Aniket Bera

Anthony Francis, Claudia Pérez-D'Arpino, Chengshu Li et al. · cmu, mit

A major challenge to deploying robots widely is navigation in human-populated environments, commonly referred to as social robot navigation. While the field of social navigation has advanced tremendously in recent years, the fair evaluation of algorithms that tackle social navigation remains hard because it involves not just robotic agents moving in static environments but also dynamic human agents and their perceptions of the appropriateness of robot behavior. In contrast, clear, repeatable, and accessible benchmarks have accelerated progress in fields like computer vision, natural language processing and traditional robot navigation by enabling researchers to fairly compare algorithms, revealing limitations of existing solutions and illuminating promising new directions. We believe the same approach can benefit social navigation. In this paper, we pave the road towards common, widely accessible, and repeatable benchmarking criteria to evaluate social robot navigation. Our contributions include (a) a definition of a socially navigating robot as one that respects the principles of safety, comfort, legibility, politeness, social competency, agent understanding, proactivity, and responsiveness to context, (b) guidelines for the use of metrics, development of scenarios, benchmarks, datasets, and simulators to evaluate social navigation, and (c) a design of a social navigation metrics framework to make it easier to compare results from different simulators, robots and datasets.

Hrishikesh Viswanath, Yue Chang, Aleksey Panas et al.

Simulating physical systems governed by Lagrangian dynamics often entails solving partial differential equations (PDEs) over high-resolution spatial domains, leading to significant computational expense. Reduced-order modeling (ROM) mitigates this cost by evolving low-dimensional latent representations of the underlying system. While neural ROMs enable querying solutions from latent states at arbitrary spatial points, their latent states typically represent the global domain and struggle to capture localized, highly dynamic behaviors such as fluids. We propose a sampling-based reduction framework that evolves Lagrangian systems directly in physical space over the particles themselves, reducing the number of active degrees of freedom via data-driven neural PDE operators. To enable querying at arbitrary spatial locations, we introduce a learnable kernel parameterization that uses local spatial information from time-evolved sample particles to infer the underlying solution manifold. Empirically, our approach achieves a 6.6x to 32x reduction in input dimensionality while maintaining high-fidelity evaluations across diverse Lagrangian regimes, including fluid flows, granular media, and elastoplastic dynamics. We refer to this framework as GIOROM (Geometry-Informed Reduced-Order Modeling). All code and data are available at: https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/GIOROM

Xijun Wang, Ruiqi Xian, Tianrui Guan et al.

We propose a novel approach for aerial video action recognition. Our method is designed for videos captured using UAVs and can run on edge or mobile devices. We present a learning-based approach that uses customized auto zoom to automatically identify the human target and scale it appropriately. This makes it easier to extract the key features and reduces the computational overhead. We also present an efficient temporal reasoning algorithm to capture the action information along the spatial and temporal domains within a controllable computational cost. Our approach has been implemented and evaluated both on the desktop with high-end GPUs and on the low power Robotics RB5 Platform for robots and drones. In practice, we achieve 6.1-7.4% improvement over SOTA in Top-1 accuracy on the RoCoG-v2 dataset, 8.3-10.4% improvement on the UAV-Human dataset and 3.2% improvement on the Drone Action dataset.

Vikram Gupta, Trisha Mittal, Puneet Mathur et al.

We present 3MASSIV, a multilingual, multimodal and multi-aspect, expertly-annotated dataset of diverse short videos extracted from short-video social media platform - Moj. 3MASSIV comprises of 50k short videos (20 seconds average duration) and 100K unlabeled videos in 11 different languages and captures popular short video trends like pranks, fails, romance, comedy expressed via unique audio-visual formats like self-shot videos, reaction videos, lip-synching, self-sung songs, etc. 3MASSIV presents an opportunity for multimodal and multilingual semantic understanding on these unique videos by annotating them for concepts, affective states, media types, and audio language. We present a thorough analysis of 3MASSIV and highlight the variety and unique aspects of our dataset compared to other contemporary popular datasets with strong baselines. We also show how the social media content in 3MASSIV is dynamic and temporal in nature, which can be used for semantic understanding tasks and cross-lingual analysis.

James F. Mullen, Divya Kothandaraman, Aniket Bera et al.

We present a novel method for placing a 3D human animation into a 3D scene while maintaining any human-scene interactions in the animation. We use the notion of computing the most important meshes in the animation for the interaction with the scene, which we call "keyframes." These keyframes allow us to better optimize the placement of the animation into the scene such that interactions in the animations (standing, laying, sitting, etc.) match the affordances of the scene (e.g., standing on the floor or laying in a bed). We compare our method, which we call PAAK, with prior approaches, including POSA, PROX ground truth, and a motion synthesis method, and highlight the benefits of our method with a perceptual study. Human raters preferred our PAAK method over the PROX ground truth data 64.6\% of the time. Additionally, in direct comparisons, the raters preferred PAAK over competing methods including 61.5\% compared to POSA.

Yi Wu, Zikang Xiong, Yiran Hu et al.

