SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Xiaojiang Peng

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaojiang Peng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

AffectSim: A Controllable Interactive 3D Simulation Benchmark for Embodied Affective Perception

Existing affective benchmarks largely consist of fixed recordings whose observation conditions are determined before inference, making it difficult to systematically study how embodied sensing influences affective perception. We introduce AffectSim, a controllable interactive 3D simulation benchmark for embodied affective perception. Rather than treating affective samples as fixed recordings, AffectSim instantiates emotion-expressive human motions as replayable 3D episodes in which distance, orientation, occlusion, scene geometry, and agent viewpoint can be systematically varied while preserving the underlying behavior and emotion label. AffectSim contains 27{,}647 episodes across five emotion categories and 57 scenes. Its factorized design separates affective behavior from observation conditions, supporting controlled re-observation of the same behavior as well as agent-controlled sensing in an executable 3D environment. To demonstrate this capability, we instantiate embodied emotion perception under matched initial (P-Init), reference (P-Ref), and actively acquired (A-Obs) observations. Across 24 frozen perception-model configurations, P-Ref substantially outperforms P-Init, while a simple two-stage active-observation baseline improves 21 of 24 configurations. Mean Macro-F1 increases from 9.89% to 11.70% for open-source models and from 22.61% to 24.26% for closed-source models, recovering 32.0% and 20.1% of their respective P-Ref--P-Init gaps. Episode-level recovery and path-aware evaluation further characterize the current baseline beyond aggregate recognition performance. These results demonstrate the value of making affective observation controllable and establish AffectSim as an initial platform for studying embodied affective perception through interactive 3D simulation.

cs.HC

HiMA-MDD: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Harness for Interpretable Multimodal Depression Detection in Clinical Interviews

Depression assessment from multimodal clinical interviews requires integrating dispersed evidence from multiple symptoms into a coherent PHQ-8 profile. This process is hierarchical: relevant evidence is often sparse and context-dependent within local question-answer exchanges, multiple exchanges jointly support symptom-level judgments, and the final assessment depends on the coherence of the complete symptom profile. Existing LLM systems either process interviews holistically or distribute work across generic agent roles; neither design necessarily provides an explicit orchestration mechanism that coordinates evidence access, item-score authority, bounded feedback, and state recording across these levels. To address this gap, we introduce HiMA-MDD, a hierarchical multi-agent harness that aligns this assessment hierarchy with three agent layers. After non-agentic preprocessing constructs context-preserving multimodal QA units, Layer 1 identifies candidate QA-to-item relations and supports bounded item-grounded evidence routing. Layer 2 assigns symptom groups to operational factor specialists, with one specialist responsible for each provisional item score. Layer 3 audits the complete provisional profile, requests at most one round of targeted revision, and reconstructs the verified PHQ-8 profile. This layered design naturally yields a Hierarchical Evidence Trace, preserves all intermediate evidence, judgments, and revisions for auditability. The final item scores then deterministically produce the total score and screening decision. Using Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct as the harness backbone, our experiments on E-DAIC demonstrate that HiMA-MDD outperforms the compared state-of-the-art methods.

cs.AI

OneEmo: A Unified Multimodal Reasoning Model for Emotion Perception, Understanding, and Interaction

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in emotional intelligence. However, prevailing research predominantly focuses on task-specific specialization, often neglecting inter-task synergy and leaving latent reasoning potential underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce OneEmo, a unified affective generalist capable of mastering emotion perception, comprehension, and interaction. For this purpose, we first construct EmoWorld-130K, a comprehensive dataset that distills specialized affective knowledge into explicit reasoning trajectories via a human-in-the-loop workflow. Supervised fine-tuning on this corpus reveals significant mutual benefits derived from multi-task learning. Second, to fully unlock the latent reasoning potential, we propose Emo-Chord, a novel reinforcement learning strategy that stabilizes optimization through unified multi-task reward allocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OneEmo achieves state-of-the-art performance against similarly sized baselines across most benchmarks. Notably, despite having significantly fewer parameters than commercial models, OneEmo delivers highly competitive results. This paper paves the way for more reliable and interpretable affective computing. The code is available at https://github.com/waHAHJIAHAO/OneEmo.

