot interaction due to their natural language understanding and reasoning abilities. Recent methods for learning scene representations have shown that adapting these representations to the 3D world can significantly improve the quality of LLM responses. However, existing methods typically rely only on geometric information, such as object coordinates, and overlook the rich semantic relationships between objects. In this work, we propose 3DGraphLLM, a method for constructing a learnable representation of a 3D scene graph that explicitly incorporates semantic relationships. This representation is used as input to LLMs for performing 3D vision-language tasks. In our experiments on popular ScanRefer, Multi3DRefer, ScanQA, Sqa3D, and Scan2cap datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms baselines that do not leverage semantic relationships between objects. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/CognitiveAISystems/3DGraphLLM.
The use of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as an end-to-end solution for Embodied AI and Autonomous Driving has become a prevailing trend. While MLLMs have been extensively studied for visual semantic understanding tasks, their ability to perform precise and quantitative spatial-temporal understanding in real-world applications remains largely unexamined, leading to uncertain prospects. To address this gap, we introduce ST-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs' spatial-temporal understanding through challenging tasks such as estimating and predicting the appearance, pose, displacement, and motion of objects. Our benchmark encompasses a wide range of robot and vehicle operations across desktop, indoor, and outdoor scenarios. The extensive experiments reveals that the state-of-the-art MLLMs still struggle in real-world spatial-temporal understanding, especially in tasks requiring precise distance estimation and motion analysis.
PINO: Person-Interaction Noise Optimization for Long-Duration and Customizable Motion Generation of Arbitrary-Sized Groups
PDF ↗Generating realistic group interactions involving multiple characters remains challenging due to increasing complexity as group size expands. While existing conditional diffusion models incrementally generate motions by conditioning on previously generated characters, they rely on single shared prompts, limiting nuanced control and leading to overly simplified interactions. In this paper, we introduce Person-Interaction Noise Optimization (PINO), a novel, training-free framework designed for generating realistic and customizable interactions among groups of arbitrary size. PINO decomposes complex group interactions into semantically relevant pairwise interactions, and leverages pretrained two-person interaction diffusion models to incrementally compose group interactions. To ensure physical plausibility and avoid common artifacts such as overlapping or penetration between characters, PINO employs physics-based penalties during noise optimization. This approach allows precise user control over character orientation, speed, and spatial relationships without additional training. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that PINO generates visually realistic, physically coherent, and adaptable multi-person interactions suitable for diverse animation, gaming, and robotics applications.
Visual imitation learning is effective for robots to learn versatile tasks. However, many existing methods rely on behavior cloning with supervised historical trajectories, limiting their 3D spatial and 4D spatiotemporal awareness. Consequently, these methods struggle to capture the 3D structures and 4D spatiotemporal relationships necessary for real-world deployment. In this work, we propose 4D Diffusion Policy (DP4), a novel visual imitation learning method that incorporates spatiotemporal awareness into diffusion-based policies. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on trajectory cloning, DP4 leverages a dynamic Gaussian world model to guide the learning of 3D spatial and 4D spatiotemporal perceptions from interactive environments. Our method constructs the current 3D scene from a single-view RGB-D observation and predicts the future 3D scene, optimizing trajectory generation by explicitly modeling both spatial and temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments across 17 simulation tasks with 173 variants and 3 real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that the 4D Diffusion Policy (DP4) outperforms baseline methods, improving the average simulation task success rate by 16.4% (Adroit), 14% (DexArt), and 6.45% (RLBench), and the average real-world robotic task success rate by 8.6%.