Despite significant advancements in large language models (LLMs) that enhance robot agents' understanding and execution of natural language (NL) commands, ensuring the agents adhere to user-specified constraints remains challenging, particularly for complex commands and long-horizon tasks. To address this challenge, we present three key insights, equivalence voting, constrained decoding, and domain-specific fine-tuning, which significantly enhance LLM planners' capability in handling complex tasks. Equivalence voting ensures consistency by generating and sampling multiple Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas from NL commands, grouping equivalent LTL formulas, and selecting the majority group of formulas as the final LTL formula. Constrained decoding then uses the generated LTL formula to enforce the autoregressive inference of plans, ensuring the generated plans conform to the LTL. Domain-specific fine-tuning customizes LLMs to produce safe and efficient plans within specific task domains. Our approach, Safe Efficient LLM Planner (SELP), combines these insights to create LLM planners to generate plans adhering to user commands with high confidence. We demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of SELP across different robot agents and tasks, including drone navigation and robot manipulation. For drone navigation tasks, SELP outperforms state-of-the-art planners by 10.8% in safety rate (i.e., finishing tasks conforming to NL commands) and by 19.8% in plan efficiency. For robot manipulation tasks, SELP achieves 20.4% improvement in safety rate. Our datasets for evaluating NL-to-LTL and robot task planning will be released in github.com/lt-asset/selp.

Md Ashiqur Rahman, Jasorsi Ghosh, Hrishikesh Viswanath et al.

We address the problem of generating 3D human motions in dyadic activities. In contrast to the concurrent works, which mainly focus on generating the motion of a single actor from the textual description, we generate the motion of one of the actors from the motion of the other participating actor in the action. This is a particularly challenging, under-explored problem, that requires learning intricate relationships between the motion of two actors participating in an action and also identifying the action from the motion of one actor. To address these, we propose partner conditioned motion operator (PaCMO), a neural operator-based generative model which learns the distribution of human motion conditioned by the partner's motion in function spaces through adversarial training. Our model can handle long unlabeled action sequences at arbitrary time resolution. We also introduce the "Functional Frechet Inception Distance" ($F^2ID$) metric for capturing similarity between real and generated data for function spaces. We test PaCMO on NTU RGB+D and DuetDance datasets and our model produces realistic results evidenced by the $F^2ID$ score and the conducted user study.

Aaditya Kharel, Manas Paranjape, Aniket Bera

With the rise in manipulated media, deepfake detection has become an imperative task for preserving the authenticity of digital content. In this paper, we present a novel multi-modal audio-video framework designed to concurrently process audio and video inputs for deepfake detection tasks. Our model capitalizes on lip synchronization with input audio through a cross-attention mechanism while extracting visual cues via a fine-tuned VGG-16 network. Subsequently, a transformer encoder network is employed to perform facial self-attention. We conduct multiple ablation studies highlighting different strengths of our approach. Our multi-modal methodology outperforms state-of-the-art multi-modal deepfake detection techniques in terms of F-1 and per-video AUC scores.

Rashmi Bhaskara, Maurice Chiu, Aniket Bera

With the increasing availability and affordability of personal robots, they will no longer be confined to large corporate warehouses or factories but will instead be expected to operate in less controlled environments alongside larger groups of people. In addition to ensuring safety and efficiency, it is crucial to minimize any negative psychological impact robots may have on humans and follow unwritten social norms in these situations. Our research aims to develop a model that can predict the movements of pedestrians and perceptually-social groups in crowded environments. We introduce a new Social Group Long Short-term Memory (SG-LSTM) model that models human groups and interactions in dense environments using a socially-aware LSTM to produce more accurate trajectory predictions. Our approach enables navigation algorithms to calculate collision-free paths faster and more accurately in crowded environments. Additionally, we also release a large video dataset with labeled pedestrian groups for the broader social navigation community. We show comparisons with different metrics on different datasets (ETH, Hotel, MOT15) and different prediction approaches (LIN, LSTM, O-LSTM, S-LSTM) as well as runtime performance.

Hrishikesh Viswanath, Md Ashiqur Rahman, Abhijeet Vyas et al.

Numerical approximations of partial differential equations (PDEs) are routinely employed to formulate the solution of physics, engineering and mathematical problems involving functions of several variables, such as the propagation of heat or sound, fluid flow, elasticity, electrostatics, electrodynamics, and more. While this has led to solving many complex phenomena, there are some limitations. Conventional approaches such as Finite Element Methods (FEMs) and Finite Differential Methods (FDMs) require considerable time and are computationally expensive. In contrast, data driven machine learning-based methods such as neural networks provide a faster, fairly accurate alternative, and have certain advantages such as discretization invariance and resolution invariance. This article aims to provide a comprehensive insight into how data-driven approaches can complement conventional techniques to solve engineering and physics problems, while also noting some of the major pitfalls of machine learning-based approaches. Furthermore, we highlight, a novel and fast machine learning-based approach (~1000x) to learning the solution operator of a PDE operator learning. We will note how these new computational approaches can bring immense advantages in tackling many problems in fundamental and applied physics.

Dipam Patel, Phu Pham, Aniket Bera

We present a novel optimization algorithm called DroNeRF for the autonomous positioning of monocular camera drones around an object for real-time 3D reconstruction using only a few images. Neural Radiance Fields or NeRF, is a novel view synthesis technique used to generate new views of an object or scene from a set of input images. Using drones in conjunction with NeRF provides a unique and dynamic way to generate novel views of a scene, especially with limited scene capabilities of restricted movements. Our approach focuses on calculating optimized pose for individual drones while solely depending on the object geometry without using any external localization system. The unique camera positioning during the data-capturing phase significantly impacts the quality of the 3D model. To evaluate the quality of our generated novel views, we compute different perceptual metrics like the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure(SSIM). Our work demonstrates the benefit of using an optimal placement of various drones with limited mobility to generate perceptually better results.