cs.HC

What Can I Edit? Open-Ended Strategy Discovery and the Emotion Editability Landscape

Emotional image editing requires more than applying affective filters or modifying predefined visual factors: an effective edit must identify what a particular image can afford for a target emotion. Existing affective image manipulation methods, including recent agentic variants, largely operate within bounded strategy spaces based on predefined factor taxonomies, knowledge libraries, or conventional editing templates, and therefore often miss image-specific, context-grounded strategies. We introduce EmoScope, a multi-agent framework that reframes the task from "how should I edit?" to "what can I edit?" EmoScope first discovers an image-specific editable space through emotion-conditioned affordance reasoning, then uses a semantic hierarchy of anchors, variables, and context to balance content consistency and emotional expressiveness before executing and verifying the edit. Because its plans are expressed as image-specific affordances rather than retrieved templates, EmoScope also exposes the editing strategy as an interactive surface for user refinement at the plan level. In a large-scale human evaluation covering all eight Mikels emotion categories, with 4,693 valid responses across 1,824 pairwise questions, participants preferred EmoScope over two competitive baselines by 88.1% on average. Attribution analysis further shows that EmoScope selects target-emotion-adaptive strategies rather than applying a uniform template. The same affordance-level plan also supports lightweight user refinement in an interactive pilot. Finally, we show that classifier-based metrics exhibit emotion-conditional blind spots toward non-stereotypical, context-grounded edits, and present a relative content-emotion preference-affinity landscape showing that EmoScope's advantage varies systematically across image-emotion combinations.

cs.CV

Robust Speech Emotion Recognition under Tone-Word Conflict: A Benchmark and Framework

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a crucial component of human-computer interaction, attracting extensive attention from both industry and academia. However, existing SER systems typically assume alignment between vocal tone and lexical semantics, overlooking the real-world scenarios that involve tone-word conflict-where the emotion conveyed by speech contradicts the literal meaning of the words. To bridge this gap, we introduce TWIN-SER (Tone-Word Incongruent SER), a benchmark for systematic evaluation under acoustic-semantic incongruence, and show that state-of-the-art models degrade severely under such incongruence. To address this, we propose DAS (Disentangled Acoustic-Semantic fusion), a framework that mitigates tone-word conflict by explicitly disentangling acoustic and semantic pathways, selecting informative high-energy embeddings, and adaptively fusing them via a lightweight query-based attention mechanism. Specifically, DAS comprises three crucial modules: i) a heterogeneous feature extraction module that separately captures complementary acoustic and semantic representations from raw input; ii) a high-energy embedding selection module that identifies and retains the most discriminative embeddings; and iii) a Q-Former combination module that bridges the two pathways through cross-attention, enabling robust emotion prediction under incongruent conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAS consistently outperforms existing methods in tone-word conflict scenarios, as well as in standard in-domain and zero-shot settings. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/24DavidHuang/FAS

eess.AS

AC-VLA: Robust Out-of-Distribution Action Execution via Compositional Learning

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at end-to-end robotic manipulation but struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization when familiar sub-tasks are recombined in unseen configurations. We identify two mutually reinforcing failure modes: \emph{trajectory overfitting}, where models overfit to holistic trajectory patterns rather than compositional sub-skill semantics; and \emph{perceptual shortcut}, where action tokens over-rely on wrist-view textures at the expense of global spatial grounding. To address both, we introduce \textbf{AC-VLA}, a plug-and-play Action Compositional learning framework comprising two architecture-agnostic components: \textbf{(i)} a compositional learning module that uses an LLM-driven instruction decomposer and a proprioceptive trajectory aligner to generate dense sub-task supervision, followed by mixed training on complete demonstrations and decomposed data to endow the model with compositional generalization; and \textbf{(ii)} a state-conditioned asymmetric masking strategy that suppresses wrist-view inputs during closed-gripper phases, enforcing global semantic grounding. All components are architectural modification-free and directly integrable into any VLA backbone. Instantiated on $\pi_{0.5}$ and evaluated on LIBERO and LIBERO-OOD benchmarks, AC-VLA achieves a ~28% absolute improvement on compositional OOD tasks while maintaining near-perfect in-distribution performance.