Trajectory prediction aims to forecast an agent's future trajectories based on its historical observed trajectories, which is a critical task for various applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and surveillance systems. Most existing trajectory prediction methods assume that the observed trajectories collected for forecasting are clean. However, in real-world scenarios, noise is inevitably introduced into the observations, resulting in the collapse of the existing approaches. Therefore, it is essential to perform robust trajectory prediction based on noisy observations, which is a more practical scenario. In this paper, we propose **NATRA**, a **N**oise-**A**gnostic framework capable of tackling the problem of **TRA**jectory prediction with arbitrary types of noisy observations. Specifically, we put forward a mutual information-based mechanism to denoise the original noisy observations. It optimizes the produced trajectories to exhibit a pattern that closely resembles the clean trajectory pattern while deviating from the noisy one.Considering that the trajectory structure may be destroyed through the only optimization of mutual information, we introduce an additional reconstruction loss to preserve the structure information of the produced observed trajectories. Moreover, we further propose a ranking loss to further enhance the performance. Because NATRA does not rely on any specific module tailored to particular noise distributions, it can handle arbitrary types of noise in principle. Additionally, our proposed NATRA can be easily integrated into existing trajectory prediction models. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world noisy datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
VLABench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Robotics Manipulation with Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks
PDF ↗General-purposed embodied agents are designed to understand the users' natural instructions or intentions and act precisely to complete universal tasks. Recently, methods based on foundation models especially Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have shown a substantial potential to solve language-conditioned manipulation (LCM) tasks well. However, existing benchmarks do not adequately meet the needs of VLAs and relative algorithms. To better define such general-purpose tasks in the context of LLMs and advance the research in VLAs, we present VLABench, an open-source benchmark for evaluating universal LCM task learning. VLABench provides 100 carefully designed categories of tasks, with strong randomization in each category of task and a total of 2000+ objects. VLABench stands out from previous benchmarks in four key aspects: 1) tasks requiring world knowledge and common sense transfer, 2) natural language instructions with implicit human intentions rather than templates, 3) long-horizon tasks demanding multi-step reasoning, and 4) evaluation of both action policies and language model capabilities. The benchmark assesses multiple competencies including understanding of mesh&texture, spatial relationship, semantic instruction, physical laws, knowledge transfer and reasoning, etc. To support the downstream finetuning, we provide high-quality training data collected via an automated framework incorporating heuristic skills and prior information. The experimental results indicate that both the current state-of-the-art pretrained VLAs and the workflow based on VLMs face challenges in our tasks.
UniEgoMotion: A Unified Model for Egocentric Motion Reconstruction, Forecasting, and Generation
PDF ↗Egocentric human motion generation and forecasting with scene-context is crucial for enhancing AR/VR experiences, improving human-robot interaction, advancing assistive technologies, and enabling adaptive healthcare solutions by accurately predicting and simulating movement from a first-person perspective. However, existing methods primarily focus on third-person motion synthesis with structured 3D scene contexts, limiting their effectiveness in real-world egocentric settings where limited field of view, frequent occlusions, and dynamic cameras hinder scene perception. To bridge this gap, we introduce Egocentric Motion Generation and Egocentric Motion Forecasting, two novel tasks that utilize first-person images for scene-aware motion synthesis without relying on explicit 3D scene. We propose UniEgoMotion, a unified conditional motion diffusion model with a novel head-centric motion representation tailored for egocentric devices. UniEgoMotion's simple yet effective design supports egocentric motion reconstruction, forecasting, and generation from first-person visual inputs in a unified framework. Unlike previous works that overlook scene semantics, our model effectively extracts image-based scene context to infer plausible 3D motion. To facilitate training, we introduce EE4D-Motion, a large-scale dataset derived from EgoExo4D, augmented with pseudo-ground-truth 3D motion annotations. UniEgoMotion achieves state-of-the-art performance in egocentric motion reconstruction and is the first to generate motion from a single egocentric image. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our unified framework, setting a new benchmark for egocentric motion modeling and unlocking new possibilities for egocentric applications.
Robot foundation models, particularly Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, have garnered significant attention for their ability to enhance robot policy learning, greatly improving robot's generalization and robustness. OpenAI's recent model, O1, showcased impressive capabilities in solving complex problems by utilizing extensive reasoning chains. This prompts an important question: can robot models achieve better performance in multi-task, complex environments by reviewing prior observations and then providing task-specific reasoning to guide action prediction?In this paper, we introduce Chain-of-Affordance (CoA-VLA), a novel approach to scaling robot models by incorporating reasoning in the format of sequential robot affordances to facilitate task completion. Specifically, we prompt the model to consider the following four types of affordances before taking action: (1) object affordance-- what object to manipulate and where it is; (2) grasp affordance -- the specific object part to grasp; (3) spatial affordance -- the optimal space to place the object; and (4) movement affordance-- the collision-free path for movement. We further transform each affordance into two prompting formats: visual affordance and textual affordance. We introduce a novel vision-language co-injection module that integrates this knowledge into the policy network. This allows the robot to leverage essential contextual information during action inference, resulting in improved precision and robustness. Our experiments demonstrate that CoA-VLA outperforms state-of-the-art robot foundation models, including OpenVLA and Octo, on a variety of tasks. Furthermore, CoA-VLA exhibits strong generalization capabilities, including recognizing unseen object poses, identifying free space, and avoiding obstacles in novel environments.