Nishaant Shah, Kshitij Tiwari, Aniket Bera

Urban search and rescue missions require rapid first response to minimize loss of life and damage. Often, such efforts are assisted by humanitarian robots which need to handle dynamic operational conditions such as uneven and rough terrains, especially during mass casualty incidents like an earthquake. Quadruped robots, owing to their versatile design, have the potential to assist in such scenarios. However, control of quadruped robots in dynamic and rough terrain environments is a challenging problem due to the many degrees of freedom of these robots. Current locomotion controllers for quadrupeds are limited in their ability to produce multiple adaptive gaits, solve tasks in a time and resource-efficient manner, and require tedious training and manual tuning procedures. To address these challenges, we propose MTAC: a multi-gait terrain-adaptive controller, which utilizes a Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) approach while being time and memory-efficient. We show that our proposed method scales well to a diverse range of environments with similar compute times as state-of-the-art methods. Our method showed greater than 75% on most tasks, outperforming previous work on the majority of test cases.

Phu Pham, Aniket Bera

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) in crowded environments presents a challenging problem in motion planning, aiming to find collision-free paths for all agents in the system. MAPF finds a wide range of applications in various domains, including aerial swarms, autonomous warehouse robotics, and self-driving vehicles. Current approaches to MAPF generally fall into two main categories: centralized and decentralized planning. Centralized planning suffers from the curse of dimensionality when the number of agents or states increases and thus does not scale well in large and complex environments. On the other hand, decentralized planning enables agents to engage in real-time path planning within a partially observable environment, demonstrating implicit coordination. However, they suffer from slow convergence and performance degradation in dense environments. In this paper, we introduce CRAMP, a novel crowd-aware decentralized reinforcement learning approach to address this problem by enabling efficient local communication among agents via Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), facilitating situational awareness and decision-making capabilities in congested environments. We test CRAMP on simulated environments and demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art decentralized methods for MAPF on various metrics. CRAMP improves the solution quality up to 59% measured in makespan and collision count, and up to 35% improvement in success rate in comparison to previous methods.

Hrishikesh Viswanath, Md Ashiqur Rahman, Rashmi Bhaskara et al.

We present, AdaFNIO - Adaptive Fourier Neural Interpolation Operator, a neural operator-based architecture to perform video frame interpolation. Current deep learning based methods rely on local convolutions for feature learning and suffer from not being scale-invariant, thus requiring training data to be augmented through random flipping and re-scaling. On the other hand, AdaFNIO, learns the features in the frames, independent of input resolution, through token mixing and global convolution in the Fourier space or the spectral domain by using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). We show that AdaFNIO can produce visually smooth and accurate results. To evaluate the visual quality of our interpolated frames, we calculate the structural similarity index (SSIM) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) between the generated frame and the ground truth frame. We provide the quantitative performance of our model on Vimeo-90K dataset, DAVIS, UCF101 and DISFA+ dataset.

Apoorva Vashisth, Manav Kulshrestha, Damon Conover et al.

Autonomous robots are widely utilized for mapping and exploration tasks due to their cost-effectiveness. Multi-robot systems offer scalability and efficiency, especially in terms of the number of robots deployed in more complex environments. These tasks belong to the set of Multi-Robot Informative Path Planning (MRIPP) problems. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning approach for the MRIPP problem. We aim to maximize the number of discovered stationary targets in an unknown 3D environment while operating under resource constraints (such as path length). Here, each robot aims to maximize discovered targets, avoid unknown static obstacles, and prevent inter-robot collisions while operating under communication and resource constraints. We utilize the centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm to train a single policy neural network. A key aspect of our approach is our coordination graph that prioritizes visiting regions not yet explored by other robots. Our learned policy can be copied onto any number of robots for deployment in more complex environments not seen during training. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by at least 26.2% in terms of the number of discovered targets while requiring a planning time of less than 2 sec per step. We present results for more complex environments with up to 64 robots and compare success rates against baseline planners. Our code and trained model are available at - https://github.com/AccGen99/marl_ipp

Dipam Patel, Phu Pham, Kshitij Tiwari et al.

Resource-constrained robots often suffer from energy inefficiencies, underutilized computational abilities due to inadequate task allocation, and a lack of robustness in dynamic environments, all of which strongly affect their performance. This paper introduces DREAM - Decentralized Reinforcement Learning for Exploration and Efficient Energy Management in Multi-Robot Systems, a comprehensive framework that optimizes the allocation of resources for efficient exploration. It advances beyond conventional heuristic-based task planning as observed conventionally. The framework incorporates Operational Range Estimation using Reinforcement Learning to perform exploration and obstacle avoidance in unfamiliar terrains. DREAM further introduces an Energy Consumption Model for goal allocation, thereby ensuring mission completion under constrained resources using a Graph Neural Network. This approach also ensures that the entire Multi-Robot System can survive for an extended period of time for further missions compared to the conventional approach of randomly allocating goals, which compromises one or more agents. Our approach adapts to prioritizing agents in real-time, showcasing remarkable resilience against dynamic environments. This robust solution was evaluated in various simulated environments, demonstrating adaptability and applicability across diverse scenarios. We observed a substantial improvement of about 25% over the baseline method, leading the way for future research in resource-constrained robotics.

Hrishikesh Viswanath, Aneesh Bhattacharya, Pascal Jutras-Dubé et al.

