68 accepted papers
Large language models leverage internet-scale text data, yet embodied AI remains constrained by the prohibitive costs of physical trajectory collection. Desktop environments---particularly gaming---offer a compelling alternative: they provide rich sensorimotor interactions at scale while maintaining…
Sound symbolism is a linguistic concept that refers to non-arbitrary associations between phonetic forms and their meanings. We suggest that this can be a compelling probe into how Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) interpret auditory information in human languages. We investigate MLLMs
With the rapid advancement of mathematical reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), AI systems are increasingly being adopted in educational settings to support students’ comprehension of problem-solving processes. However, a critical component remains underexplored in current LLM-gen
Recent progress in reasoning models suggests that generating plausible attempts for research-level mathematics may be within reach, but verification remains a bottleneck, consuming scarce expert time. We hypothesize that a meaningful solution should contain enough method-level information that, when…
Recent frontier models employ long-chain-of-thought reasoning to explore solution spaces in context and achieve stronger performance. While many works study distillation to build smaller yet capable models, most focus on English and little is known about language-specific reasoning. To bridge this g…
TIPO (Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization) introduces an efficient approach for automatic prompt refinement in text-to-image (T2I) generation. Starting from simple user prompts, TIPO leverages a lightweight pre-trained model to expand these prompts into richer, detailed versions. Conceptually, TIPO sa…
As large language models expand beyond natural language to domains such as mathematics, multimodal understanding, and embodied agents, tokens increasingly reflect metric relationships rather than purely linguistic meaning. We introduce DIST2Loss, a distance-aware framework designed to train autoregr…
Any-to-any generative models aim to enable seamless interpretation and generation across multiple modalities within a unified framework, yet their ability to preserve relationships across modalities remains uncertain. Do unified models truly achieve cross-modal coherence, or is this coherence merely…
Real-life robot navigation involves more than just reaching a destination; it requires optimizing movements while addressing scenario-specific goals. An intuitive way for humans to express these goals is through abstract cues like verbal commands or rough sketches. Such human guidance may lack detai
Speech-driven 3D facial animation has garnered lots of attention thanks to its broad range of applications. Despite recent advancements in achieving realistic lip motion, current methods fail to capture the nuanced emotional undertones conveyed through speech and produce monotonous facial motion. Th…
Semantic segmentation demands dense pixel-level annotations, which can be prohibitively expensive -- especially under extremely constrained labeling budgets. In this paper, we address the problem of low-budget active learning for semantic segmentation by proposing a novel two-stage selection pipelin…
Human motion is inherently continuous and dynamic, posing significant challenges for generative models. While discrete generation methods are widely used, they suffer from limited expressiveness and frame-wise noise artifacts. In contrast, continuous approaches produce smoother, more natural motion…
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their adaptation in various domains as conversational agents. We wonder: can personality tests be applied to these agents to analyze their behavior, similar to humans? We introduce TRAIT, a new benchmark consisting of 8K multi-choice qu…
Predicting when to initiate speech in real-world environments remains a fundamental challenge for conversational agents. We introduce , a novel framework for real-time speech initiation prediction in egocentric streaming video. By modeling the conversation from the speaker’s first-person viewpoint,…
Iterative self-improvement, a concept extending beyond personal growth, has found powerful applications in machine learning, particularly in transforming weak models into strong ones. While recent advances in natural language processing have shown its efficacy through iterative preference optimizati…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) demonstrates the advantage of aligning a large language model with human preference using only an offline dataset. However, DPO has the limitation that the KL penalty, which prevents excessive deviation from the reference model, is static throughout the training…
Pretrained visual-language models have made significant advancements in multimodal tasks, including image-text retrieval. However, a major challenge in image-text matching lies in language bias, where models predominantly rely on language priors and neglect to adequately consider the visual content.…
Lyrics translation requires both accurate semantic transfer and preservation of musical rhythm, syllabic structure, and poetic style. In animated musicals, the challenge intensifies due to alignment with visual and auditory cues. We introduce Multilingual Audio-Video Lyrics Benchmark for Animated So
Commonsense reasoning in multimodal contexts remains a foundational challenge in artificial intelligence. We introduce Multimodal UNcommonsense (MUN), a benchmark designed to evaluate models’ ability to handle scenarios that deviate from typical visual or contextual expectations. MUN pairs visual sc
Artificial agents are increasingly central to complex interactions and decision-making tasks, yet aligning their behaviors with desired human values remains an open challenge. In this work, we investigate how human-like personality traits influence agent behavior and performance within text-based in…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools, but their inherent safety risks – ranging from harmful content generation to broader societal harms – pose significant challenges. These risks can be amplified by the recent adversarial attacks, fine-tuning vulnerabilities, and the increas…
Residual connections are pivotal for deep neural networks, enabling greater depth by mitigating vanishing gradients. However, in standard residual updates, the module’s output is directly added to the input stream. This can lead to updates that predominantly reinforce or modulate the existing stream…