Different 2D and 3D visual data have been widely used in applications such as UHDTV, mobile phones, autonomous driving, robots, and UAVs, etc. The large-scale data amount has raised the research and development trends of image and video coding, and point cloud coding. Compression technologies can efficiently reliever the burden of communication and storage. This tutorial will discuss diverse aspects of multimedia data compression, including datasets, perception models, deep learning-based coding methods, AI-based standards, open source projects, and future research.
The rapid expansion of multimedia services, such as video streaming, video conferencing, virtual reality, and cloud gaming, makes maintaining and evaluating high perceptual visual quality essential for user experience and system competitiveness. However, visual content can degrade at multiple stages, including acquisition, compression, transmission, enhancement, and display, where suboptimal enhancement may also introduce artifacts and reduce perceived quality. The core challenge is to reliably measure and predict this perceived quality so that it can be maintained or improved. Perceptual Visual Quality Assessment (PVQA) addresses this by evaluating visual quality from the perspective of human subjects, through subjective studies and objective prediction models. Beyond humans, recent work also extends PVQA to machines and robots, where the goal is to preserve downstream task performance (e.g., segmentation accuracy and planning success) under distortions or bandwidth constraints. This tutorial provides a concise, practice-oriented overview of PVQA: fundamentals and human vision considerations; image and video quality assessment; methods for immersive/3D media; opportunities and challenges in the era of foundation models and GenAI; perceptual optimization loops that close the gap between assessment and decisions in coding, streaming, and embodied perception; and domain applications. Finally, we summarize the key concepts, toolchains, and future opportunities for PVQA to be used in modern multimedia communication.
Point cloud processing and 3D vision have emerged as very hot topics in the multimedia community. Point clouds can give an immersive visual experience and provide accurate structural information of 3D objects and scenes in the applications including virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR), autonomous driving, robot navigation, and geo-information systems (GIS). Moreover, 3D Gaussian splatting has become a very powerful and popular tool for 3D reconstruction, generation and rendering, as well as compression, representation and understanding. 3D Gaussian splatting technology can also be deemed as an extension of point cloud processing technology. 3D vision technologies empower the developments of immersive media, embodied artificial intelligence (AI) and unmanned systems. Their challenges in processing, analysis, and applications have attracted significant interest from industry, academia, and standardization bodies. This workshop invites innovative contributions in point cloud processing and 3D Gaussian splatting to propel the advancements of 3D vision technologies.
Multimodal, generative, and responsible affective computing aims to enhance people's lives. In recent years, the AI revolution has already begun to impact daily life, with virtual assistants being deployed across various sectors such as healthcare, banking, transportation, and education. It is clear that, in the near future, humans may interact with AI-powered systems as much or maybe even more than direct human-to-human interactions. Affective computing has numerous applications, including innovative approaches to forecasting and preventing anxiety, stress, and mental health issues; enhancing robotic empathy; assisting individuals with communication, behavior, and emotion regulation challenges; and promoting awareness of health and well-being. Many of these applications require enhanced control and protection of sensitive, private, and personal data. Therefore, it is crucial to further develop the creation, evaluation, and deployment of emotionally intelligent systems that are both responsive and responsible. Additionally, improving the accuracy and interpretability of emotion prediction results can significantly enhance the application of this technology in the downstream tasks mentioned above. MRAC'25 is the continuation of MRAC'23 and MRAC'24. Through this workshop, we aim to bring together researchers to discuss the potential and development of affective computing.
Embodied intelligence, evolving from rule-based control to learning-driven systems, has primarily focused on rigid robots, whose limitations in flexibility and adaptability have spurred research into soft-bodied platforms inspired by biological organisms. Soft robots offer adaptive, safe solutions for human collaboration and complex environments but face challenges from underactuation and nonlinear dynamics. This workshop centers on multimodal perception and decision-making in soft robotics, gathering researchers to explore cutting-edge technologies, challenges, and solutions across areas like embodied navigation, manipulation, and control, with presentations and discussions on novel findings and methodologies.