Affect is an emotional characteristic encompassing valence, arousal, and intensity, and is a crucial attribute for enabling authentic conversations. While existing text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-speech systems rely on strength embedding vectors and global style tokens to capture emotions, these models represent emotions as a component of style or represent them in discrete categories. We propose AffectEcho, an emotion translation model, that uses a Vector Quantized codebook to model emotions within a quantized space featuring five levels of affect intensity to capture complex nuances and subtle differences in the same emotion. The quantized emotional embeddings are implicitly derived from spoken speech samples, eliminating the need for one-hot vectors or explicit strength embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in controlling the emotions of generated speech while preserving identity, style, and emotional cadence unique to each speaker. We showcase the language-independent emotion modeling capability of the quantized emotional embeddings learned from a bilingual (English and Chinese) speech corpus with an emotion transfer task from a reference speech to a target speech. We achieve state-of-art results on both qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Yunsheng Ma, Can Cui, Xu Cao et al.

Autonomous driving (AD) has made significant strides in recent years. However, existing frameworks struggle to interpret and execute spontaneous user instructions, such as "overtake the car ahead." Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities showing potential to bridge this gap. In this paper, we present LaMPilot, a novel framework that integrates LLMs into AD systems, enabling them to follow user instructions by generating code that leverages established functional primitives. We also introduce LaMPilot-Bench, the first benchmark dataset specifically designed to quantitatively evaluate the efficacy of language model programs in AD. Adopting the LaMPilot framework, we conduct extensive experiments to assess the performance of off-the-shelf LLMs on LaMPilot-Bench. Our results demonstrate the potential of LLMs in handling diverse driving scenarios and following user instructions in driving. To facilitate further research in this area, we release our code and data at https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/LaMPilot.

Mihir Chauhan, Damon Conover, Aniket Bera

Autonomous navigation in partially observable environments requires agents to reason beyond immediate sensor input, exploit occlusion, and ensure safety while progressing toward a goal. These challenges arise in many robotics domains, from urban driving and warehouse automation to defense and surveillance. Classical path planning approaches and memoryless reinforcement learning often fail under limited fields of view (FoVs) and occlusions, committing to unsafe or inefficient maneuvers. We propose a hierarchical navigation framework that integrates a Deep Transformer Q-Network (DTQN) as a high-level subgoal selector with a modular low-level controller for waypoint execution. The DTQN consumes short histories of task-aware features, encoding odometry, goal direction, obstacle proximity, and visibility cues, and outputs Q-values to rank candidate subgoals. Visibility-aware candidate generation introduces masking and exposure penalties, rewarding the use of cover and anticipatory safety. A low-level potential field controller then tracks the selected subgoal, ensuring smooth short-horizon obstacle avoidance. We validate our approach in 2D simulation and extend it directly to a 3D Unity-ROS environment by projecting point-cloud perception into the same feature schema, enabling transfer without architectural changes. Results show consistent improvements over classical planners and RL baselines in success rate, safety margins, and time to goal, with ablations confirming the value of temporal memory and visibility-aware candidate design. These findings highlight a generalizable framework for safe navigation under uncertainty, with broad relevance across robotic platforms.

Kai Cheng, Zhengyuan Li, Xingpeng Sun et al.

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is an essential yet challenging task for robot assistants. Large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for EQA, but existing approaches either treat it as static video question answering without active exploration or restrict answers to a closed set of choices. These limitations hinder real-world applicability, where a robot must explore efficiently and provide accurate answers in open-vocabulary settings. To overcome these challenges, we introduce EfficientEQA, a novel framework that couples efficient exploration with free-form answer generation. EfficientEQA features three key innovations: (1) Semantic-Value-Weighted Frontier Exploration (SFE) with Verbalized Confidence (VC) from a black-box VLM to prioritize semantically important areas to explore, enabling the agent to gather relevant information faster; (2) a BLIP relevancy-based mechanism to stop adaptively by flagging highly relevant observations as outliers to indicate whether the agent has collected enough information; and (3) a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method for the VLM to answer accurately based on pertinent images from the agent's observation history without relying on predefined choices. Our experimental results show that EfficientEQA achieves over 15% higher answer accuracy and requires over 20% fewer exploration steps than state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/chengkaiAcademyCity/EfficientEQA

Juanwu Lu, Can Cui, Yunsheng Ma et al.

Safety and robustness are crucial factors in developing trustworthy autonomous vehicles. One essential aspect of addressing these factors is to equip vehicles with the capability to predict future trajectories for all moving objects in the surroundings and quantify prediction uncertainties. In this paper, we propose the Sequential Neural Variational Agent (SeNeVA), a generative model that describes the distribution of future trajectories for a single moving object. Our approach can distinguish Out-of-Distribution data while quantifying uncertainty and achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on the Argoverse 2 and INTERACTION datasets. Specifically, a 0.446 meters minimum Final Displacement Error, a 0.203 meters minimum Average Displacement Error, and a 5.35% Miss Rate are achieved on the INTERACTION test set. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis is also provided to evaluate the proposed model. Our open-source code is available at https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/seneva.

Pascal Jutras-Dubé, Ruqi Zhang, Aniket Bera

Planning with generative models has emerged as an effective decision-making paradigm across a wide range of domains, including reinforcement learning and autonomous navigation. While continuous replanning at each timestep might seem intuitive because it allows decisions to be made based on the most recent environmental observations, it results in substantial computational challenges, primarily due to the complexity of the generative model's underlying deep learning architecture. Our work addresses this challenge by introducing a simple adaptive planning policy that leverages the generative model's ability to predict long-horizon state trajectories, enabling the execution of multiple actions consecutively without the need for immediate replanning. We propose to use the predictive uncertainty derived from a Deep Ensemble of inverse dynamics models to dynamically adjust the intervals between planning sessions. In our experiments conducted on locomotion tasks within the OpenAI Gym framework, we demonstrate that our adaptive planning policy allows for a reduction in replanning frequency to only about 10% of the steps without compromising the performance. Our results underscore the potential of generative modeling as an efficient and effective tool for decision-making.