Nonverbal communication is integral to human interaction, with gestures, facial expressions, and body language conveying critical aspects of intent and emotion. However, existing large language models (LLMs) fail to effectively incorporate these nonverbal elements, limiting their capacity to create…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision making in embodied agents, yet existing safety evaluations often rely on coarse success rates and domain-specific setups, making it difficult to diagnose why and where these models fail. This obscures our understanding of embodied safet
With growing interest in deploying text-to-video (T2V) models in resource-constrained environments, reducing their high computational cost has become crucial, leading to extensive research on pruning and knowledge distillation methods while maintaining performance. However, existing distillation met…
Human communication often relies on visual cues to resolve ambiguity. While humans can intuitively integrate these cues, AI systems often find it challenging to engage in sophisticated multimodal reasoning. We introduce VAGUE, a benchmark evaluating multimodal AI systems' ability to integrate visual…
Escape rooms present a unique cognitive challenge that demands exploration-driven planning: with the sole instruction to escape the room, players must actively search their environment, collecting information, and finding solutions through repeated trial and error. Motivated by this, we introduce Vi
Rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have extended information retrieval beyond text, enabling access to complex real-world documents that combine both textual and visual content. However, most documents are private, either owned by individuals or confined within corporate silo
"Online Temporal Action Localization (On-TAL) is a critical task that aims to instantaneously identify action instances in untrimmed streaming videos as soon as an action concludes—a major leap from frame-based Online Action Detection (OAD). Yet, the challenge of detecting overlapping actions is oft…
Existing approaches for aligning large language models with human preferences face a trade-off that requires a separate reward model (RM) for on-policy learning. In this paper, we present a novel alignment framework, SELF-JUDGE that (1) does on-policy learning and 2) is parameter efficient, as it do…
In this letter, we focus on inferring whether the given user command is clear, ambiguous, or infeasible in the context of interactive robotic agents utilizing large language models (LLMs). To tackle this problem, we first present an uncertainty estimation method for LLMs to classify whether the comm
Recently, the demand for psychological counseling has significantly increased as more individuals express concerns about their mental health. This surge has accelerated efforts to improve the accessibility of counseling by using large language models (LLMs) as counselors. To ensure client privacy, t…
Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a task aimed at alleviating individuals’ emotional distress through daily conversation. Given its inherent complexity and non-intuitive nature, ESConv dataset incorporates support strategies to facilitate the generation of appropriate responses. Recently, desp…
Humans possess multimodal literacy, allowing them to actively integrate information from various modalities to form reasoning. Faced with challenges like lexical ambiguity in text, we supplement this with other modalities, such as thumbnail images or textbook illustrations. Is it possible for machin…
Given the growing influx of misinformation across news and social media, there is a critical need for systems that can provide effective real-time verification of news claims. Large language or multimodal model based verification has been proposed to scale up online policing mechanisms for mitigatin…
Algorithmic reasoning tasks that involve complex logical patterns, such as completing Dyck language, pose challenges for large language models (LLMs), despite their recent success. Prior work has used LLMs to generate programming language and applied external compilers for such tasks. Yet, when on t…
Conversational recommender systems are an emerging area that has garnered increasing interest in the community, especially with the advancements in large language models (LLMs) that enable sophisticated handling of conversational input. Despite the progress, the field still has many aspects left to…
Despite the recent advances in artificial intelligence, building social intelligence remains a challenge.Among social signals, laughter is one of the distinctive expressions that occurs during social interactions between humans.In this work, we tackle a new challenge for machines to understand the r…
Visual arguments, often used in advertising or social causes, rely on images to persuade viewers to do or believe something. Understanding these arguments requires selective vision: only specific visual stimuli within an image are relevant to the argument, and relevance can only be understood within…
Visual text design plays a critical role in conveying themes, emotions, and atmospheres in multimodal formats such as film posters and album covers. Translating these visual and textual elements across languages extends the concept of translation beyond mere text, requiring the adaptation of aesthet…
Recent advancements in large language models have influenced the development of video large multimodal models (VLMMs). Previous approaches for VLMMs involve Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with instruction-tuned datasets, integrating LLM with visual encoders, and additional learnable parameters. Here,…
Visual information is central to conversation: body gestures and physical behaviour, for example, contribute to meaning that transcends words alone. To date, however, most neural conversational models are limited to just text. We introduce CHAMPAGNE, a generative model of conversations that can acco…
Human-like chatbots necessitate the use of commonsense reasoning in order to effectively comprehend and respond to implicit information present within conversations. Achieving such coherence and informativeness in responses, however, is a non-trivial task. Even for large language models (LLMs), the…
Language models are capable of commonsense reasoning: while domain-specific models can learn from explicit knowledge (e.g. commonsense graphs [6], ethical norms [25]), and larger models like GPT-3 manifest broad commonsense reasoning capacity. Can their knowledge be extended to multimodal inputs suc…
Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible interface that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion. However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user to “point to" and access specific regions within images. This capabilit…