cs.RO

Unleashing More Actions via Action Compositional Training for VLA Models

Vision-Language-Action models excel at robotic manipulation, driven by the scale and diversity of demonstration data. However, standard training paradigms often cause VLA models to severely overfit to specific behavioral patterns, rendering them unable to generalize to out-of-distribution scenarios even when those scenarios merely require novel combinations of identical sub-skills. While expanding datasets can mitigate this overfitting, acquiring high-quality robot data remains notoriously labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive. To resolve this impasse without expensive human teleoperation and to truly unleash more actions,i.e., enable VLA models to compose known sub-skills into a much broader set of executable behaviors beyond the original demonstrations-we propose ACT-VLA (Action Compositional Training for VLA Models), an offline data augmentation framework that leverages the model's latent task representations to synthesize novel, physically valid demonstrations directly from existing tasks for policy training. By eliminating additional manual data collection, our method automatically expands the training distribution and mitigates overfitting. We evaluate our approach on challenging manipulation tasks in simulation. Experiments demonstrate that while baseline VLA models generalize poorly due to original distribution overfitting, policies trained with our synthesized data achieve substantially higher success rates, validating that leveraging existing tasks for automated demonstration synthesis provides an effective, scalable, and data-efficient route to broadening VLA generalization.

cs.RO

OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

Reinforcement learning for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks. This challenge is particularly pronounced in human-centered scenarios involving states, emotions, intentions, and behaviors, where heterogeneous multimodal signals and subjective human factors make high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations expensive and difficult to obtain. Although many multimodal datasets provide expert-annotated ground-truth labels, directly using these labels for supervised fine-tuning may encourage shortcut learning in multimodal perception and provides limited transparency for safety-critical human--AI interaction. To address these limitations, we propose OmniOPSD, a Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence rather than student imitation targets. OmniOPSD uses frontier-generated evidence-aware rationales only as training-time privileged evidence context for a local teacher. The student samples its own rollout from the original multimodal input, while the rationale-privileged teacher scores the same tokens and provides dense token-level supervision. Thus, the student learns on its own trajectory distribution without directly imitating frontier-model completions, and inference requires no labels, rationales, CoT annotations, or closed-source model access. Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$, and ablations further support the value of rationale-privileged teacher guidance.

cs.CV

AffectVerse: Emotional World Models for Multimodal Affective Computing

Humans infer emotions by integrating observed multimodal cues with expectations about how affective states may unfold. Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), however, often treat emotion recognition as static fusion over complete audiovisual-text inputs, leaving affective dynamics implicit. We propose AffectVerse, a Qwen2.5-Omni-based model equipped with an Emotion World Module (EWM), an action-free representation-level module for short-horizon latent affective prediction. \rev{EWM contains three modules: 1) Cross-Modal Temporal Imagination predicts future video/audio representations from past tokens with multi-step rollout. 2) MAMA(Modality-Aware Multi-step Attention) Belief Aggregation compresses imagined tokens into modality-aware belief tokens. 3) Belief Injection inserts these belief tokens into the LLM for affective reasoning.} AffectVerse uses future prediction as a past-conditioned self-supervised signal: it does not replace modeling observed history or require unseen signals at inference, but forces the current belief state to encode transition cues that are predictive of subsequent affective change. Across nine benchmarks, AffectVerse improves at least 2.57\% over other models, while controlled ablations show additive gains from temporal imagination, cross-modal rollout, and belief aggregation. These results suggest predictive belief-state modeling is a practical alternative for affective computing.

