arXiv subjects

Koji Inoue

Publications and source records attributed to Koji Inoue.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Multimodal Temporal Modeling for Continuous Group Emotion Recognition in Multi-party Dialogues

To realize natural behavior in dialogue agents in multi-party dialogue scenarios, it is important to understand group emotion such as valence and arousal as a whole. Most prior work addressed this task at the utterance level or using a coarse-grained time window, which is not sufficient to capture emotional dynamics. In this study, we formulate continuous recognition of the Group Emotion at a one-second resolution. Moreover, we also introduce the Mixed state, which captures the emotional divergence among participants in the group. We constructed a dataset with frame-level soft labels based on the TEIDAN corpus and propose a multimodal temporal framework that integrates audio and video information using a sliding-window context. Experimental results demonstrate that the temporal Transformer outperforms simple baselines and shows stronger temporal agreement with the ground-truth labels than the LLM-based model. The effect of context length is limited, whereas audio-visual input outperforms either unimodal input on the continuous-label metrics. Additionally, our analysis shows larger Group Emotion recognition errors in intervals with high Mixed values, exposing emotional divergence as a key challenge for group emotion recognition.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2026

Human-robot conversation with multiple participants in noisy public spaces

For noisy real-world environments such as those in open public spaces, spoken dialogue systems for both autonomous robots and avatars should be carefully designed to provide enhanced speech signals. These signals can be used either for speech recognition or, in the case of an avatar system, transmitted as clean speech to a remote operator. This work proposes an audio system that can be used for both these scenarios and was demonstrated as a proof-of-concept at the 2025 World Expo in Osaka. The first scenario is an attentive listening system with the android ERICA, and the second is a conversation support system with mobile Teleco robots, with one of them acting as an avatar for a remote operator. Both systems feature multi-party conversation and use a single multi-channel microphone array. We describe how our audio system not only enhances the speech of multiple speakers in a noisy environment, but provides a form of spatial audio which allows for more immersiveness in avatar-based conversational interactions.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

TEIDAN: A Multilingual Multiparty Dialogue Corpus

Multi-party interaction is a central setting for human communication and a necessary target for human-agent interaction systems that must participate in group conversation. Yet available corpora often focus on meetings, task-oriented interaction, text-based interaction, or acted scenarios, and fewer resources support cross-linguistic comparison of spontaneous face-to-face triadic discussion. This paper presents TEIDAN, a multilingual multimodal corpus that currently consists of Japanese and English three-party conversations. TEIDAN records groups of three participants discussing open-ended topics with individual pin microphones, a microphone array, and participant-facing cameras, and provides IPU-based transcripts for both language portions. Earlier studies used subsets of the Japanese portion for task-specific benchmarks in multi-party dialogue modeling; in contrast, this paper presents TEIDAN as a corpus resource spanning both Japanese and English, with planned expansion to additional languages. We describe the collection design, participants, recording setup, transcription format, and corpus statistics, and provide preliminary analyses to illustrate how TEIDAN can support research on turn-taking, addressee recognition, and multimodal grounding in human-human and human-agent interaction.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

CultureConverse: A Multilingual Multi-turn Simulation Harness for Culturally Grounded Assistance in East and Southeast Asia

Current cultural evaluations for large language models (LLMs) often reduce culture to single-turn factual recall via MCQs, failing to capture a common use case: users seeking practical help over multiple turns in culturally grounded scenarios. We introduce CultureConverse, a scalable, multilingual simulation and evaluation harness for culturally grounded assistant dialogue that covers 10 East and Southeast Asian regions, 58 subgroup identities, and 7 domains. Each simulated and evaluated episode produces a scored interaction where the assistant assists the user and infers cultural constraints from partial information. The resulting CultureConverse-DS dataset contains 14,610 benchmark (evaluation) episodes and 274,295 oracle-guided (gold-mode) dialogues. In our benchmark evaluation of 18 models, GPT-5 mini achieves the highest assistance quality. Human annotation experiments suggest that our evaluation framework is a sufficient proxy for human judgment. Performance gains from fine-tuning on 27,860 high-quality CultureConverse-DS samples improve in-domain assistance and transfer out-of-domain to cultural MCQ and safety classification benchmarks. We release the harness, both splits, and judge prompts to support interactive evaluation of cultural competency.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

MemUse: Moving Memory Evaluation from Direct QA to Natural Integration in Long-Term Human-AI Conversation