In-context vision and language models like Flamingo support arbitrarily interleaved sequences of images and text as input. This format not only enables few-shot learning via interleaving independent supervised (image, text) examples, but also, more complex prompts involving interaction between image…
Commonsense norms are defeasible by context: reading books is usually great, but not when driving a car. While contexts can be explicitly described in language, in embodied scenarios, contexts are often provided visually. This type of visually grounded reasoning about defeasible commonsense norms is…
Data scarcity has been a long standing issue in the field of open-domain social dialogue. To quench this thirst, we present SODA: the first publicly available, million-scale high-quality social dialogue dataset. By contextualizing social commonsense knowledge from a knowledge graph, we are able to d…
Chain-of-thought prompting (e.g., “Let’s think step-by-ste”) primes large language models to verbalize rationalization for their predictions. While chain-of-thought can lead to dramatic performance gains, benefits appear to emerge only for sufficiently large models (beyond 50B parameters). We show t…
Multimodal language generation, which leverages the synergy of language and vision, is a rapidly expanding field. However, existing vision-language models face challenges in tasks that require complex linguistic understanding. To address this issue, we introduce Visual-Language models as Importance…
In this paper, we focus on the problem of efficiently locating a target object described with free-form text using a mobile robot equipped with vision sensors (e.g., an RGBD camera). Conventional active visual search predefines a set of objects to search for, rendering these techniques restrictive i…
Machines that can represent and describe environmental soundscapes have practical potential, e.g., for audio tagging and captioning. Prevailing learning paradigms of audio-text connections have been relying on parallel audio-text data, which is, however, scarcely available on the web. We propose VIP…
As humans, we navigate a multimodal world, building a holistic understanding from all our senses. We introduce MERLOT Reserve, a model that represents videos jointly over time -- through a new training objective that learns from audio, subtitles, and video frames. Given a video, we replace snippets…
The dominant paradigm for neural text generation is left-to-right decoding from autoregressive language models. Constrained or controllable generation under complex lexical constraints, however, requires foresight to plan ahead feasible future paths. Drawing inspiration from the A* search algorithm,…
Most existing dialogue systems fail to respond properly to potentially unsafe user utterances by either ignoring or passively agreeing with them. To address this issue, we introduce ProsocialDialog, the first large-scale multi-turn dialogue dataset to teach conversational agents to respond to proble…
The natural association between visual observations and their corresponding sound provides powerful self-supervisory signals for learning video representations, which makes the ever-growing amount of online videos an attractive source of training data. However, large portions of online videos contai…
We present an approach named Dual Composition Network (DCNet) for interactive image retrieval that searches for the best target image for a natural language query and a reference image. To accomplish this task, existing methods have focused on learning a composite representation of the reference ima…
As humans, we understand events in the visual world contextually, performing multimodal reasoning across time to make inferences about the past, present, and future. We introduce MERLOT, a model that learns multimodal script knowledge by watching millions of YouTube videos with transcribed speech --…
360deg videos convey holistic views for the surroundings of a scene. It provides audio-visual cues beyond predetermined normal field of views and displays distinctive spatial relations on a sphere. However, previous benchmark tasks for panoramic videos are still limited to evaluate the semantic unde…
The recent success of Transformers in the language domain has motivated adapting it to a multimodal setting, where a new visual model is trained in tandem with an already pretrained language model. However, due to the excessive memory requirements from Transformers, existing work typically fixes the…
Self-supervised learning of video representations has received great attention. Existing methods typically require frames to be decoded before being processed, which increases compute and storage requirements and ultimately hinders large-scale training. In this work, we propose an efficient self-sup…
Previous models for vision-to-language generation tasks usually pretrain a visual encoder and a language generator in the respective domains and jointly finetune them with the target task. However, this direct transfer practice may suffer from the discord between visual specificity and language flue…
We address character grounding and re-identification in multiple story-based videos like movies and associated text descriptions. In order to solve these related tasks in a mutually rewarding way, we propose a model named Character in Story Identification Network (CiSIN). Our method builds two seman…
We present an approach named JSFusion (Joint Sequence Fusion) that can measure semantic similarity between any pairs of multimodal sequence data (e.g. a video sequence and a language sentence). Our idea is to learn an effective multimodal matching network for sequence data, consisting of two key com…
We address the problem of story-based temporal summarization of long 360° videos. We propose a novel memory network model named Past-Future Memory Network (PFMN), in which we first compute the scores of 81 normal field of view (NFOV) region proposals cropped from the input 360° video, and then recov…
We propose a high-level concept word detector that can be integrated with any video-to-language models. It takes a video as input and generates a list of concept words as useful semantic priors for language generation models. The proposed word detector has two important properties. First, it does no…
The attention mechanisms in deep neural networks are inspired by human's attention that sequentially focuses on the most relevant parts of the information over time to generate prediction output. The attention parameters in those models are implicitly trained in an end-to-end manner, yet there have…
Vision and language understanding has emerged as a subject undergoing intense study in Artificial Intelligence. Among many tasks in this line of research, visual question answering (VQA) has been one of the most successful ones, where the goal is to learn a model that understands visual content at r…