Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4o and Qwen3-Omni show strong perception but struggle in multi-speaker, dialogue-centric settings that demand agentic reasoning, tracking who speaks, maintaining roles, and grounding events across time. These scenarios are central to multimodal audio-video understanding, where models must jointly reason over audio and visual streams in applications such as conversational video assistants and meeting analytics. We introduce AMusE, a benchmark designed around tasks that are inherently agentic, requiring models to decompose complex audio-visual interactions into planning, grounding, and reflection steps. It evaluates MLLMs across three modes: zero-shot, guided, and agentic, and six task families, including spatio-temporal speaker grounding and multimodal dialogue summarization. Across all modes, current models exhibit weak multi-speaker reasoning and inconsistent behavior under both non-agentic and agentic evaluation. Motivated by the inherently agentic nature of these tasks and recent advances in LLM agents, we propose RAFT, a data-efficient agentic alignment framework that integrates reward optimization with intrinsic multimodal self-evaluation as reward and selective parameter adaptation for data and parameter-efficient updates. Using RAFT, we achieve up to 39.52% relative improvement in accuracy on our benchmark. Together, AMusE and RAFT provide a practical platform for examining agentic reasoning in multimodal models and improving their capabilities.
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The rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) marks a significant step toward artificial general intelligence, offering great potential for augmenting human capabilities. However, their ability to provide effective assistance in dynamic, real-world environments remains largely underexplored. Existing video benchmarks predominantly assess passive understanding through retrospective analysis or isolated perception tasks, failing to capture the interactive and adaptive nature of real-time user assistance. To bridge this gap, we introduce LifeEval, a multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate real-time, task-oriented human-AI collaboration in daily life from an egocentric perspective. LifeEval emphasizes three key aspects: task-oriented holistic evaluation, egocentric real-time perception from continuous first-person streams, and human-assistant collaborative interaction through natural dialogues. Constructed via a rigorous annotation pipeline, the benchmark comprises 4,075 high-quality question-answer pairs across 6 core capability dimensions. Extensive evaluations of 26 state-of-the-art MLLMs on LifeEval reveal substantial challenges in achieving timely, effective and adaptive interaction, highlighting essential directions for advancing human-centered interactive intelligence.
The recent successes of Vision-Language models raise the question of how to equivalently imbue a pretrained speech model with vision understanding, an important milestone towards building a multimodal speech model able to freely converse about images. Building such a conversational Vision-Speech model brings its unique challenges: (i) paired image-speech datasets are much scarcer than their image-text counterparts, (ii) ensuring real-time latency at inference is crucial thus bringing compute and memory constraints, and (iii) the model should preserve prosodic features (e.g., speaker tone) which cannot be inferred from text alone. In this work, we introduce MoshiVis, augmenting a recent dialogue speech LLM, Moshi, with visual inputs through lightweight adaptation modules. An additional dynamic gating mechanism enables the model to more easily switch between the visual inputs and unrelated conversation topics. To reduce training costs, we design a simple one-stage, parameter-efficient fine-tuning pipeline in which we leverage a mixture of image-text (i.e., "speechless") and image-speech samples. We evaluate the model on downstream visual understanding tasks with both audio and text prompts, and report qualitative samples of interactions with MoshiVis.
Parse, Search, and Confirmation: Training-Free Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Structured Spatial Memory
PDF ↗In this paper, we tackle the Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (AVDN) task in the training-free setting for resource-efficient high-altitude UAV navigation.Naively applying MLLMs leads to unreliable navigation due to weak directional grounding and the lack of explicit spatial memory.To address these issues, we propose PSC-AVDN, a training-free framework that tightly couples a three-stage Parsing-Search-Confirmation reasoning pipeline with a Structured Spatial Memory (SSM).The parsing stage uses an LLM to convert ambiguous dialogue instructions into stable geometric directional and destination cues.A Search Chain-of-Thought (S-CoT) then performs stepwise target exploration under high-altitude observations, and a Confirmation Chain-of-Thought (C-CoT) conducts fine-grained verification around candidate regions to resolve visual ambiguity.Meanwhile, SSM integrates three complementary sources of spatial cues, including multi-scale visual observation, spatial visual memory, and structured geometric memory to provide global spatial context and long-horizon consistency.Extensive experiments on ANDH and ANDH-Full show that PSC-AVDN establishes new state-of-the-art performance in the training-free setting, matching or surpassing several finetuned methods.