Memory systems for conversational LLMs are conventionally evaluated by direct, fact-seeking questions about prior dialogue (Direct QA): can the model recall fact X from a prior conversation? We tested whether higher Direct QA accuracy correlates with higher user satisfaction in a 4-month deployment (40 users, 1,872 sessions, 7 memory conditions). Existing-benchmark Direct QA varies from 19.7% to 70.1% across the 7 conditions, but satisfaction does not change. We hypothesize that existing benchmarks and user satisfaction are tracking different capabilities: benchmarks measure elicited retrieval (recall when asked), while conversation requires natural integration (detecting relevance and naturally weaving prior context into a response). To examine this, we introduce MemUse, a set of real user-cued memory moments drawn from the deployment, scored by an integration-aware judgment of the natural conversational response. Holding the model and context fixed, the same system that scores 78.8% on Direct QA references only 7.9% of those facts in conversation -- a 71-point gap. Within these moments, Natural Integration is associated with satisfaction, whereas Direct QA is not. We release the deployment corpus and MemUse together with all judgments and scoring prompts at https://github.com/ryuichi-sumida/memuse.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Does Listening Matter? Backchanneling and Nodding in AI Clone

AI clones that imitate a specific person typically reproduce what the person says and how they sound, but not how they listen. We investigate whether adding multimodal listening behaviors gives such a clone more presence and authenticity. We integrated verbal backchannels and head nodding, driven by real-time prediction models, into an AI clone equipped with voice cloning and LLM-based responses. In a within-subjects study (N=35), adding these behaviors significantly improved the perceived attentiveness of the avatar, the sense of talking with the real person, and the feeling of co-presence. These results indicate that AI clone fidelity should extend beyond voice and response content to include interactive listening behavior.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Revisiting Thermal Scalability for Large-Scale Superconducting Quantum Systems

The readout amplification chain imposes a critical thermal scalability bottleneck in large-scale superconducting quantum systems. This happens through three mechanisms: amplifier dissipation, passive conduction through bias wiring and Joule heating within that same wiring. These terms are absent or only partially represented in several prior system-level thermal-scalability models, leading to bottleneck misidentification and scalability overestimation. In this work, we improve upon previous system-level heat estimation models by fully accounting for the major heat sources in modern cryogenic quantum systems including the active dissipation, passive conduction, and Joule heating in the readout amplifier module. Our analysis demonstrates that amplifier-associated heat emerges as the dominant thermal bottleneck that fundamentally alters the thermal landscape of modern large-scale cryogenic systems. We explore various technology options and their tradeoffs to identify configurations that reduce this critical heat load and improve scalability. Finally, we evaluate forward-looking system configurations, including larger refrigeration platforms and optical approaches, and analyze forward-looking pathways toward single-fridge 10k-qubit cryogenic systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Low-Latency Turn-Taking via Context-Aware Preface Generation in a Real-World Dialogue Robot

Large language model (LLM)-based dialogue systems suffer response delays because generation begins only after final speech recognition. While fixed fillers are a workaround, they become unnatural over time. We propose a two-stage incremental framework that decouples prefatory-response preparation from speech onset. Once user intent becomes predictable, an intent readiness detector triggers LLM-based generation of a short prefatory response. Concurrently, a voice activity projection (VAP) model determines when to deliver it. Through a field experiment with a route-guidance robot in a shopping mall, we evaluated three conditions: no-filler, fixed-filler, and contextual-preface. Both fixed-filler and contextual-preface significantly reduced initial response latency relative to no-filler. Relative to fixed-filler, contextual-preface had significantly longer initial response latency but a significantly shorter initial-to-main gap. Exploratory ratings showed no significant differences. These results indicate a timing trade-off.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

On the Structure of Address in Multi-Party Dialogue: From Discrete Labels to Continuous Levels

In multi-party dialogues between a dialogue system and multiple users, identifying to whom an utterance is addressed is a key challenge. Prior work has typically treated addressee detection as a multi-class classification task, selecting a single label representing an individual participant or the group. This formulation assumes that address is inherently discrete and has primarily been used for predicting turn-taking. In this paper, we revisit this assumption by analyzing address as a continuous phenomenon. Using a multi-party human dialogue corpus annotated by multiple annotators, we construct both binary address labels derived from majority-vote addressee labels and continuous address levels inferred from annotator judgments using a latent-variable model. We then examine how these representations relate to turn-taking as well as listener behaviors, including gaze and backchannels. Our results show that, in addition to turn-taking, both gaze and backchannels are associated with address. Furthermore, models using continuous address levels achieve better predictive fit than those using discrete labels, suggesting that address may exhibit graded structure. Finally, we discuss the future directions of addressee detection research based on the findings of this study.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Memory-Driven Self-Disclosure and Relational Turning Points: A Longitudinal Multimodal Study of Human-AI Interaction

