arXiv:2608.30068v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Films communicate through deliberate creative choices, including lighting, color, composition, editing, dialogue, music, and sound. Humans naturally in...
By Kaishuu Shinozaki-Conefrey, Olivier Pascaud, Robin Courant, Xi Wang, Dimitris Samaras, Vicky Kalogeiton
The paper introduces Omni Demand Understanding (ODU), a benchmark designed to test whether multimodal models can infer a user's underlying demand from complex audio‑visual interactions. ODU requires models to detect the presence of a demand and infer intent using multimodal and conversational context, evaluated across single‑turn and multi‑turn scenarios. The authors built ODU‑Bench through a taxonomy‑guided approach, agentic video generation, and human‑recorded interactions, and found that even top models like Gemini 3.1 Pro recover only 44.7% of key information, with many models exhibiting high false‑trigger rates.
By Qi Chen, Yunfei Chu, Haolin He, Yifan Yang, Zihan Liu, Yuxuan Wang, Ziyang Ma, Ruiyang Xu, Meng Gao, Yinsong Yan, Ling Wang, Hui Wang, Wen Huang, Yiheng Chen, Guanrou Yang, Qiuqiang Kong, Jin Xu, Xie Chen
arXiv:2609.09628v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Inferring speaker relationships from spoken conversations is an important step towards socially aware speech understanding. However, this task remain...
By Yaohan Guan, Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Junhyeok Lee, Jesus Villalba, Laureano Moro Velazquez, Thomas Thebaud, Najim Dehak
Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer other's beliefs, intentions, and states of knowledge, is central to social interaction, yet remains challenging for current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), especially in multi-party meetings where cues are distributed across speech and behavior. Existing multimodal ToM benchmarks mainly focus on video-grounded question answering over overt, externally verifiable signals, and provide limited coverage of latent social states and group dynamics.
The paper introduces a pipeline that generates intent‑labeled, two‑channel conversational speech from relational event lists, enabling controlled synthesis of full‑duplex dialogue with 42 phenomena across eight families in English and Mandarin. By having an LLM author each event’s speaker, text, conversational act, and attachment, and then aligning and timing these events independently, the system produces diverse, realistic turn‑taking signals. Experiments show that models trained on this synthetic corpus achieve higher floor‑occupancy accuracy and better start‑speaking/listening F1 scores compared to models trained on prior data.
By Matthew Sun, Vinay Kothapally, Meng Yu, Chao Huang, Hao Zhang, Yixuan Zhang, Steve Yves
The paper introduces Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT), a structured reasoning framework for vision‑language models that divides multimodal social reasoning into three cognitively inspired stages: Perception, Situation, and Norm. CoCoT improves performance across diverse tasks—multimodal intent disambiguation, theory of mind, social commonsense reasoning, and safety instruction following—by 5.9% to 4.6% on average. Fine‑tuning on CoCoT‑structured traces further boosts accuracy by 5–6% without explicit prompting, indicating that models internalize the structured reasoning pattern and that the approach enhances interpretability and social alignment in multimodal systems.
By Eunkyu Park, Wesley Hanwen Deng, Gunhee Kim, Motahhare Eslami, Maarten Sap
Humans possess an innate ability to understand fine-grained interpersonal relationships, which is central to everyday social interactions. Although such reasoning is inherently multimodal, it remains largely unexplored by existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.
By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
arXiv:2603. 16859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Omni-modal large language models (OLMs) redefine human-machine interaction by natively integrating audio, vision, and text.
By Tianyu Xie, Jinfa Huang, Yuexiao Ma, Rongfang Luo, Yan Yang, Wang Chen, Yuhui Zeng, Yixuan Zou, Qingchuan Ma, Zhiqiang Lu, Ruize Fang, Xiawu Zheng, Jiebo Luo, Rongrong Ji
arXiv:2606. 07541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on objective tasks such as video understanding and reasoning.
By Prabal Shrestha, Bohan Jiang, Haoning Xue, Huan Liu, Xinyi Zhou
The paper introduces ProAction, a multimodal dataset of 10,000 samples comprising visual, audio, and text inputs across 12 daily-life scenarios, designed to support the Proactive Robot Action Reasoning (ProRobo) problem. It presents a two-stage human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline that incorporates appraisal and Theory-of-Mind considerations to generate cognitively grounded high-level action labels. The authors benchmark multimodal large language models and propose MMC2Act, showing that training on ProAction significantly improves proactive action reasoning compared to general-purpose models.
By Zhihao Gu, Kechao Zhu, Yuanfeng Wu, Mohan Liu, Ankit Kumar Shaw, ChenDong Hong, Xuanyu Chen, Dengchen Mei, Xu Tianyi, Lin Wang
arXiv:2609.14118v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Online understanding of who is talking to the camera wearer is a key capability for egocentric social interaction. However, existing talk-to-me (TTM)...
By Feiyu Du, Xi He, Jia Li, Yapeng Tian, Weili Wu