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SubscribeRefHCM: A Unified Model for Referring Perceptions in Human-Centric Scenarios
Human-centric perceptions play a crucial role in real-world applications. While recent human-centric works have achieved impressive progress, these efforts are often constrained to the visual domain and lack interaction with human instructions, limiting their applicability in broader scenarios such as chatbots and sports analysis. This paper introduces Referring Human Perceptions, where a referring prompt specifies the person of interest in an image. To tackle the new task, we propose RefHCM (Referring Human-Centric Model), a unified framework to integrate a wide range of human-centric referring tasks. Specifically, RefHCM employs sequence mergers to convert raw multimodal data -- including images, text, coordinates, and parsing maps -- into semantic tokens. This standardized representation enables RefHCM to reformulate diverse human-centric referring tasks into a sequence-to-sequence paradigm, solved using a plain encoder-decoder transformer architecture. Benefiting from a unified learning strategy, RefHCM effectively facilitates knowledge transfer across tasks and exhibits unforeseen capabilities in handling complex reasoning. This work represents the first attempt to address referring human perceptions with a general-purpose framework, while simultaneously establishing a corresponding benchmark that sets new standards for the field. Extensive experiments showcase RefHCM's competitive and even superior performance across multiple human-centric referring tasks. The code and data are publicly at https://github.com/JJJYmmm/RefHCM.
UniHCP: A Unified Model for Human-Centric Perceptions
Human-centric perceptions (e.g., pose estimation, human parsing, pedestrian detection, person re-identification, etc.) play a key role in industrial applications of visual models. While specific human-centric tasks have their own relevant semantic aspect to focus on, they also share the same underlying semantic structure of the human body. However, few works have attempted to exploit such homogeneity and design a general-propose model for human-centric tasks. In this work, we revisit a broad range of human-centric tasks and unify them in a minimalist manner. We propose UniHCP, a Unified Model for Human-Centric Perceptions, which unifies a wide range of human-centric tasks in a simplified end-to-end manner with the plain vision transformer architecture. With large-scale joint training on 33 human-centric datasets, UniHCP can outperform strong baselines on several in-domain and downstream tasks by direct evaluation. When adapted to a specific task, UniHCP achieves new SOTAs on a wide range of human-centric tasks, e.g., 69.8 mIoU on CIHP for human parsing, 86.18 mA on PA-100K for attribute prediction, 90.3 mAP on Market1501 for ReID, and 85.8 JI on CrowdHuman for pedestrian detection, performing better than specialized models tailored for each task.
HAP: Structure-Aware Masked Image Modeling for Human-Centric Perception
Model pre-training is essential in human-centric perception. In this paper, we first introduce masked image modeling (MIM) as a pre-training approach for this task. Upon revisiting the MIM training strategy, we reveal that human structure priors offer significant potential. Motivated by this insight, we further incorporate an intuitive human structure prior - human parts - into pre-training. Specifically, we employ this prior to guide the mask sampling process. Image patches, corresponding to human part regions, have high priority to be masked out. This encourages the model to concentrate more on body structure information during pre-training, yielding substantial benefits across a range of human-centric perception tasks. To further capture human characteristics, we propose a structure-invariant alignment loss that enforces different masked views, guided by the human part prior, to be closely aligned for the same image. We term the entire method as HAP. HAP simply uses a plain ViT as the encoder yet establishes new state-of-the-art performance on 11 human-centric benchmarks, and on-par result on one dataset. For example, HAP achieves 78.1% mAP on MSMT17 for person re-identification, 86.54% mA on PA-100K for pedestrian attribute recognition, 78.2% AP on MS COCO for 2D pose estimation, and 56.0 PA-MPJPE on 3DPW for 3D pose and shape estimation.