Phu Pham, Dipam Patel, Damon Conover et al.

We introduce Go-SLAM, a novel framework that utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM to reconstruct dynamic environments while embedding object-level information within the scene representations. This framework employs advanced object segmentation techniques, assigning a unique identifier to each Gaussian splat that corresponds to the object it represents. Consequently, our system facilitates open-vocabulary querying, allowing users to locate objects using natural language descriptions. Furthermore, the framework features an optimal path generation module that calculates efficient navigation paths for robots toward queried objects, considering obstacles and environmental uncertainties. Comprehensive evaluations in various scene settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in delivering high-fidelity scene reconstructions, precise object segmentation, flexible object querying, and efficient robot path planning. This work represents an additional step forward in bridging the gap between 3D scene reconstruction, semantic object understanding, and real-time environment interactions.

Phu Pham, Aradhya N. Mathur, Ojaswa Sharma et al.

The field of text-to-3D content generation has made significant progress in generating realistic 3D objects, with existing methodologies like Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) offering promising guidance. However, these methods often encounter the "Janus" problem-multi-face ambiguities due to imprecise guidance. Additionally, while recent advancements in 3D gaussian splitting have shown its efficacy in representing 3D volumes, optimization of this representation remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces a unified framework for text-to-3D content generation that addresses these critical gaps. Our approach utilizes multi-view guidance to iteratively form the structure of the 3D model, progressively enhancing detail and accuracy. We also introduce a novel densification algorithm that aligns gaussians close to the surface, optimizing the structural integrity and fidelity of the generated models. Extensive experiments validate our approach, demonstrating that it produces high-quality visual outputs with minimal time cost. Notably, our method achieves high-quality results within half an hour of training, offering a substantial efficiency gain over most existing methods, which require hours of training time to achieve comparable results.

Vineet Punyamoorty, Pascal Jutras-Dubé, Ruqi Zhang et al.

By framing reinforcement learning as a sequence modeling problem, recent work has enabled the use of generative models, such as diffusion models, for planning. While these models are effective in predicting long-horizon state trajectories in deterministic environments, they face challenges in dynamic settings with moving obstacles. Effective collision avoidance demands continuous monitoring and adaptive decision-making. While replanning at every timestep could ensure safety, it introduces substantial computational overhead due to the repetitive prediction of overlapping state sequences -- a process that is particularly costly with diffusion models, known for their intensive iterative sampling procedure. We propose an adaptive generative planning approach that dynamically adjusts replanning frequency based on the uncertainty of action predictions. Our method minimizes the need for frequent, computationally expensive, and redundant replanning while maintaining robust collision avoidance performance. In experiments, we obtain a 13.5% increase in the mean trajectory length and a 12.7% increase in mean reward over long-horizon planning, indicating a reduction in collision rates and an improved ability to navigate the environment safely.

Divyanshu Daiya, Damon Conover, Aniket Bera

We propose a novel framework COLLAGE for generating collaborative agent-object-agent interactions by leveraging large language models (LLMs) and hierarchical motion-specific vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs). Our model addresses the lack of rich datasets in this domain by incorporating the knowledge and reasoning abilities of LLMs to guide a generative diffusion model. The hierarchical VQ-VAE architecture captures different motion-specific characteristics at multiple levels of abstraction, avoiding redundant concepts and enabling efficient multi-resolution representation. We introduce a diffusion model that operates in the latent space and incorporates LLM-generated motion planning cues to guide the denoising process, resulting in prompt-specific motion generation with greater control and diversity. Experimental results on the CORE-4D, and InterHuman datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating realistic and diverse collaborative human-object-human interactions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our work opens up new possibilities for modeling complex interactions in various domains, such as robotics, graphics and computer vision.

Lu Ling, Yichen Sheng, Zhi Tu et al.

We have witnessed significant progress in deep learning-based 3D vision, ranging from neural radiance field (NeRF) based 3D representation learning to applications in novel view synthesis (NVS). However, existing scene-level datasets for deep learning-based 3D vision, limited to either synthetic environments or a narrow selection of real-world scenes, are quite insufficient. This insufficiency not only hinders a comprehensive benchmark of existing methods but also caps what could be explored in deep learning-based 3D analysis. To address this critical gap, we present DL3DV-10K, a large-scale scene dataset, featuring 51.2 million frames from 10,510 videos captured from 65 types of point-of-interest (POI) locations, covering both bounded and unbounded scenes, with different levels of reflection, transparency, and lighting. We conducted a comprehensive benchmark of recent NVS methods on DL3DV-10K, which revealed valuable insights for future research in NVS. In addition, we have obtained encouraging results in a pilot study to learn generalizable NeRF from DL3DV-10K, which manifests the necessity of a large-scale scene-level dataset to forge a path toward a foundation model for learning 3D representation. Our DL3DV-10K dataset, benchmark results, and models will be publicly accessible at https://dl3dv-10k.github.io/DL3DV-10K/.