cs.CV

AffectGPT-RL: Revealing Roles of Reinforcement Learning in Open-Vocabulary Emotion Recognition

Open-Vocabulary Multimodal Emotion Recognition (OV-MER) aims to predict emotions without being constrained by predefined label spaces, thereby enabling fine-grained emotion understanding. Unlike traditional discriminative methods, OV-MER leverages generative models to capture the full spectrum of emotions and employs emotion wheels (EWs) for metric calculation. Previous approaches primarily rely on token-level loss during training. However, this objective is misaligned with the metrics used in OV-MER, and these metrics cannot be directly optimized via gradient backpropagation. To address this limitation, we turn our attention to reinforcement learning, as this strategy can optimize non-differentiable objectives. We term this framework AffectGPT-RL. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to elucidate the role of reinforcement learning in this task, revealing the necessity of the reasoning process, the impact of different rewards, and the generalizability to other emotion tasks such as sentiment analysis and basic emotion recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that AffectGPT-RL yields significant performance improvements on OV-MER. Beyond this task, we also achieve remarkable performance gains on basic emotion recognition, attaining state-of-the-art results on MER-UniBench. To the best of our knowledge, this is the pioneering work exploring the role of reinforcement learning in OV-MER, providing valuable guidance for subsequent researchers. Our code is provided in the supplementary material and will be released to facilitate future research.

cs.HC

MER 2026: From Discriminative Emotion Recognition to Generative Emotion Understanding

MER2026 marks the fourth edition of the MER series of challenges. The MER series provides valuable data resources to the research community and offers tasks centered on recent research trends, establishing itself as one of the largest challenges in the field. Throughout its history, the focus of MER has shifted from discriminative emotion recognition to generative emotion understanding. Specifically, MER2023 concentrated on discriminative emotion recognition, restricting the emotion recognition scope to fixed basic labels. In MER2024 and MER2025, we transitioned to generative emotion understanding and introduced two new tasks: fine-grained emotion recognition and descriptive emotion analysis, aiming to leverage the extensive vocabulary and multimodal understanding capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to facilitate fine-grained and explainable emotion recognition. Building on this trajectory, MER2026 continues to follow these research trends and contains four tracks: MER-Cross shifts the focus from individual to dyadic interaction scenarios; MER-FG centers on fine-grained emotion recognition; MER-Prefer aims to predict human preferences regarding different emotion descriptions; MER-PS focuses on emotion recognition based on physiological signals. More details regarding the dataset and baselines are available at https://zeroqiaoba.github.io/MER-Challenge/.

cs.HC

Adaptive Action Chunking at Inference-time for Vision-Language-Action Models

In Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, action chunking (i.e., executing a sequence of actions without intermediate replanning) is a key technique to improve robotic manipulation abilities. However, a large chunk size reduces the model's responsiveness to new information, while a small one increases the likelihood of mode-jumping, jerky behavior resulting from discontinuities between chunks. Therefore, selecting the optimal chunk size is an urgent demand to balance the model's reactivity and consistency. Unfortunately, a dominant trend in current VLA models is an empirical fixed chunk length at inference-time, hindering their superiority and scalability across diverse manipulation tasks. To address this issue, we propose a novel Adaptive Action Chunking (AAC) strategy, which exploits action entropy as the cue to adaptively determine the chunk size based on current predictions. Extensive experiments on a wide range of simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks have demonstrated that our approach substantially improves performance over the state-of-the-art alternatives. The videos and source code are publicly available at https://lance-lot.github.io/adaptive-chunking.github.io/.

cs.RO

ViGoR-Bench: How Far Are Visual Generative Models From Zero-Shot Visual Reasoners?