Augmenting Perceptual Super-Resolution via Image Quality Predictors
Super-resolution (SR), a classical inverse problem in computer vision, is inherently ill-posed, inducing a distribution of plausible solutions for every input. However, the desired result is not simply the expectation of this distribution, which is the blurry image obtained by minimizing pixelwise error, but rather the sample with the highest image quality. A variety of techniques, from perceptual metrics to adversarial losses, are employed to this end. In this work, we explore an alternative: utilizing powerful non-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) models in the SR context. We begin with a comprehensive analysis of NR-IQA metrics on human-derived SR data, identifying both the accuracy (human alignment) and complementarity of different metrics. Then, we explore two methods of applying NR-IQA models to SR learning: (i) altering data sampling, by building on an existing multi-ground-truth SR framework, and (ii) directly optimizing a differentiable quality score. Our results demonstrate a more human-centric perception-distortion tradeoff, focusing less on non-perceptual pixel-wise distortion, instead improving the balance between perceptual fidelity and human-tuned NR-IQA measures.
RTMW: Real-Time Multi-Person 2D and 3D Whole-body Pose Estimation
Whole-body pose estimation is a challenging task that requires simultaneous prediction of keypoints for the body, hands, face, and feet. Whole-body pose estimation aims to predict fine-grained pose information for the human body, including the face, torso, hands, and feet, which plays an important role in the study of human-centric perception and generation and in various applications. In this work, we present RTMW (Real-Time Multi-person Whole-body pose estimation models), a series of high-performance models for 2D/3D whole-body pose estimation. We incorporate RTMPose model architecture with FPN and HEM (Hierarchical Encoding Module) to better capture pose information from different body parts with various scales. The model is trained with a rich collection of open-source human keypoint datasets with manually aligned annotations and further enhanced via a two-stage distillation strategy. RTMW demonstrates strong performance on multiple whole-body pose estimation benchmarks while maintaining high inference efficiency and deployment friendliness. We release three sizes: m/l/x, with RTMW-l achieving a 70.2 mAP on the COCO-Wholebody benchmark, making it the first open-source model to exceed 70 mAP on this benchmark. Meanwhile, we explored the performance of RTMW in the task of 3D whole-body pose estimation, conducting image-based monocular 3D whole-body pose estimation in a coordinate classification manner. We hope this work can benefit both academic research and industrial applications. The code and models have been made publicly available at: https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmpose/tree/main/projects/rtmpose
Human-centric Scene Understanding for 3D Large-scale Scenarios
Human-centric scene understanding is significant for real-world applications, but it is extremely challenging due to the existence of diverse human poses and actions, complex human-environment interactions, severe occlusions in crowds, etc. In this paper, we present a large-scale multi-modal dataset for human-centric scene understanding, dubbed HuCenLife, which is collected in diverse daily-life scenarios with rich and fine-grained annotations. Our HuCenLife can benefit many 3D perception tasks, such as segmentation, detection, action recognition, etc., and we also provide benchmarks for these tasks to facilitate related research. In addition, we design novel modules for LiDAR-based segmentation and action recognition, which are more applicable for large-scale human-centric scenarios and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Human-MME: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Human-Centric Multimodal Large Language Models
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant advances in visual understanding tasks. However, their capacity to comprehend human-centric scenes has rarely been explored, primarily due to the absence of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks that take into account both the human-oriented granular level and higher-dimensional causal reasoning ability. Such high-quality evaluation benchmarks face tough obstacles, given the physical complexity of the human body and the difficulty of annotating granular structures. In this paper, we propose Human-MME, a curated benchmark designed to provide a more holistic evaluation of MLLMs in human-centric scene understanding. Compared with other existing benchmarks, our work provides three key features: 1. Diversity in human scene, spanning 4 primary visual domains with 15 secondary domains and 43 sub-fields to ensure broad scenario coverage. 2. Progressive and diverse evaluation dimensions, evaluating the human-based activities progressively from the human-oriented granular perception to the higher-dimensional reasoning, consisting of eight dimensions with 19,945 real-world image question pairs and an evaluation suite. 3. High-quality annotations with rich data paradigms, constructing the automated annotation pipeline and human-annotation platform, supporting rigorous manual labeling to facilitate precise and reliable model assessment. Our benchmark extends the single-target understanding to the multi-person and multi-image mutual understanding by constructing the choice, short-answer, grounding, ranking and judgment question components, and complex questions of their combination. The extensive experiments on 17 state-of-the-art MLLMs effectively expose the limitations and guide future MLLMs research toward better human-centric image understanding. All data and code are available at https://github.com/Yuan-Hou/Human-MME.