Phu Pham, Damon Conover, Aniket Bera

Aerial-ground localization is difficult due to large viewpoint and modality gaps between ground-level LiDAR and overhead imagery. We propose TransLocNet, a cross-modal attention framework that fuses LiDAR geometry with aerial semantic context. LiDAR scans are projected into a bird's-eye-view representation and aligned with aerial features through bidirectional attention, followed by a likelihood map decoder that outputs spatial probability distributions over position and orientation. A contrastive learning module enforces a shared embedding space to improve cross-modal alignment. Experiments on CARLA and KITTI show that TransLocNet outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing localization error by up to 63% and achieving sub-meter, sub-degree accuracy. These results demonstrate that TransLocNet provides robust and generalizable aerial-ground localization in both synthetic and real-world settings.

Amir Tahmasbi, Sadegh Majidi, Kazem Taram et al.

Spatial reasoning in large language models (LLMs) has gained increasing attention due to applications in navigation and planning. Despite strong general language capabilities, LLMs still struggle with spatial transformations and multi-step planning in structured environments. We propose a two-stage approach that decomposes spatial reasoning into atomic building blocks and their composition. First, we apply supervised fine-tuning on elementary spatial transformations, such as rotation, translation, and scaling, to equip the model with basic spatial physics. We then freeze this physics-aware model and train lightweight LoRA adapters within the GRPO framework to learn policies that compose these building blocks for multi-step planning in puzzle-based environments, in a closed-loop manner. To support this pipeline, we synthesize an ASCII-art dataset and construct a corresponding ASCII-based reinforcement learning environment. Our method consistently outperforms baselines, including the generic backbone, physics-aware model, and end-to-end RL models, under both Dynamic environments with explicit state updates and Static environments where the model must rely on its internal state across steps. In addition, the proposed approach converges faster and exhibits more stable training compared to end-to-end reinforcement learning from scratch. Finally, we analyze attention patterns to assess whether fine-tuning induces meaningful improvements in spatial understanding.

Hrishikesh Viswanath, Md Ashiqur Rahman, Chi Lin et al.

Accurate and efficient 3D mapping of large-scale outdoor environments from LiDAR measurements is a fundamental challenge in robotics, particularly towards ensuring smooth and artifact-free surface reconstructions. Although the state-of-the-art methods focus on memory-efficient neural representations for high-fidelity surface generation, they often fail to produce artifact-free manifolds, with artifacts arising due to noisy and sparse inputs. To address this issue, we frame surface mapping as a physics-informed energy optimization problem, enforcing surface smoothness by optimizing an energy functional that penalizes sharp surface ridges. Specifically, we propose a deep learning based approach that learns the signed distance field (SDF) of the surface manifold from raw LiDAR point clouds using a physics-informed loss function that optimizes the $L_2$-Hessian energy of the surface. Our learning framework includes a hierarchical octree based input feature encoding and a multi-scale neural network to iteratively refine the signed distance field at different scales of resolution. Lastly, we introduce a test-time refinement strategy to correct topological inconsistencies and edge distortions that can arise in the generated mesh. We propose a \texttt{CUDA}-accelerated least-squares optimization that locally adjusts vertex positions to enforce feature-preserving smoothing. We evaluate our approach on large-scale outdoor datasets and demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in terms of improved accuracy and smoothness. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/HessianForge/}{https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/HessianForge/}

Xingpeng Sun, Haoming Meng, Souradip Chakraborty et al.

While LLMs excel in processing text in these human conversations, they struggle with the nuances of verbal instructions in scenarios like social navigation, where ambiguity and uncertainty can erode trust in robotic and other AI systems. We can address this shortcoming by moving beyond text and additionally focusing on the paralinguistic features of these audio responses. These features are the aspects of spoken communication that do not involve the literal wording (lexical content) but convey meaning and nuance through how something is said. We present Beyond Text: an approach that improves LLM decision-making by integrating audio transcription along with a subsection of these features, which focus on the affect and more relevant in human-robot conversations.This approach not only achieves a 70.26% winning rate, outperforming existing LLMs by 22.16% to 48.30% (gemini-1.5-pro and gpt-3.5 respectively), but also enhances robustness against token manipulation adversarial attacks, highlighted by a 22.44% less decrease ratio than the text-only language model in winning rate. Beyond Text' marks an advancement in social robot navigation and broader Human-Robot interactions, seamlessly integrating text-based guidance with human-audio-informed language models.

Zhengyuan Li, Kai Cheng, Anindita Ghosh et al.

Text-based 3D human motion editing is a critical yet challenging task in computer vision and graphics. While training-free approaches have been explored, the recent release of the MotionFix dataset, which includes source-text-motion triplets, has opened new avenues for training, yielding promising results. However, existing methods struggle with precise control, often leading to misalignment between motion semantics and language instructions. In this paper, we introduce a related task, motion similarity prediction, and propose a multi-task training paradigm, where we train the model jointly on motion editing and motion similarity prediction to foster the learning of semantically meaningful representations. To complement this task, we design an advanced Diffusion-Transformer-based architecture that separately handles motion similarity prediction and motion editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach in both editing alignment and fidelity.

AmirMohammad Tahmasbi, MohammadSaleh Faghfoorian, Saeed Khodaygan et al.