Beneath the stunning visual fidelity of modern AIGC models lies a "logical desert", where systems fail tasks that require physical, causal, or complex spatial reasoning. Current evaluations largely rely on superficial metrics or fragmented benchmarks, creating a ``performance mirage'' that overlooks the generative process. To address this, we introduce ViGoR Vision-G}nerative Reasoning-centric Benchmark), a unified framework designed to dismantle this mirage. ViGoR distinguishes itself through four key innovations: 1) holistic cross-modal coverage bridging Image-to-Image and Video tasks; 2) a dual-track mechanism evaluating both intermediate processes and final results; 3) an evidence-grounded automated judge ensuring high human alignment; and 4) granular diagnostic analysis that decomposes performance into fine-grained cognitive dimensions. Experiments on over 20 leading models reveal that even state-of-the-art systems harbor significant reasoning deficits, establishing ViGoR as a critical ``stress test'' for the next generation of intelligent vision models. The demo have been available at https://vincenthancoder.github.io/ViGoR-Bench/

cs.CV

Emotion-LLaMAv2 and MMEVerse: A New Framework and Benchmark for Multimodal Emotion Understanding

Understanding human emotions from multimodal signals poses a significant challenge in affective computing and human-robot interaction. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have excelled in general vision-language tasks, their capabilities in emotional reasoning remain limited. The field currently suffers from a scarcity of large-scale datasets with high-quality, descriptive emotion annotations and lacks standardized benchmarks for evaluation. Our preliminary framework, Emotion-LLaMA, pioneered instruction-tuned multimodal learning for emotion reasoning but was restricted by explicit face detectors, implicit fusion strategies, and low-quality training data with limited scale. To address these limitations, we present Emotion-LLaMAv2 and the MMEVerse benchmark, establishing an end-to-end pipeline together with a standardized evaluation setting for emotion recognition and reasoning. Emotion-LLaMAv2 introduces three key advances. First, an end-to-end multiview encoder eliminates external face detection and captures nuanced emotional cues via richer spatial and temporal multiview tokens. Second, a Conv Attention pre-fusion module is designed to enable simultaneous local and global multimodal feature interactions external to the LLM backbone. Third, a perception-to-cognition curriculum instruction tuning scheme within the LLaMA2 backbone unifies emotion recognition and free-form emotion reasoning. To support large-scale training and reproducible evaluation, MMEVerse aggregates twelve publicly available emotion datasets, including IEMOCAP, MELD, DFEW, and MAFW, into a unified multimodal instruction format. The data are re-annotated via a multi-agent pipeline involving Qwen2 Audio, Qwen2.5 VL, and GPT 4o, producing 130k training clips and 36k testing clips across 18 evaluation benchmarks.

cs.CV

MME-Emotion: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence in Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have catalyzed transformative progress in affective computing, enabling models to exhibit emergent emotional intelligence. Despite substantial methodological progress, current emotional benchmarks remain limited, as it is still unknown: (a) the generalization abilities of MLLMs across distinct scenarios, and (b) their reasoning capabilities to identify the triggering factors behind emotional states. To bridge these gaps, we present \textbf{MME-Emotion}, a systematic benchmark that assesses both emotional understanding and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, enjoying \textit{scalable capacity}, \textit{diverse settings}, and \textit{unified protocols}. As the largest emotional intelligence benchmark for MLLMs, MME-Emotion contains over 6,000 curated video clips with task-specific questioning-answering (QA) pairs, spanning broad scenarios to formulate eight emotional tasks. It further incorporates a holistic evaluation suite with hybrid metrics for emotion recognition and reasoning, analyzed through a multi-agent system framework. Through a rigorous evaluation of 20 advanced MLLMs, we uncover both their strengths and limitations, yielding several key insights: \ding{182} Current MLLMs exhibit unsatisfactory emotional intelligence, with the best-performing model achieving only $39.3\%$ recognition score and $56.0\%$ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) score on our benchmark. \ding{183} Generalist models (\emph{e.g.}, Gemini-2.5-Pro) derive emotional intelligence from generalized multimodal understanding capabilities, while specialist models (\emph{e.g.}, R1-Omni) can achieve comparable performance through domain-specific post-training adaptation. By introducing MME-Emotion, we hope that it can serve as a foundation for advancing MLLMs' emotional intelligence in the future.