A Survey on Human-Centric LLMs
The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) and their capacity to simulate human cognition and behavior has given rise to LLM-based frameworks and tools that are evaluated and applied based on their ability to perform tasks traditionally performed by humans, namely those involving cognition, decision-making, and social interaction. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of such human-centric LLM capabilities, focusing on their performance in both individual tasks (where an LLM acts as a stand-in for a single human) and collective tasks (where multiple LLMs coordinate to mimic group dynamics). We first evaluate LLM competencies across key areas including reasoning, perception, and social cognition, comparing their abilities to human-like skills. Then, we explore real-world applications of LLMs in human-centric domains such as behavioral science, political science, and sociology, assessing their effectiveness in replicating human behaviors and interactions. Finally, we identify challenges and future research directions, such as improving LLM adaptability, emotional intelligence, and cultural sensitivity, while addressing inherent biases and enhancing frameworks for human-AI collaboration. This survey aims to provide a foundational understanding of LLMs from a human-centric perspective, offering insights into their current capabilities and potential for future development.
From Pixels to Feelings: Aligning MLLMs with Human Cognitive Perception of Images
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are adept at answering what is in an image-identifying objects and describing scenes-they often lack the ability to understand how an image feels to a human observer. This gap is most evident when considering subjective cognitive properties, such as what makes an image memorable, funny, aesthetically pleasing, or emotionally evocative. To systematically address this challenge, we introduce CogIP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on such image cognitive properties. Our evaluation reveals a significant gap: current models are poorly aligned with human perception of these nuanced properties. We then demonstrate that a post-training phase can effectively bridge this gap, significantly enhancing the model's alignment with human judgments. Furthermore, we show that this learned cognitive alignment is not merely predictive but also transferable to downstream creative tasks. By integrating our cognitively-aligned MLLM into an image generation pipeline, we can guide the synthesis process to produce images that better embody desired traits, such as being more memorable or visually appealing. Our work provides a benchmark to measure this human-like perception, a post-training pipeline to enhance it, and a demonstration that this alignment unlocks more human-centric AI.
ActionArt: Advancing Multimodal Large Models for Fine-Grained Human-Centric Video Understanding
Fine-grained understanding of human actions and poses in videos is essential for human-centric AI applications. In this work, we introduce ActionArt, a fine-grained video-caption dataset designed to advance research in human-centric multimodal understanding. Our dataset comprises thousands of videos capturing a broad spectrum of human actions, human-object interactions, and diverse scenarios, each accompanied by detailed annotations that meticulously label every limb movement. We develop eight sub-tasks to evaluate the fine-grained understanding capabilities of existing large multimodal models across different dimensions. Experimental results indicate that, while current large multimodal models perform commendably on various tasks, they often fall short in achieving fine-grained understanding. We attribute this limitation to the scarcity of meticulously annotated data, which is both costly and difficult to scale manually. Since manual annotations are costly and hard to scale, we propose proxy tasks to enhance the model perception ability in both spatial and temporal dimensions. These proxy tasks are carefully crafted to be driven by data automatically generated from existing MLLMs, thereby reducing the reliance on costly manual labels. Experimental results show that the proposed proxy tasks significantly narrow the gap toward the performance achieved with manually annotated fine-grained data.
HPSv3: Towards Wide-Spectrum Human Preference Score
Evaluating text-to-image generation models requires alignment with human perception, yet existing human-centric metrics are constrained by limited data coverage, suboptimal feature extraction, and inefficient loss functions. To address these challenges, we introduce Human Preference Score v3 (HPSv3). (1) We release HPDv3, the first wide-spectrum human preference dataset integrating 1.08M text-image pairs and 1.17M annotated pairwise comparisons from state-of-the-art generative models and low to high-quality real-world images. (2) We introduce a VLM-based preference model trained using an uncertainty-aware ranking loss for fine-grained ranking. Besides, we propose Chain-of-Human-Preference (CoHP), an iterative image refinement method that enhances quality without extra data, using HPSv3 to select the best image at each step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HPSv3 serves as a robust metric for wide-spectrum image evaluation, and CoHP offers an efficient and human-aligned approach to improve image generation quality. The code and dataset are available at the HPSv3 Homepage.