Evolutionary Multimodal Reasoning via Hierarchical Semantic Representation for Intent Recognition
PDF ↗Multimodal intent recognition aims to infer human intents by jointly modeling various modalities, playing a pivotal role in real-world dialogue systems. However, current methods struggle to model hierarchical semantics underlying complex intents and lack the capacity for self-evolving reasoning over multimodal representations. To address these issues, we propose HIER, a novel method that integrates hierarchical semantic representation with evolutionary reasoning based on Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Inspired by human cognition, HIER introduces a structured reasoning paradigm that organizes multimodal semantics into three progressively abstracted levels. It starts with modality-specific tokens capturing localized semantic cues, which are then clustered via a label-guided strategy to form mid-level semantic concepts. To capture higher-order structure, inter-concept relations are selected using JS divergence scores to highlight salient dependencies across concepts. These hierarchical representations are then injected into MLLM via CoT-driven prompting, enabling step-wise reasoning. Besides, HIER utilizes a self-evolution mechanism that refines semantic representations through MLLM feedback, allowing dynamic adaptation during inference. Experiments on three challenging benchmarks show that HIER consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods and MLLMs with 1-3% gains across all metrics. Code and more results are available at https://github.com/thuiar/HIER.
Human communication is inherently multimodal and social: words, prosody, and body language jointly carry intent. Yet most prior systems model human behavior as a translation task--co-speech gesture or text-to-motion that maps a fixed utterance to motion clips--without requiring agentic decision-making about when to move, what to do, or how to adapt across multi-turn dialogue. This leads to brittle timing, weak social grounding, and fragmented stacks where speech, text, and motion are trained or inferred in isolation. We introduce ViBES (Voice in Behavioral Expression and Synchrony), a conversational 3D agent that jointly plans language and movement and executes dialogue-conditioned body actions. Concretely, ViBES is a speech-language-behavior (SLB) model with a mixture-of-modality-experts (MoME) backbone: modality-partitioned transformer experts for speech, facial expression, and body motion. The model processes interleaved multimodal token streams with hard routing by modality (parameters are split per expert), while sharing information through cross-expert attention. By leveraging strong pretrained speech-language models, the agent supports mixed-initiative interaction: users can speak, type, or issue body-action directives mid-conversation, and the system exposes controllable behavior hooks for streaming responses. We further benchmark on multi-turn conversation with automatic metrics of dialogue-motion alignment and behavior quality, and observe consistent gains over strong co-speech and text-to-motion baselines. ViBES goes beyond "speech-conditioned motion generation" toward agentic virtual bodies where language, prosody, and movement are jointly generated, enabling controllable, socially competent 3D interaction.