cs.CV

When Tone and Words Disagree: Towards Robust Speech Emotion Recognition under Acoustic-Semantic Conflict

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems often assume congruence between vocal emotion and lexical semantics. However, in real-world interactions, acoustic-semantic conflict is common yet overlooked, where the emotion conveyed by tone contradicts the literal meaning of spoken words. We show that state-of-the-art SER models, including ASR-based, self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches and Audio Language Models (ALMs), suffer performance degradation under such conflicts due to semantic bias or entangled acoustic-semantic representations. To address this, we propose the Fusion Acoustic-Semantic (FAS) framework, which explicitly disentangles acoustic and semantic pathways and bridges them through a lightweight, query-based attention module. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce the Conflict in Acoustic-Semantic Emotion (CASE), the first dataset dominated by clear and interpretable acoustic-semantic conflicts in varied scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FAS consistently outperforms existing methods in both in-domain and zero-shot settings. Notably, on the CASE benchmark, conventional SER models fail dramatically, while FAS sets a new SOTA with 59.38% accuracy. Our code and datasets is available at https://github.com/24DavidHuang/FAS.

cs.SD

ResearchGPT: Benchmarking and Training LLMs for End-to-End Computer Science Research Workflows

As large language models (LLMs) advance, the ultimate vision for their role in science is emerging: we could build an AI collaborator to effectively assist human beings throughout the entire scientific research process. We refer to this envisioned system as ResearchGPT. Given that scientific research progresses through multiple interdependent phases, achieving this vision requires rigorous benchmarks that evaluate the end-to-end workflow rather than isolated sub-tasks. To this end, we contribute CS-54k, a high-quality corpus of scientific Q&A pairs in computer science, built from 14k CC-licensed papers. It is constructed through a scalable, paper-grounded pipeline that combines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with multi-stage quality control to ensure factual grounding. From this unified corpus, we derive two complementary subsets: CS-4k, a carefully curated benchmark for evaluating AI's ability to assist scientific research, and CS-50k, a large-scale training dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CS-4k stratifies state-of-the-art LLMs into distinct capability tiers. Open models trained on CS-50k with supervised training and reinforcement learning demonstrate substantial improvements. Even 7B-scale models, when properly trained, outperform many larger proprietary systems, such as GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. This indicates that making AI models better research assistants relies more on domain-aligned training with high-quality data than on pretraining scale or general benchmark performance. We release CS-4k and CS-50k in the hope of fostering AI systems as reliable collaborators in CS research.

cs.LG

EmoPrefer: Can Large Language Models Understand Human Emotion Preferences?

Descriptive Multimodal Emotion Recognition (DMER) has garnered increasing research attention. Unlike traditional discriminative paradigms that rely on predefined emotion taxonomies, DMER aims to describe human emotional state using free-form natural language, enabling finer-grained and more interpretable emotion representations. However, this free-form prediction paradigm introduces new challenges regarding its evaluation. Previous works depend on ground-truth descriptions, but emotions are inherently tied to diverse human behaviors, and generating a comprehensive and accurate description is inherently demanding. Other researchers reformulate this problem into a more tractable human preference learning task, but pairwise preference annotation involves substantial manual effort. This leads to a question: can we leverage multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to achieve more cost-efficient preference annotation? To answer this, we propose EmoPrefer, a pioneering work exploring the potential of LLMs in decoding human emotion preferences. Specifically, we construct the first emotion preference dataset, EmoPrefer-Data, featuring high-quality preference annotations from experts. Additionally, we introduce EmoPrefer-Bench, which evaluates the performance of various MLLMs and prompting techniques in preference prediction, while also revealing new strategies to enhance their performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work exploring the capabilities of LLMs in understanding human emotion preferences. Our work advances the field of DMER and lays the foundation for more intelligent human-computer interaction.

cs.HC