As conversational AI systems are designed for repeated use, a central question is how a series of interactions becomes a relationship. We present a longitudinal multimodal study of a memory-augmented conversational agent (24 participants x 10 sessions), in which participants rated five relational constructs -- familiarity, self-disclosure, perceived memory, conversational quality, and enjoyment -- after each session. Two complementary dynamics emerge. First, conversational quality strongly shapes how enjoyable a session feels in the moment but does not carry forward across sessions, whereas perceived memory is relationally conditioned -- predicted by prior relational state rather than reflecting system capability alone -- and it shapes later enjoyment indirectly, via subsequent self-disclosure. Second, relationships are punctuated by discrete turning points -- crashes and surges -- that are partially traceable in multimodal behavior and open different intervention windows: surges are more behaviorally detectable in the moment, enjoyment surges persist more reliably than enjoyment crashes recover, and some crashes are better forecast from person-specific behavioral drift than detected after they have already occurred. Together, the findings suggest that longitudinal human-AI relationships are built through both slow accumulation and abrupt turning points.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Real-time Generation of Listener Nodding via Prediction of Kinematic Parameters for Avatar Dialogue Systems

In human dialogue, we achieve smooth communication by expressing nonverbal cues such as eye contact, nodding, and facial expressions with precise timing. It is expected for conversational avatars to express these cues appropriately to realize natural and human-like interactions. This study focuses on nodding, which is crucial for demonstrating active listening and encouraging further user utterances. We propose a model that predicts both timing and kinematic parameters representing the motion features of listener nodding in real time. The proposed model consists of a timing prediction module and a kinematic parameter prediction module. Each implements a dyadic attention network over the speaker and listener channels based on the technique of Voice Activity Projection (VAP). Unlike conventional models, this approach enables real-time prediction of kinematic parameters based on the specific context of the dialogue rather than just predicting the timing. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of fine-tuning the kinematic parameter prediction module initialized from the trained timing prediction module. The proposed model is lightweight and capable of real-time operation, and it has been integrated into an avatar dialogue system. Subjective evaluation experiments shows that our proposed method significantly outperforms both a baseline with stochastic timing and another with fixed-motion nodding. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/MaAI-Kyoto/MaAI.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

I Understand How You Feel: Enhancing Deeper Emotional Support Through Multilingual Emotional Validation in Dialogue System

Emotional validation - explicitly acknowledging that a user's feelings make sense - has proven therapeutic value but has received little computational attention. Emotional validation in dialogue systems can be decomposed into (i) validating response identification, (ii) validation timing detection, and (iii) validating response generation. To support research on all three subtasks, we release M-EDESConv, a 120k English-Japanese multilingual corpus created through hybrid manual and automatic annotation, and M-TESC, a multilingual spoken-dialogue test set. For timing detection, we propose MEGUMI, a Multilingual Emotion-aware Gated Unit for Mutual Integration, that fuses frozen XLM-RoBERTa semantics with language-specific emotion encoders via cross-modal attention and gated fusion. MEGUMI shows superior performance on both the M-EDESConv and M-TESC datasets, both objectively and subjectively. Finally, our EmoValidBench benchmarks of GPT-4.1 Nano and Llama-3.1 8B indicate that current LLMs generate contextually similar and diverse validating responses, but emotional understanding remains a major area for improvement. Project page: https://github.com/zihaurpang/Multilingual-Emotional-Validation

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Toward Signing Activity Projection in Sign Language Interaction

Social robots must interact robustly not only with users assumed by speech-centered systems but also with diverse users whose communication relies on different modalities, e.g., sign language. One important capability gap is predictive turn-taking with signing users. Although Voice Activity Projection (VAP) has been successfully used to model future voice activity in spoken interaction, it remains unclear whether the framework transfers to sign language interaction. This paper presents an initial transfer study of adapting a VAP architecture to dyadic sign language interaction. Using interaction recordings from the Public DGS Corpus, we derive binary signing activity streams from lexical sign annotations and formulate proxy tasks for turn-taking prediction. The model uses pose-derived hand, eye-region, and mouth-region features extracted for each signer. The results show that SHIFT/HOLD prediction is promising, especially with hand cues, while SHIFT-prediction remains difficult. These findings provide initial evidence for both the promise and the current limitations of transferring predictive turn-taking models from spoken interaction to sign language interaction. Predictive modeling of sign language interaction still requires sign-language-specific event definitions that go beyond speech-derived categories.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Emotion Transcription in Conversation: A Benchmark for Capturing Subtle and Complex Emotional States through Natural Language

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) is critical for enabling natural human-machine interactions. However, existing methods predominantly employ categorical or dimensional emotion annotations, which often fail to adequately represent complex, subtle, or culturally specific emotional nuances. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel task named Emotion Transcription in Conversation (ETC). This task focuses on generating natural language descriptions that accurately reflect speakers' emotional states within conversational contexts. To address the ETC, we constructed a Japanese dataset comprising text-based dialogues annotated with participants' self-reported emotional states, described in natural language. The dataset also includes emotion category labels for each transcription, enabling quantitative analysis and its application to ERC. We benchmarked baseline models, finding that while fine-tuning on our dataset enhances model performance, current models still struggle to infer implicit emotional states. The ETC task will encourage further research into more expressive emotion understanding in dialogue. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/UEC-InabaLab/ETCDataset.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Multilingual and Continuous Backchannel Prediction: A Cross-lingual Study