MP-GUI: Modality Perception with MLLMs for GUI Understanding
Graphical user interface (GUI) has become integral to modern society, making it crucial to be understood for human-centric systems. However, unlike natural images or documents, GUIs comprise artificially designed graphical elements arranged to convey specific semantic meanings. Current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) already proficient in processing graphical and textual components suffer from hurdles in GUI understanding due to the lack of explicit spatial structure modeling. Moreover, obtaining high-quality spatial structure data is challenging due to privacy issues and noisy environments. To address these challenges, we present MP-GUI, a specially designed MLLM for GUI understanding. MP-GUI features three precisely specialized perceivers to extract graphical, textual, and spatial modalities from the screen as GUI-tailored visual clues, with spatial structure refinement strategy and adaptively combined via a fusion gate to meet the specific preferences of different GUI understanding tasks. To cope with the scarcity of training data, we also introduce a pipeline for automatically data collecting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MP-GUI achieves impressive results on various GUI understanding tasks with limited data.
ContextAgent: Context-Aware Proactive LLM Agents with Open-World Sensory Perceptions
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled intelligent agents from reactive responses to proactive support. While promising, existing proactive agents either rely exclusively on observations from enclosed environments (e.g., desktop UIs) with direct LLM inference or employ rule-based proactive notifications, leading to suboptimal user intent understanding and limited functionality for proactive service. In this paper, we introduce ContextAgent, the first context-aware proactive agent that incorporates extensive sensory contexts to enhance the proactive capabilities of LLM agents. ContextAgent first extracts multi-dimensional contexts from massive sensory perceptions on wearables (e.g., video and audio) to understand user intentions. ContextAgent then leverages the sensory contexts and the persona contexts from historical data to predict the necessity for proactive services. When proactive assistance is needed, ContextAgent further automatically calls the necessary tools to assist users unobtrusively. To evaluate this new task, we curate ContextAgentBench, the first benchmark for evaluating context-aware proactive LLM agents, covering 1,000 samples across nine daily scenarios and twenty tools. Experiments on ContextAgentBench show that ContextAgent outperforms baselines by achieving up to 8.5% and 6.0% higher accuracy in proactive predictions and tool calling, respectively. We hope our research can inspire the development of more advanced, human-centric, proactive AI assistants.
Adaptive Camera Sensor for Vision Models
Domain shift remains a persistent challenge in deep-learning-based computer vision, often requiring extensive model modifications or large labeled datasets to address. Inspired by human visual perception, which adjusts input quality through corrective lenses rather than over-training the brain, we propose Lens, a novel camera sensor control method that enhances model performance by capturing high-quality images from the model's perspective rather than relying on traditional human-centric sensor control. Lens is lightweight and adapts sensor parameters to specific models and scenes in real-time. At its core, Lens utilizes VisiT, a training-free, model-specific quality indicator that evaluates individual unlabeled samples at test time using confidence scores without additional adaptation costs. To validate Lens, we introduce ImageNet-ES Diverse, a new benchmark dataset capturing natural perturbations from varying sensor and lighting conditions. Extensive experiments on both ImageNet-ES and our new ImageNet-ES Diverse show that Lens significantly improves model accuracy across various baseline schemes for sensor control and model modification while maintaining low latency in image captures. Lens effectively compensates for large model size differences and integrates synergistically with model improvement techniques. Our code and dataset are available at github.com/Edw2n/Lens.git.
ODHSR: Online Dense 3D Reconstruction of Humans and Scenes from Monocular Videos
Creating a photorealistic scene and human reconstruction from a single monocular in-the-wild video figures prominently in the perception of a human-centric 3D world. Recent neural rendering advances have enabled holistic human-scene reconstruction but require pre-calibrated camera and human poses, and days of training time. In this work, we introduce a novel unified framework that simultaneously performs camera tracking, human pose estimation and human-scene reconstruction in an online fashion. 3D Gaussian Splatting is utilized to learn Gaussian primitives for humans and scenes efficiently, and reconstruction-based camera tracking and human pose estimation modules are designed to enable holistic understanding and effective disentanglement of pose and appearance. Specifically, we design a human deformation module to reconstruct the details and enhance generalizability to out-of-distribution poses faithfully. Aiming to learn the spatial correlation between human and scene accurately, we introduce occlusion-aware human silhouette rendering and monocular geometric priors, which further improve reconstruction quality. Experiments on the EMDB and NeuMan datasets demonstrate superior or on-par performance with existing methods in camera tracking, human pose estimation, novel view synthesis and runtime. Our project page is at https://eth-ait.github.io/ODHSR.