Path planning in high-dimensional spaces poses significant challenges, particularly in achieving both time efficiency and a fair success rate. To address these issues, we introduce a novel path-planning algorithm, Zonal RL-RRT, that leverages kd-tree partitioning to segment the map into zones while addressing zone connectivity, ensuring seamless transitions between zones. By breaking down the complex environment into multiple zones and using Q-learning as the high-level decision-maker, our algorithm achieves a 3x improvement in time efficiency compared to basic sampling methods such as RRT and RRT* in forest-like maps. Our approach outperforms heuristic-guided methods like BIT* and Informed RRT* by 1.5x in terms of runtime while maintaining robust and reliable success rates across 2D to 6D environments. Compared to learning-based methods like NeuralRRT* and MPNetSMP, as well as the heuristic RRT*J, our algorithm demonstrates, on average, 1.5x better performance in the same environments. We also evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through simulations of the UR10e arm manipulator in the MuJoCo environment. A key observation of our approach lies in its use of zone partitioning and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for adaptive high-level planning allowing the algorithm to accommodate flexible policies across diverse environments, making it a versatile tool for advanced path planning.

Phu Pham, Damon Conover, Aniket Bera

We present FlashSLAM, a novel SLAM approach that leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting for efficient and robust 3D scene reconstruction. Existing 3DGS-based SLAM methods often fall short in sparse view settings and during large camera movements due to their reliance on gradient descent-based optimization, which is both slow and inaccurate. FlashSLAM addresses these limitations by combining 3DGS with a fast vision-based camera tracking technique, utilizing a pretrained feature matching model and point cloud registration for precise pose estimation in under 80 ms - a 90% reduction in tracking time compared to SplaTAM - without costly iterative rendering. In sparse settings, our method achieves up to a 92% improvement in average tracking accuracy over previous methods. Additionally, it accounts for noise in depth sensors, enhancing robustness when using unspecialized devices such as smartphones. Extensive experiments show that FlashSLAM performs reliably across both sparse and dense settings, in synthetic and real-world environments. Evaluations on benchmark datasets highlight its superior accuracy and efficiency, establishing FlashSLAM as a versatile and high-performance solution for SLAM, advancing the state-of-the-art in 3D reconstruction across diverse applications.

Nihal Gunukula, Kshitij Tiwari, Aniket Bera

In emergency scenarios, mobile robots must navigate like humans, interpreting stimuli to locate potential victims rapidly without interfering with first responders. Existing socially-aware navigation algorithms face computational and adaptability challenges. To overcome these, we propose a solution, MIRACLE -- an inverse reinforcement and curriculum learning model, that employs gamified learning to gather stimuli-driven human navigational data. This data is then used to train a Deep Inverse Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning model, reducing reliance on demonstrator abilities. Testing reveals a low loss of 2.7717 within a 400-sized environment, signifying human-like response replication. Current databases lack comprehensive stimuli-driven data, necessitating our approach. By doing so, we enable robots to navigate emergency situations with human-like perception, enhancing their life-saving capabilities.

Prerit Gupta, Shourya Verma, Ananth Grama et al.

Generating realistic, context-aware two-person motion conditioned on diverse modalities remains a central challenge in computer graphics, animation, and human-computer interaction. We introduce DualFlow, a unified and efficient framework for multi-modal two-person motion generation. DualFlow conditions 3D motion synthesis on diverse inputs, including text, music, and prior motion sequences. Leveraging rectified flow, it achieves deterministic straight-line sampling paths between noise and data, reducing inference time and mitigating error accumulation common in diffusion-based models. To enhance semantic grounding, DualFlow employs a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) module that retrieves motion exemplars using music features and LLM-based text decompositions of spatial relations, body movements, and rhythmic patterns. We use contrastive objective that further strengthens alignment with conditioning signals and introduce synchronization loss that improves inter-person coordination. Extensive evaluations across text-to-motion, music-to-motion, and multi-modal interactive benchmarks show consistent gains in motion quality, responsiveness, and efficiency. DualFlow produces temporally coherent and rhythmically synchronized motions, setting state-of-the-art in multi-modal human motion generation.

Xingpeng Sun, Shiyang Jia, Zherong Pan et al.

Mesh deformation is a fundamental tool in 3D content manipulation. Despite extensive prior research, existing approaches often suffer from low output quality, require significant manual tuning, or depend on data-intensive training. To address these limitations, we introduce a training-free, handle-based mesh deformation method. % Our core idea is to leverage a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to interpret and manipulate a handle-based interface through prompt engineering. We begin by applying cone singularity detection to identify a sparse set of potential handles. The VLM is then prompted to select both the deformable sub-parts of the mesh and the handles that best align with user instructions. Subsequently, we query the desired deformed positions of the selected handles in screen space. To reduce uncertainty inherent in VLM predictions, we aggregate the results from multiple camera views using a novel multi-view voting scheme. % Across a suite of benchmarks, our method produces deformations that align more closely with user intent, as measured by CLIP and GPTEval3D scores, while introducing low distortion -- quantified via membrane energy. In summary, our approach is training-free, highly automated, and consistently delivers high-quality mesh deformations.

Uttaran Bhattacharya, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha

We present a multimodal learning-based method to simultaneously synthesize co-speech facial expressions and upper-body gestures for digital characters using RGB video data captured using commodity cameras. Our approach learns from sparse face landmarks and upper-body joints, estimated directly from video data, to generate plausible emotive character motions. Given a speech audio waveform and a token sequence of the speaker's face landmark motion and body-joint motion computed from a video, our method synthesizes the motion sequences for the speaker's face landmarks and body joints to match the content and the affect of the speech. We design a generator consisting of a set of encoders to transform all the inputs into a multimodal embedding space capturing their correlations, followed by a pair of decoders to synthesize the desired face and pose motions. To enhance the plausibility of synthesis, we use an adversarial discriminator that learns to differentiate between the face and pose motions computed from the original videos and our synthesized motions based on their affective expressions. To evaluate our approach, we extend the TED Gesture Dataset to include view-normalized, co-speech face landmarks in addition to body gestures. We demonstrate the performance of our method through thorough quantitative and qualitative experiments on multiple evaluation metrics and via a user study. We observe that our method results in low reconstruction error and produces synthesized samples with diverse facial expressions and body gestures for digital characters.