Universal Multimodal embedding models built on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have traditionally employed contrastive learning, which aligns representations of query-target pairs across different modalities. Yet, despite its empirical success, they are primarily built on a "single-turn" formulation where each query-target pair is treated as an independent data point. This paradigm leads to computational inefficiency when scaling, as it requires a separate forward pass for each pair and overlooks potential contextual relationships between multiple queries that can relate to the same context. In this work, we introduce Multi-Turn Contrastive Learning (MuCo), a dialogue-inspired framework that revisits this process. MuCo leverages the conversational nature of MLLMs to process multiple, related query-target pairs associated with a single image within a single forward pass. This allows us to extract a set of multiple query and target embeddings simultaneously, conditioned on a shared context representation, amplifying the effective batch size and overall training efficiency. Experiments exhibit MuCo with a newly curated 5M multimodal multi-turn dataset (M3T), which yields state-of-the-art retrieval performance on MMEB and M-BEIR benchmarks, while markedly enhancing both training efficiency and representation coherence across modalities. Code and M3T are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/muco
Recent unified multimodal models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual comprehension and generation. However, existing datasets and benchmarks focus predominantly on single-turn interactions, overlooking the multi-turn, context-dependent nature of real-world image creation and editing. To bridge this gap, we introduce W E A V E, the first comprehensive suite for in-context interleaved cross-modality comprehension and generation, comprising two complementary components. W E A V E-100k is a large-scale dataset of 100,000 interleaved samples spanning over 370,000 dialogue turns and 500,000 images, encompassing comprehension, editing, and generation tasks that demand reasoning over prior context. W E A V E-Bench is a human-annotated benchmark of 100 items with 480 images, equipped with a hybrid VLM judge evaluation framework that jointly leverages reference images and original-image-instruction pairs to assess multi-turn generation, visual memory, and world-knowledge reasoning across diverse domains. Experiments show that training on W E A V E-100k substantially improves vision comprehension, image editing, and comprehension-generation collaboration, while further enabling the emergence of visual-memory capabilities in UMMs. Extensive evaluations on W E A V E-Bench reveal persistent limitations of current approaches in multi-turn, context-aware image generation and editing. We hope W E A V E provides both a perspective and a foundation for advancing in-context interleaved comprehension and generation in the multimodal community.
While Instruction-based Image Editing (IIE) has achieved significant progress, existing benchmarks pursue task breadth via mixed evaluations. This paradigm obscures a critical failure mode crucial in professional applications: the inconsistent performance of models across tasks of varying semantic scales. To address this gap, we introduce Omni IIE Bench, a high-quality, human-annotated benchmark specifically designed to diagnose the editing consistency of IIE models in practical application scenarios. Omni IIE Bench features an innovative dual-track diagnostic design: (1) Single-turn Consistency, comprising shared-context task pairs of attribute modification and entity replacement; and (2) Multi-turn Coordination, involving continuous dialogue tasks that traverse semantic scales. The benchmark is constructed via an exceptionally rigorous multi-stage human filtering process, incorporating a quality standard enforced by computer vision graduate students and an industry relevance review conducted by professional designers. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of 8 mainstream IIE models using Omni IIE Bench. Our analysis quantifies, for the first time, a prevalent performance gap: nearly all models exhibit a significant performance degradation when transitioning from low-semantic-scale to high-semantic-scale tasks. Omni IIE Bench provides critical diagnostic tools and insights for the development of next-generation, more reliable, and stable IIE models.
MimicTalker: A Multimodal Interactive and Memory-Enhanced Framework for Real-Time Dyadic 3D Head Generation
PDF ↗Dyadic interactive head generation aims to synthesize realistic head motions that respond both verbally and non-verbally to an interlocutor in real-time conversation. The existing works often focus on offline scenarios, and struggle with a shallow understanding of the multimodal conversational context while also lacking long-term coherence. To address these limitations, we propose MimicTalker, a novel method for producing real-time, contextually-aware, and long-term consistent interactive head motions. To this end, we propose a Multimodal Interactive Context Extraction (MICE) module to capture both instantaneous and long-term multimodal interactive information from the interlocutor. To enhance in-depth conversational understanding, we propose a Semantic-enhanced Dynamic Interaction (SDI) module to integrate the intentions and topics of the conversation, which are automatically extracted through an LLM-based analyzer. Further, we propose a semantic-guided Motion Style Memory (MSM) mechanism, enabling the long-term motion consistency throughout the conversation. We conduct experiments on both short conversational segments (25 seconds) and extended dialogues (6 minutes), and the comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches.