Machine Perceptual Quality: Evaluating the Impact of Severe Lossy Compression on Audio and Image Models
In the field of neural data compression, the prevailing focus has been on optimizing algorithms for either classical distortion metrics, such as PSNR or SSIM, or human perceptual quality. With increasing amounts of data consumed by machines rather than humans, a new paradigm of machine-oriented compressionx2013which prioritizes the retention of features salient for machine perception over traditional human-centric criteriax2013has emerged, creating several new challenges to the development, evaluation, and deployment of systems utilizing lossy compression. In particular, it is unclear how different approaches to lossy compression will affect the performance of downstream machine perception tasks. To address this under-explored area, we evaluate various perception modelsx2013including image classification, image segmentation, speech recognition, and music source separationx2013under severe lossy compression. We utilize several popular codecs spanning conventional, neural, and generative compression architectures. Our results indicate three key findings: (1) using generative compression, it is feasible to leverage highly compressed data while incurring a negligible impact on machine perceptual quality; (2) machine perceptual quality correlates strongly with deep similarity metrics, indicating a crucial role of these metrics in the development of machine-oriented codecs; and (3) using lossy compressed datasets, (e.g. ImageNet) for pre-training can lead to counter-intuitive scenarios where lossy compression increases machine perceptual quality rather than degrading it. To encourage engagement on this growing area of research, our code and experiments are available at: https://github.com/danjacobellis/MPQ.
UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction
Autonomous agents that navigate Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to automate tasks like document editing and file management can greatly enhance computer workflows. While existing research focuses on online settings, desktop environments, critical for many professional and everyday tasks, remain underexplored due to data collection challenges and licensing issues. We introduce UI-Vision, the first comprehensive, license-permissive benchmark for offline, fine-grained evaluation of computer use agents in real-world desktop environments. Unlike online benchmarks, UI-Vision provides: (i) dense, high-quality annotations of human demonstrations, including bounding boxes, UI labels, and action trajectories (clicks, drags, and keyboard inputs) across 83 software applications, and (ii) three fine-to-coarse grained tasks-Element Grounding, Layout Grounding, and Action Prediction-with well-defined metrics to rigorously evaluate agents' performance in desktop environments. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations in state-of-the-art models like UI-TARS-72B, including issues with understanding professional software, spatial reasoning, and complex actions like drag-and-drop. These findings highlight the challenges in developing fully autonomous computer use agents. By releasing UI-Vision as open-source, we aim to advance the development of more capable agents for real-world desktop tasks.
Reasoning-Enhanced Object-Centric Learning for Videos
Object-centric learning aims to break down complex visual scenes into more manageable object representations, enhancing the understanding and reasoning abilities of machine learning systems toward the physical world. Recently, slot-based video models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in segmenting and tracking objects, but they overlook the importance of the effective reasoning module. In the real world, reasoning and predictive abilities play a crucial role in human perception and object tracking; in particular, these abilities are closely related to human intuitive physics. Inspired by this, we designed a novel reasoning module called the Slot-based Time-Space Transformer with Memory buffer (STATM) to enhance the model's perception ability in complex scenes. The memory buffer primarily serves as storage for slot information from upstream modules, the Slot-based Time-Space Transformer makes predictions through slot-based spatiotemporal attention computations and fusion. Our experimental results on various datasets indicate that the STATM module can significantly enhance the capabilities of multiple state-of-the-art object-centric learning models for video. Moreover, as a predictive model, the STATM module also performs well in downstream prediction and Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. We will release our codes and data at https://github.com/intell-sci-comput/STATM.
