Ruoxuan Zhang

Ruoxuan Zhang, Qiaoqiao Wan, Zhengguang Wang et al.

Theory of Mind (ToM) enables an agent to reason about another actor's beliefs, goals, and intentions, which is essential for human-centered embodied assistance. Existing ToM benchmarks have advanced text and multimodal mental-state recognition, but they mostly evaluate offline question answering or final action prediction. They do not fully test whether an embodied agent can stay connected to a changing environment, update actor-specific beliefs, decide when reasoning is needed, and intervene only when help is useful. Building on MindPower, we extend robot-centric ToM reasoning to a real-time closed-loop setting and introduce MindClaw, a framework for embodied mental-state reasoning with precision intervention. MindClaw connects multi-source inputs, belief memory, an embodied cognitive trigger skill, mental reasoning, and action generation, allowing the agent to output helpful actions at the right time while remaining silent when intervention is unnecessary. Experiments show that direct VLM baselines struggle with task awareness and intervention calibration, while MindClaw achieves the best overall performance, demonstrating the importance of trigger-skill optimization for closed-loop embodied ToM assistance.

Ruoxuan Zhang, Bin Wen, Hongxia Xie et al.

Cooking is a sequential and visually grounded activity, where each step such as chopping, mixing, or frying carries both procedural logic and visual semantics. While recent diffusion models have shown strong capabilities in text-to-image generation, they struggle to handle structured multi-step scenarios like recipe illustration. Additionally, current recipe illustration methods are unable to adjust to the natural variability in recipe length, generating a fixed number of images regardless of the actual instructions structure. To address these limitations, we present CookAnything, a flexible and consistent diffusion-based framework that generates coherent, semantically distinct image sequences from textual cooking instructions of arbitrary length. The framework introduces three key components: (1) Step-wise Regional Control (SRC), which aligns textual steps with corresponding image regions within a single denoising process; (2) Flexible RoPE, a step-aware positional encoding mechanism that enhances both temporal coherence and spatial diversity; and (3) Cross-Step Consistency Control (CSCC), which maintains fine-grained ingredient consistency across steps. Experimental results on recipe illustration benchmarks show that CookAnything performs better than existing methods in training-based and training-free settings. The proposed framework supports scalable, high-quality visual synthesis of complex multi-step instructions and holds significant potential for broad applications in instructional media, and procedural content creation.

Ruoxuan Zhang, Hongxia Xie, Yi Yao et al.

Recipe image generation is an important challenge in food computing, with applications from culinary education to interactive recipe platforms. However, there is currently no real-world dataset that comprehensively connects recipe goals, sequential steps, and corresponding images. To address this, we introduce RecipeGen, the first real-world goal-step-image benchmark for recipe generation, featuring diverse ingredients, varied recipe steps, multiple cooking styles, and a broad collection of food categories. Data is in https://github.com/zhangdaxia22/RecipeGen.

Bin Wen, Ruoxuan Zhang, Yang Chen et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential in long-horizon decision-making tasks, such as embodied manipulation and web interaction. However, agents frequently struggle with endless trial-and-error loops or deviate from the main objective in complex environments. We attribute these failures to two fundamental errors: global Progress Drift and local Feasibility Violation. Existing methods typically attempt to address both issues simultaneously using a single paradigm. However, these two challenges are fundamentally distinct: the former relies on fuzzy semantic planning, while the latter demands strict logical constraints and state validation. The inherent limitations of such a single-paradigm approach pose a fundamental challenge for existing models in handling long-horizon tasks. Motivated by this insight, we propose a Neuro-Symbolic Dual Memory Framework that explicitly decouples semantic progress guidance from logical feasibility verification. Specifically, during the inference phase, the framework invokes both memory mechanisms synchronously: on one hand, a neural-network-based Progress Memory extracts semantic blueprints from successful trajectories to guide global task advancement; on the other hand, a symbolic-logic-based Feasibility Memory utilizes executable Python verification functions synthesized from failed transitions to perform strict logical validation. Experiments demonstrate that this method significantly outperforms existing competitive baselines on ALFWorld, WebShop, and TextCraft, while drastically reducing the invalid action rate and average trajectory length.

Zhiyu Zhou, Peilin Liu, Ruoxuan Zhang et al.

Small object-centric spatial understanding in indoor videos remains a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), despite its practical value for object search and assistive applications. Although existing benchmarks have advanced video spatial intelligence, embodied reasoning, and diagnostic perception, no existing benchmark directly evaluates whether a model can localize a target object in video and express its position with sufficient precision for downstream use. In this work, we introduce PinpointQA, the first dataset and benchmark for small object-centric spatial understanding in indoor videos. Built from ScanNet++ and ScanNet200, PinpointQA comprises 1,024 scenes and 10,094 QA pairs organized into four progressively challenging tasks: Target Presence Verification (TPV), Nearest Reference Identification (NRI), Fine-Grained Spatial Description (FSD), and Structured Spatial Prediction (SSP). The dataset is built from intermediate spatial representations, with QA pairs generated automatically and further refined through quality control. Experiments on representative MLLMs reveal a consistent capability gap along the progressive chain, with SSP remaining particularly difficult. Supervised fine-tuning on PinpointQA yields substantial gains, especially on the harder tasks, demonstrating that PinpointQA serves as both a diagnostic benchmark and an effective training dataset. The dataset and project page are available at https://rainchowz.github.io/PinpointQA.

Cheng Zhang, Hongxia xie, Bin Wen et al.

With the rapid advancement of diffusion models, text-to-image generation has achieved significant progress in image resolution, detail fidelity, and semantic alignment, particularly with models like Stable Diffusion 3.5, Stable Diffusion XL, and FLUX 1. However, generating emotionally expressive and abstract artistic images remains a major challenge, largely due to the lack of large-scale, fine-grained emotional datasets. To address this gap, we present the EmoArt Dataset -- one of the most comprehensive emotion-annotated art datasets to date. It contains 132,664 artworks across 56 painting styles (e.g., Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstract Art), offering rich stylistic and cultural diversity. Each image includes structured annotations: objective scene descriptions, five key visual attributes (brushwork, composition, color, line, light), binary arousal-valence labels, twelve emotion categories, and potential art therapy effects. Using EmoArt, we systematically evaluate popular text-to-image diffusion models for their ability to generate emotionally aligned images from text. Our work provides essential data and benchmarks for emotion-driven image synthesis and aims to advance fields such as affective computing, multimodal learning, and computational art, enabling applications in art therapy and creative design. The dataset and more details can be accessed via our project website.

Ruoxuan Zhang, Qiyun Zheng, Zhiyu Zhou et al.

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to infer others' mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Current vision-language embodied agents lack ToM-based decision-making, and existing benchmarks focus solely on human mental states while ignoring the agent's own perspective, hindering coherent decision and action generation. To address this, we propose MindPower, a Robot-Centric framework integrating Perception, Mental Reasoning, Decision Making and Action. Given multimodal inputs, MindPower first perceives the environment and human states, then performs ToM Reasoning to model both self and others, and finally generates decisions and actions guided by inferred mental states. Furthermore, we introduce Mind-Reward, a novel optimization objective that encourages VLMs to produce consistent ToM Reasoning and behavior. Our model outperforms GPT-4o by 12.77% in decision making and 12.49% in action generation.