CAST: Context-Aware Dynamic Latent Space Transformation for Interactive Text-to-Image Retrieval
PDF ↗Interactive Text-to-Image Retrieval (I-TIR) aims to refine image retrieval results through natural language dialogues, which allows users to progressively supplement or correct their search intention across multiple rounds, enabling a more precise and user-aligned visual search experience.However, existing methods perform cross-modal retrieval within a fixed multimodal feature space, mapping all dialogue text and images onto the same static embedding manifold.Such static formulation easily causes semantic vagueness, making it difficult to capture subtle embedding shifts in the user's updated intention for fine-grained retrieval.To address this limitation, we propose Context-Aware Latent Space Transformation (CAST), a lightweight framework that dynamically transforms the common latent space of both textual and visual representations according to the specific evolving user's search intention, enabling fine-grained and adaptive semantic alignment.The core of CAST is the Context-Aware Space Regulator (CASR), a crucial space transformation module composed of two key components: (1) the Context-Aware Low-Rank Projector (CLP), which learns to predict the projection direction of embedding space based on the intent's context;and (2) the Context-Guided Modulator (CGM), which adaptively determines appropriate projection strength. CASR is highly lightweight, adding negligible parameters and computational overhead, and can be seamlessly integrated into diverse I-TIR frameworks.Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, indicating that it can serve as a general, plug-and-play solution for efficient and scalable interactive text-to-image retrieval. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HuiGuanLab/CAST.
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) excel in visual understanding and reasoning, but the excessive visual tokens lead to high inference costs. Although recent token reduction methods mitigate this issue, they mainly target single-turn Visual Question Answering (VQA), leaving the more practical multi-turn VQA (MT-VQA) scenario largely unexplored. MT-VQA introduces additional challenges, as subsequent questions are unknown beforehand and may refer to arbitrary image regions, making existing reduction strategies ineffective. Specifically, current approaches fall into two categories: prompt-dependent methods, which bias toward the initial text prompt and discard information useful for subsequent turns; prompt-agnostic ones, which, though technically applicable to multi-turn settings, rely on heuristic reduction metrics such as attention scores, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a learning-based prompt-agnostic method, termed MetaCompress, overcoming the limitations of heuristic designs. We begin by formulating token reduction as a learnable compression mapping, unifying existing formats such as pruning and merging into a single learning objective. Upon this formulation, we introduce a data-efficient training paradigm capable of learning optimal compression mappings with limited computational costs. Extensive experiments on MT-VQA benchmarks and across multiple LVLM architectures demonstrate that MetaCompress achieves superior efficiency-accuracy trade-offs while maintaining strong generalization across dialogue turns. Our code is available at https://github.com/MArSha1147/MetaCompress.
Text-to-Image Person Retrieval (TIPR) aims to retrieve pedestrian images with a given natural language description. It remains highly challenging due to the inherent ambiguity in cross-modal alignment: existing models often struggle to capture fine-grained correspondences, and their understanding of detailed pedestrian attributes is typically confined to partial or coarse cues, leading to mismatched or erroneous retrieval results. To overcome this challenge, we propose CECA, a Conversation-Enhanced Cross-modal Alignment framework. CECA strengthens the attribute correspondence between textual and visual modalities through multimodal large language models (MLLMs)-guided dialogue, enhances token-level alignment via a Bidirectional Cross-attention Mixer (BCM), and stabilizes optimization with a Confidence-Aware Weighting Loss (CAWL) that reduces the impact of low-quality conversational responses. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance and strong generalization ability of our approach.