Provable Compositional Generalization for Object-Centric Learning
Learning representations that generalize to novel compositions of known concepts is crucial for bridging the gap between human and machine perception. One prominent effort is learning object-centric representations, which are widely conjectured to enable compositional generalization. Yet, it remains unclear when this conjecture will be true, as a principled theoretical or empirical understanding of compositional generalization is lacking. In this work, we investigate when compositional generalization is guaranteed for object-centric representations through the lens of identifiability theory. We show that autoencoders that satisfy structural assumptions on the decoder and enforce encoder-decoder consistency will learn object-centric representations that provably generalize compositionally. We validate our theoretical result and highlight the practical relevance of our assumptions through experiments on synthetic image data.
Multiverse Through Deepfakes: The MultiFakeVerse Dataset of Person-Centric Visual and Conceptual Manipulations
The rapid advancement of GenAI technology over the past few years has significantly contributed towards highly realistic deepfake content generation. Despite ongoing efforts, the research community still lacks a large-scale and reasoning capability driven deepfake benchmark dataset specifically tailored for person-centric object, context and scene manipulations. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing MultiFakeVerse, a large scale person-centric deepfake dataset, comprising 845,286 images generated through manipulation suggestions and image manipulations both derived from vision-language models (VLM). The VLM instructions were specifically targeted towards modifications to individuals or contextual elements of a scene that influence human perception of importance, intent, or narrative. This VLM-driven approach enables semantic, context-aware alterations such as modifying actions, scenes, and human-object interactions rather than synthetic or low-level identity swaps and region-specific edits that are common in existing datasets. Our experiments reveal that current state-of-the-art deepfake detection models and human observers struggle to detect these subtle yet meaningful manipulations. The code and dataset are available on https://github.com/Parul-Gupta/MultiFakeVerse{GitHub}.
Are We Done with Object-Centric Learning?
Object-centric learning (OCL) seeks to learn representations that only encode an object, isolated from other objects or background cues in a scene. This approach underpins various aims, including out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, sample-efficient composition, and modeling of structured environments. Most research has focused on developing unsupervised mechanisms that separate objects into discrete slots in the representation space, evaluated using unsupervised object discovery. However, with recent sample-efficient segmentation models, we can separate objects in the pixel space and encode them independently. This achieves remarkable zero-shot performance on OOD object discovery benchmarks, is scalable to foundation models, and can handle a variable number of slots out-of-the-box. Hence, the goal of OCL methods to obtain object-centric representations has been largely achieved. Despite this progress, a key question remains: How does the ability to separate objects within a scene contribute to broader OCL objectives, such as OOD generalization? We address this by investigating the OOD generalization challenge caused by spurious background cues through the lens of OCL. We propose a novel, training-free probe called Object-Centric Classification with Applied Masks (OCCAM), demonstrating that segmentation-based encoding of individual objects significantly outperforms slot-based OCL methods. However, challenges in real-world applications remain. We provide the toolbox for the OCL community to use scalable object-centric representations, and focus on practical applications and fundamental questions, such as understanding object perception in human cognition. Our code is available https://github.com/AlexanderRubinstein/OCCAM{here}.
Audio-Language Models for Audio-Centric Tasks: A survey
Audio-Language Models (ALMs), which are trained on audio-text data, focus on the processing, understanding, and reasoning of sounds. Unlike traditional supervised learning approaches learning from predefined labels, ALMs utilize natural language as a supervision signal, which is more suitable for describing complex real-world audio recordings. ALMs demonstrate strong zero-shot capabilities and can be flexibly adapted to diverse downstream tasks. These strengths not only enhance the accuracy and generalization of audio processing tasks but also promote the development of models that more closely resemble human auditory perception and comprehension. Recent advances in ALMs have positioned them at the forefront of computer audition research, inspiring a surge of efforts to advance ALM technologies. Despite rapid progress in the field of ALMs, there is still a notable lack of systematic surveys that comprehensively organize and analyze developments. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of ALMs with a focus on general audio tasks, aiming to fill this gap by providing a structured and holistic overview of ALMs. Specifically, we cover: (1) the background of computer audition and audio-language models; (2) the foundational aspects of ALMs, including prevalent network architectures, training objectives, and evaluation methods; (3) foundational pre-training and audio-language pre-training approaches; (4) task-specific fine-tuning, multi-task tuning and agent systems for downstream applications; (5) datasets and benchmarks; and (6) current challenges and future directions. Our review provides a clear technical roadmap for researchers to understand the development and future trends of existing technologies, offering valuable references for implementation in real-world scenarios.
