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Bermet Burkanova

Publications and source records attributed to Bermet Burkanova.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

CoMPAS3D: A Dataset and Benchmark for Interactive Motion

Socially interactive humanoid robots must engage with humans through their bodies, adapting in real time to a partner's movement, intent, and abilities. This requires models that understand not just how bodies move, but what movement means in a shared social context. Yet evaluation frameworks for interactive motion generation do not measure whether generated follower motion is legible within a shared movement vocabulary, nor whether it is appropriate to the partner's proficiency level. This gap has two causes: existing frameworks rely on kinematic metrics such as FID and beat alignment that cannot measure either property, and existing datasets lack the move annotations and proficiency variation needed. Salsa is well-suited as an evaluation domain: improvised, dyadic, and governed by a move vocabulary and judging criteria covering timing, musicality, technique, difficulty, partnering, and originality. We present CoMPAS3D, a motion capture dataset of improvised partner salsa paired with an evaluation framework covering kinematic quality, two objective metrics (move legibility and proficiency appropriateness), and six competition-based subjective dimensions. The dataset includes 3 hours of improvisation by 18 dancers spanning beginner, intermediate, and professional levels, with over 2,800 expert-annotated segments covering move types, errors, and stylistic elements. We define three benchmarks: move classification (analogous to transcription), proficiency estimation (fluency assessment), and follower generation (dialogue response). Fine-tuned vision-language models perform strongly on objective metrics applied to ground-truth motion sequences. Applied to Duolando and InterGen, the metrics reveal failures that kinematic metrics miss. Human evaluations confirm the gap between generated and ground-truth motion. CoMPAS3D, annotations, benchmark code, and baseline results are publicly available.

cs.LG

How Neurotypical and Autistic Children Interact Nonverbally with Anthropomorphic Agents in Open-Ended Tasks

What nonverbal behaviors should a robot respond to? Understanding how children-both neurotypical and autistic-engage with embodied artificial agents is critical for developing inclusive and socially interactive systems. In this paper, we study "open-ended" unconstrained interactions with embodied agents, where little is known about how children behave nonverbally when given few instructions. We conducted a Wizard-of-Oz study in which children were invited to interact nonverbally with 6 different embodied virtual characters displayed on a television screen. We collected 563 (141 unique) nonverbal behaviors produced by children and compare the childre's interaction patterns with those previously reported in an adult study. We also report the presence of repetitive face and hand movements, which should be considered in the development of nonverbally interactive artificial agents.

cs.HC

EmojiVoice: Towards long-term controllable expressivity in robot speech

Humans vary their expressivity when speaking for extended periods to maintain engagement with their listener. Although social robots tend to be deployed with ``expressive'' joyful voices, they lack this long-term variation found in human speech. Foundation model text-to-speech systems are beginning to mimic the expressivity in human speech, but they are difficult to deploy offline on robots. We present EmojiVoice, a free, customizable text-to-speech (TTS) toolkit that allows social roboticists to build temporally variable, expressive speech on social robots. We introduce emoji-prompting to allow fine-grained control of expressivity on a phase level and use the lightweight Matcha-TTS backbone to generate speech in real-time. We explore three case studies: (1) a scripted conversation with a robot assistant, (2) a storytelling robot, and (3) an autonomous speech-to-speech interactive agent. We found that using varied emoji prompting improved the perception and expressivity of speech over a long period in a storytelling task, but expressive voice was not preferred in the assistant use case.

cs.RO

React to This! How Humans Challenge Interactive Agents using Nonverbal Behaviors

How do people use their faces and bodies to test the interactive abilities of a robot? Making lively, believable agents is often seen as a goal for robots and virtual agents but believability can easily break down. In this Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) study, we observed 1169 nonverbal interactions between 20 participants and 6 types of agents. We collected the nonverbal behaviors participants used to challenge the characters physically, emotionally, and socially. The participants interacted freely with humanoid and non-humanoid forms: a robot, a human, a penguin, a pufferfish, a banana, and a toilet. We present a human behavior codebook of 188 unique nonverbal behaviors used by humans to test the virtual characters. The insights and design strategies drawn from video observations aim to help build more interaction-aware and believable robots, especially when humans push them to their limits.

cs.HC