Understanding real-world videos such as movies requires integrating visual and dialogue cues. Yet existing VideoQA benchmarks struggle to capture this multimodal reasoning and, given the difficulty of evaluating free-form answers, largely resort to simple multiple choice questions. We introduce a novel open-ended multimodal VideoQA benchmark, MovieRecapsQA, created using movie recap videos -- a distinctive type of YouTube content that summarizes a film via a voiceover description of key clips from the movie (recap video). From the transcribed voiceover (recap summary) of 60 recap videos, we generate 8.2K questions along with the necessary "facts" expected in each answer; the former facilitates the creation of questions that require mutimodal reasoning and the latter allow the construction of a reference-free evaluation metric that can be applied to open-ended responses. To our knowledge, this is the first reference-free open-ended VideoQA benchmark. The benchmark allows each question to be evaluated in different input video settings: given (a) the full-length movie, (b) the full ( 11 min) recap video (visual only), (c) 14 min of aligned movie scenes, i.e, movie scenes relevant to the question, and (d) 1.2 min of aligned recap video scenes. In all cases, the text of any associated movie dialogue is provided. Each question is categorized by the modality required to answer it---visual, dialogue, or both---enabling fine-grained evaluation of multimodal capabilities. We benchmark (setting (d)) seven state-of-the-art MLLMs and find that (i) only our reference-free metric produces meaningful human-aligned model separation; (ii) vision-centric questions yield the lowest scores across all models; (iii) removing visual input often improves model factuality; and (iv) the primary bottleneck is visual perception, not visual reasoning.
Memory-augmented language agents are increasingly deployed in affective applications such as emotional support, where understanding and responding to users’ latent emotional needs is critical. However, existing research often treats memory as a tool for factual retrieval, overlooking its role in shaping users’ emotional experiences. In this work, we introduce ENPMR-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating Emotional Need-aware Proactive Memory Retrieval (ENPMR), a core capability that enables agents to infer users’ latent emotional needs and proactively retrieve appropriate memories to support empathetic interaction. Grounded in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, ENPMR-Bench includes over 1,800 memory-augmented dialogues and defines structured mappings between emotional needs and supportive memory types. Experimental results demonstrate that current retrieval paradigms, including both embedding-based and LLM-driven approaches, exhibit substantial deficiencies, with empathy scores significantly lagging behind golden memory conditions. While chain-of-thought prompting improves the alignment between inferred emotional needs and retrieved memories to some extent, a notable performance gap remains. Together, these findings reveal critical limitations in current agents and outline directions for advancing personalized emotional support through need-sensitive memory retrieval.
Schema-Guided Response Generation using Multi-Frame Dialogue State for Motivational Interviewing Systems
PDF ↗The primary goal of Motivational Interviewing (MI) is to help clients build their own motivation for behavioral change. To support this in dialogue systems, it is essential to guide large language models (LLMs) to generate counselor responses aligned with MI principles. By employing a schema-guided approach, this study proposes a method for updating multi-frame dialogue states and a strategy decision mechanism that dynamically determines the response focus in a manner grounded in MI principles. The proposed method was implemented in a dialogue system on two different datasets and evaluated through a user study. Results showed that the proposed method successfully generates responses aligned with MI principle and frequently asks questions to elicit change talk.
Real or Robotic? Assessing Whether LLMs Accurately Simulate Qualities of Human Responses in Human-LLM Dialogue
PDF ↗Building datasets for dialogue tasks is expensive and time-consuming, requiring recruitment, training, and data collection from study participants. In response, much recent work has sought to use large language models (LLMs) to simulate both human-human and human-LLM interactions, as they have been shown to generate convincingly human-like text in many settings. However, how well do LLM-based simulations reflect real human dialogue? In this work, we answer this question by generating a large-scale dataset of 100,000 paired LLM-LLM and human-LLM dialogues from the WildChat dataset and quantifying how well the LLM simulations align with their human counterparts. Overall, we find relatively low alignment between simulations and human interactions, with systematic differences in multiple textual properties, including style and conversational dynamics. Further, we find that models perform similarly in simulating English, Chinese, and Russian dialogues. Our results also suggest that LLMs only simulate a narrow range of the overall distribution of human dialogue, as they perform better on the subset of humans who write similarly to the LLM’s own style.