Enabling Chatbots with Eyes and Ears: An Immersive Multimodal Conversation System for Dynamic Interactions
As chatbots continue to evolve toward human-like, real-world, interactions, multimodality remains an active area of research and exploration. So far, efforts to integrate multimodality into chatbots have primarily focused on image-centric tasks, such as visual dialogue and image-based instructions, placing emphasis on the "eyes" of human perception while neglecting the "ears", namely auditory aspects. Moreover, these studies often center around static interactions that focus on discussing the modality rather than naturally incorporating it into the conversation, which limits the richness of simultaneous, dynamic engagement. Furthermore, while multimodality has been explored in multi-party and multi-session conversations, task-specific constraints have hindered its seamless integration into dynamic, natural conversations. To address these challenges, this study aims to equip chatbots with "eyes and ears" capable of more immersive interactions with humans. As part of this effort, we introduce a new multimodal conversation dataset, Multimodal Multi-Session Multi-Party Conversation (M^3C), and propose a novel multimodal conversation model featuring multimodal memory retrieval. Our model, trained on the M^3C, demonstrates the ability to seamlessly engage in long-term conversations with multiple speakers in complex, real-world-like settings, effectively processing visual and auditory inputs to understand and respond appropriately. Human evaluations highlight the model's strong performance in maintaining coherent and dynamic interactions, demonstrating its potential for advanced multimodal conversational agents.
MOOSE: Pay Attention to Temporal Dynamics for Video Understanding via Optical Flows
Many motion-centric video analysis tasks, such as atomic actions, detecting atypical motor behavior in individuals with autism, or analyzing articulatory motion in real-time MRI of human speech, require efficient and interpretable temporal modeling. Capturing temporal dynamics is a central challenge in video analysis, often requiring significant computational resources and fine-grained annotations that are not widely available. This paper presents MOOSE (Motion Flow Over Spatial Space), a novel temporally-centric video encoder explicitly integrating optical flow with spatial embeddings to model temporal information efficiently, inspired by human perception of motion. Unlike prior models, MOOSE takes advantage of rich, widely available pre-trained visual and optical flow encoders instead of training video models from scratch. This significantly reduces computational complexity while enhancing temporal interpretability. Our primary contributions includes (1) proposing a computationally efficient temporally-centric architecture for video understanding (2) demonstrating enhanced interpretability in modeling temporal dynamics; and (3) achieving state-of-the-art performance on diverse benchmarks, including clinical, medical, and standard action recognition datasets, confirming the broad applicability and effectiveness of our approach.
MagicGUI: A Foundational Mobile GUI Agent with Scalable Data Pipeline and Reinforcement Fine-tuning
This paper presents MagicGUI, a foundational mobile GUI agent designed to address critical challenges in perception, grounding, and reasoning within real-world mobile GUI environments. The framework is underpinned by following six key components: (1) a comprehensive and accurate dataset, constructed via the scalable GUI Data Pipeline, which aggregates the largest and most diverse GUI-centric multimodal data to date from open-source repositories, automated crawling, and targeted manual annotation; (2) enhanced perception and grounding capabilities, facilitating fine-grained multimodal alignment for UI element referencing, grounding, and screen comprehension; (3) a comprehensive and unified action space, encompassing both fundamental UI operations and complex interactive intents to support human-agent interactions; (4) planning-oriented reasoning mechanisms that enable the model to decompose complex user instructions into sequential actions with explicit intermediate meta-paln reasoning; (5) an iterative two-stage training procedure, combining large-scale continue pre-training on 7.8M samples with reinforcement fine-tuning utilizing a spatially enhanced composite reward and dual filtering strategy; and (6) competitive performance on both the proprietary Magic-RICH benchmark and over a dozen public benchmarks, achieving superior performance across GUI perception and agent tasks, while demonstrating robust generalization and real-world deployment potential in practical mobile GUI scenarios, as detailed in Figure 1.