We present a multilingual, continuous backchannel prediction model for Japanese, English, and Chinese, and use it to investigate cross-linguistic timing behavior. The model is Transformer-based and operates at the frame level, jointly trained with auxiliary tasks on approximately 300 hours of dyadic conversations. Across all three languages, the multilingual model matches or surpasses monolingual baselines, indicating that it learns both language-universal cues and language-specific timing patterns. Zero-shot transfer with two-language training remains limited, underscoring substantive cross-lingual differences. Perturbation analyses reveal distinct cue usage: Japanese relies more on short-term linguistic information, whereas English and Chinese are more sensitive to silence duration and prosodic variation; multilingual training encourages shared yet adaptable representations and reduces overreliance on pitch in Chinese. A context-length study further shows that Japanese is relatively robust to shorter contexts, while Chinese benefits markedly from longer contexts. Finally, we integrate the trained model into a real-time processing software, demonstrating CPU-only inference. Together, these findings provide a unified model and empirical evidence for how backchannel timing differs across languages, informing the design of more natural, culturally-aware spoken dialogue systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

MMA-ASIA: A Multilingual and Multimodal Alignment Framework for Culturally-Grounded Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) are now used worldwide, yet their multimodal understanding and reasoning often degrade outside Western, high-resource settings. We propose MMA-ASIA, a comprehensive framework to evaluate LLMs' cultural awareness with a focus on Asian contexts. MMA-ASIA centers on a human-curated, multilingual, and multimodally aligned multiple-choice benchmark covering 8 Asian countries and 10 languages, comprising 27,000 questions; over 79 percent require multi-step reasoning grounded in cultural context, moving beyond simple memorization. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset aligned at the input level across three modalities: text, image (visual question answering), and speech. This enables direct tests of cross-modal transfer. Building on this benchmark, we propose a five-dimensional evaluation protocol that measures: (i) cultural-awareness disparities across countries, (ii) cross-lingual consistency, (iii) cross-modal consistency, (iv) cultural knowledge generalization, and (v) grounding validity. To ensure rigorous assessment, a Cultural Awareness Grounding Validation Module detects "shortcut learning" by checking whether the requisite cultural knowledge supports correct answers. Finally, through comparative model analysis, attention tracing, and an innovative Vision-ablated Prefix Replay (VPR) method, we probe why models diverge across languages and modalities, offering actionable insights for building culturally reliable multimodal LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Accelerating BP-based decoders for QLDPC Codes with Local Syndrome-Based Preprocessing

Due to the high error rate of qubits, detecting and correcting errors is essential for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC). Quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes are one of the most promising quantum error correction (QEC) methods due to their high encoding rates. BP (Belief Propagation)-based decoders are widely used and highly competitive for QLDPC codes because BP offers inherent parallelism and strong scalability. However, BP-based decoders still suffer from high decoding latency, a large portion of which is spent in the iterative BP stage. In this paper, we propose a lightweight preprocessing step that utilizes local patterns in the syndrome to detect likely trivial error events and provide them as hints to BP-based decoders. These hints accelerate BP convergence and thereby reduce the overall decoding time. The proposed preprocessing step offers a broadly compatible approach to reducing the latency of BP-based QLDPC decodes. On the bivariate bicycle code $[[144,12,12]]$ at low physical error rates, our method achieves a $10\times$ speedup in decoding time for BP-OSD, and more than $2\times$ speedup for both BP-LSD and Relay-BP. Our method maintains the logical error rate when combined with BP-OSD and Relay-BP, while further achieving a significant reduction in logical error rate when combined with BP-LSD.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Real-time Generation of Various Types of Nodding for Avatar Attentive Listening System

In human dialogue, nonverbal information such as nodding and facial expressions is as crucial as verbal information, and spoken dialogue systems are also expected to express such nonverbal behaviors. We focus on nodding, which is critical in an attentive listening system, and propose a model that predicts both its timing and type in real time. The proposed model builds on the voice activity projection (VAP) model, which predicts voice activity from both listener and speaker audio. We extend it to prediction of various types of nodding in a continuous and real-time manner unlike conventional models. In addition, the proposed model incorporates multi-task learning with verbal backchannel prediction and pretraining on general dialogue data. In the timing and type prediction task, the effectiveness of multi-task learning was significantly demonstrated. We confirmed that reducing the processing rate enables real-time operation without a substantial drop in accuracy, and integrated the model into an avatar attentive listening system. Subjective evaluations showed that it outperformed the conventional method, which always does nodding in sync with verbal backchannel. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/MaAI-Kyoto/MaAI.

cs.HC↗