Hanyao Wang | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Toward Natural and Companionable Virtual Agents via Cross-Temporal Emotional Modeling

Recent advances in foundation models have enabled conversational agents that aim for sustained companionship rather than mere task completion. Yet most still remain unable to support natural, long-term companion-like interactions, resulting in experiences that feel episodic and inauthentic. We argue that current agents overlooked cross-temporal modeling of agents' social behaviors and internal emotions: generated behaviors rarely influence an agent's emotional state, and emotional states seldom shape subsequent behaviors. We present Cross-Temporal Emotion Modeling (CTEM), a framework that links long-term behavioral history to moment-to-moment emotional expression. CTEM establishes a closed loop where past experiences update an evolving emotional state; this state conditions immediate interactions; and user feedback continually revises both memory and emotional state, enabling reflection and anticipation. We instantiate CTEM as Auri, a companion agent on an instant-messaging platform, and report a 21-day in-the-wild study showing that CTEM shows improvements in perceived naturalness, coherence, and emotional harmony.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Towards Alleviating Text-to-Image Retrieval Hallucination for CLIP in Zero-shot Learning

Pretrained cross-modal models, for instance, the most representative CLIP, have recently led to a boom in using pre-trained models for cross-modal zero-shot tasks, considering the generalization properties. However, we analytically discover that CLIP suffers from the text-to-image retrieval hallucination, adversely limiting its capabilities under zero-shot learning: CLIP would select the image with the highest score when asked to figure out which image perfectly matches one given query text among several candidate images even though CLIP knows contents in the image. Accordingly, we propose a Balanced Score with Auxiliary Prompts (BSAP) to mitigate the CLIP's text-to-image retrieval hallucination under zero-shot learning. Specifically, we first design auxiliary prompts to provide multiple reference outcomes for every single image retrieval, then the outcomes derived from each retrieved image in conjunction with the target text are normalized to obtain the final similarity, which alleviates hallucinations in the model. Additionally, we can merge CLIP's original results and BSAP to obtain a more robust hybrid outcome (BSAP-H). Extensive experiments on two typical zero-shot learning tasks, i.e., Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) and Referring Image Segmentation (RIS), are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our BSAP. Specifically, when evaluated on the validation dataset of RefCOCO in REC, BSAP increases CLIP's performance by 20.6%. Further, we validate that our strategy could be applied in other types of pretrained cross-modal models, such as ALBEF and BLIP.

cs.MM↗