Optimizing Conversational Quality in Spoken Dialogue Systems with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback
PDF ↗Reinforcement learning from human or AI feedback (RLHF/RLAIF) for speech-in/speech-out dialogue systems (SDS) remains underexplored, with prior work largely limited to single semantic rewards applied at the utterance level. Such setups overlook the multi-dimensional and multi-modal nature of conversational quality, which encompasses semantic coherence, audio naturalness, speaker consistency, emotion alignment, and turn-taking behavior. Moreover, they are fundamentally mismatched with duplex spoken dialogue systems that generate responses incrementally, where agents must make decisions based on partial utterances. We address these limitations with the first multi-reward RLAIF framework for SDS, combining semantic, audio-quality, and emotion-consistency rewards. To align utterance-level preferences with incremental, blockwise decoding in duplex models, we apply turn-level preference sampling and aggregate per-block log-probabilities within a single DPO objective. We present the first systematic study of preference learning for improving SDS quality in both multi-turn Chain-of-Thought and blockwise duplex models, and release a multi-reward DPO dataset to support reproducible research. Experiments show that single-reward RLAIF selectively improves its targeted metric, while joint multi-reward training yields consistent gains across semantic quality and audio naturalness. These results highlight the importance of holistic, multi-reward alignment for practical conversational SDS.
The growing ubiquity of Extended Reality (XR) is driving Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS) toward visually immersive experiences. We formalize this paradigm as Immersive CRS (ICRS), where recommended items are highlighted directly in the user’s scene-based visual environment and augmented with in-situ labels. While item recommendation has been widely studied, the problem of how to select and evaluate which information to present as immersive labels remains an open problem. To this end, we introduce a principled categorization of information needs into explicit intent satisfaction and proactive information needs and use these to define novel evaluation metrics for item label selection. We benchmark IR-, LLM-, and VLM-based methods across three datasets and ICRS scenarios: fashion, movie recommendation, and retail shopping. Our evaluation reveals three important limitations of existing methods: (1) they fail to leverage scenario-specific information modalities (e.g., visual cues for fashion, metadata for retail), (2) they present redundant information that is visually inferable, and (3) they poorly anticipate users’ proactive information needs from explicit dialogue alone. In summary, this work provides both a novel evaluation paradigm for in-situ item labeling in ICRS and highlights key challenges for future work.
Reasoning-oriented language models typically expose explicit reasoning as a long, front-loaded chain of “thinking” tokens before the main output, either always enabled or externally toggled at inference time. Although this can help on arithmetic, coding, and other multi-step tasks, it is costly, weakens claim-level auditability, and does not allow the model to re-trigger explicit reasoning once presentation has begun. In dialogue, these limitations are compounded by weak sensitivity to temporal structure: unless time is explicitly stated in text, standard models treat replies separated by seconds and replies separated by weeks as equivalent. We introduce TIME (Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine), a behavioral alignment framework that learns explicit reasoning as a context-triggered control policy rather than a fixed response mode. TIME augments dialogue with optional ISO 8601 ‘<time>‘ tags, tick events that represent silent time passage, and short ‘<think>‘ blocks that may appear anywhere in a response. Using a four-phase curriculum, including a small maximally diverse full-batch alignment stage, we train Qwen3 dense models to invoke brief, in-place reasoning bursts only when contextual cues warrant them, while keeping user-facing output compact. We also introduce TIMEBench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating reasoning from temporal cues in dialogue. Across 4B-32B scales, TIME improves TIMEBench scores over the corresponding base Qwen3 models in both thinking and no-thinking modes while reducing explicit reasoning tokens by roughly an order of magnitude. Beyond score improvements, TIME induces a distinct behavioral shift: explicit reasoning becomes more compact and more responsive to contextual cues. Code, training data, and benchmark artifacts are publicly available.