Heterogeneous Encoder Fusion with KAN Decoder for Group Engagement Modeling via 8× Sliding Pipelines
Estimating engagement in group interactions is crucial for building socially intelligent systems, such as in human-agent and human-robot interaction. However, precisely modeling the continuous frame-level fluctuations of engagement remains challenging, particularly when considering the complex multi-party signal interactions within groups. Our method employs an encoder that integrates BiLSTM with Transformer to effectively capture both local and global temporal dependencies of multimodal features. Crucially, we explicitly fuse signals from both the target participant and their conversational partners in group to model the holistic group interaction dynamics. Furthermore, we introduce an 8x overlapped optimized sliding window strategy, constructing a ''sliding pipeline'', which significantly enhances the temporal smoothness, continuity, and stability of predictions. In the final regression stage, we replace the traditional multilayer perceptron(MLP) decoder with Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), leveraging their superior function approximation capability to achieve more accurate engagement predictions. Evaluated on the test sets of NoXi-base, NoXi-addition, MPIIGroupInteraction and NoXi-J datasets from the Multimediate'25 Engagement Challenge, our approach demonstrates significant performance improvements, achieving highly competitive Concordance Correlation Coefficients (CCC) of 0.678 for global, approximately 56.1% higher than the baseline, which shows a significant improvement.
Errors often occur during human-robot interactions, such as failing to respond, interrupting users, or providing answers that do not meet user expectations. Detecting these issues on time is crucial for making human-robot communication more natural and user-friendly. In this technical report, we present the approach proposed by our team, CFM-HRI, for the ERR@HRI 2.0 Challenge 2025, targeting the task of interaction error detection. Specifically, we propose a lightweight and efficient time-series classification approach, empowered by cross-modal alignment, to detect interaction errors more accurately and promptly. To mitigate temporal misalignment across modalities, we adopt an upsampling alignment strategy, followed by feature fusion to obtain unified representations. A sliding-window voting mechanism is then introduced to construct training samples along with corresponding ground truth labels. Several machine learning models are employed to detect errors based on the fused features. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing cross-modal inconsistencies and improving detection accuracy. Our approach won first place in Sub-Challenge 2 and second place in Sub-Challenge 1 of the ERR@HRI 2.0 Challenge, held in conjunction with ACM MM 2025. We provide detailed descriptions of our data processing and experimental setup, along with an analysis of the limitations of our approach and potential directions for future work. Our code is available on https://github.com/setsaile/CFM-HRI-ERR-HRI2.0.
Reliable detection of conversational errors and user-initiated corrections is critical for effective human-robot interaction (HRI). In this study, we present a comprehensive multimodal approach leveraging temporal window processing, targeted feature engineering, and a MiniRocket + Ridge classification pipeline to address the challenges introduced by the ERR@HRI 2.0 dataset. Our methodology systematically integrates multimodal data streams, including facial expressions, acoustic features, and linguistic embeddings, to predict robot failures and user reactions. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models in event-level detection performance. Notably, linguistic features derived from transcript embeddings emerged as the most informative modality, substantially enhancing model performance. However, we observed challenges associated with managing false positives at the event level, suggesting avenues for future refinement in adaptive thresholding and sequential post-processing techniques. Our findings underscore the importance of careful feature selection and robust temporal modelling in developing effective real-time error detection systems for conversational robots. Our code is available online. https://github.com/Ruddy202/err-hri-2.0-armas.git.
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into conversational robots has made human-robot conversations more dynamic. Yet, LLM-powered conversational robots remain prone to errors, e.g., misunderstanding user intent, prematurely interrupting users, or failing to respond altogether. Detecting and addressing these failures is critical for preventing conversational breakdowns, avoiding task disruptions, and sustaining user trust. To tackle this problem, the ERR@HRI 2.0 Challenge provides a multimodal dataset of LLM-powered conversational robot failures during human-robot conversations and encourages researchers to benchmark machine learning models designed to detect robot failures. The dataset includes 16 hours of dyadic human-robot interactions, incorporating facial, speech, and head movement features. Each interaction is annotated with the presence or absence of robot errors from the system perspective, and perceived user intention to correct for a mismatch between robot behavior and user expectation. Participants are invited to form teams and develop machine learning models that detect these failures using multimodal data. Submissions will be evaluated using various performance metrics, including detection accuracy and false positive rate. This challenge represents another key step toward improving failure detection in human-robot interaction through social signal analysis.