Aradhya N. Mathur, Phu Pham, Aniket Bera et al.

3D generation has rapidly accelerated in the past decade owing to the progress in the field of generative modeling. Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) based rendering has improved 3D asset generation to a great extent. Further, the recent work of Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization (DDPO) demonstrates that the diffusion process is compatible with policy gradient methods and has been demonstrated to improve the 2D diffusion models using an aesthetic scoring function. We first show that this aesthetic scorer acts as a strong guide for a variety of SDS-based methods and demonstrates its effectiveness in text-to-3D synthesis. Further, we leverage the DDPO approach to improve the quality of the 3D rendering obtained from 2D diffusion models. Our approach, DDPO3D, employs the policy gradient method in tandem with aesthetic scoring. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method that extends policy gradient methods to 3D score-based rendering and shows improvement across SDS-based methods such as DreamGaussian, which are currently driving research in text-to-3D synthesis. Our approach is compatible with score distillation-based methods, which would facilitate the integration of diverse reward functions into the generative process. Our project page can be accessed via https://ddpo3d.github.io.

Rohan Chandra, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha

Studies have shown that autonomous vehicles (AVs) behave conservatively in a traffic environment composed of human drivers and do not adapt to local conditions and socio-cultural norms. It is known that socially aware AVs can be designed if there exists a mechanism to understand the behaviors of human drivers. We present an approach that leverages machine learning to predict, the behaviors of human drivers. This is similar to how humans implicitly interpret the behaviors of drivers on the road, by only observing the trajectories of their vehicles. We use graph-theoretic tools to extract driver behavior features from the trajectories and machine learning to obtain a computational mapping between the extracted trajectory of a vehicle in traffic and the driver behaviors. Compared to prior approaches in this domain, we prove that our method is robust, general, and extendable to broad-ranging applications such as autonomous navigation. We evaluate our approach on real-world traffic datasets captured in the U.S., India, China, and Singapore, as well as in simulation.

Niall L. Williams, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha

We present a new approach for redirected walking in static and dynamic scenes that uses techniques from robot motion planning to compute the redirection gains that steer the user on collision-free paths in the physical space. Our first contribution is a mathematical framework for redirected walking using concepts from motion planning and configuration spaces. This framework highlights various geometric and perceptual constraints that tend to make collision-free redirected walking difficult. We use our framework to propose an efficient solution to the redirection problem that uses the notion of visibility polygons to compute the free spaces in the physical environment and the virtual environment. The visibility polygon provides a concise representation of the entire space that is visible, and therefore walkable, to the user from their position within an environment. Using this representation of walkable space, we apply redirected walking to steer the user to regions of the visibility polygon in the physical environment that closely match the region that the user occupies in the visibility polygon in the virtual environment. We show that our algorithm is able to steer the user along paths that result in significantly fewer resets than existing state-of-the-art algorithms in both static and dynamic scenes. Our project website is available at https://gamma.umd.edu/vis_poly/.

Trisha Mittal, Puneet Mathur, Aniket Bera et al.

We present Affect2MM, a learning method for time-series emotion prediction for multimedia content. Our goal is to automatically capture the varying emotions depicted by characters in real-life human-centric situations and behaviors. We use the ideas from emotion causation theories to computationally model and determine the emotional state evoked in clips of movies. Affect2MM explicitly models the temporal causality using attention-based methods and Granger causality. We use a variety of components like facial features of actors involved, scene understanding, visual aesthetics, action/situation description, and movie script to obtain an affective-rich representation to understand and perceive the scene. We use an LSTM-based learning model for emotion perception. To evaluate our method, we analyze and compare our performance on three datasets, SENDv1, MovieGraphs, and the LIRIS-ACCEDE dataset, and observe an average of 10-15% increase in the performance over SOTA methods for all three datasets.

Niall L. Williams, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha

We present a novel redirected walking controller based on alignment that allows the user to explore large and complex virtual environments, while minimizing the number of collisions with obstacles in the physical environment. Our alignment-based redirection controller, ARC, steers the user such that their proximity to obstacles in the physical environment matches the proximity to obstacles in the virtual environment as closely as possible. To quantify a controller's performance in complex environments, we introduce a new metric, Complexity Ratio (CR), to measure the relative environment complexity and characterize the difference in navigational complexity between the physical and virtual environments. Through extensive simulation-based experiments, we show that ARC significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art controllers in its ability to steer the user on a collision-free path. We also show through quantitative and qualitative measures of performance that our controller is robust in complex environments with many obstacles. Our method is applicable to arbitrary environments and operates without any user input or parameter tweaking, aside from the layout of the environments. We have implemented our algorithm on the Oculus Quest head-mounted display and evaluated its performance in environments with varying complexity. Our project website is available at https://gamma.umd.edu/arc/.

Venkatraman Narayanan, Bala Murali Manoghar, Rama Prashanth RV et al.

We present EWareNet, a novel intent and affect-aware social robot navigation algorithm among pedestrians. Our approach predicts the trajectory-based pedestrian intent from gait sequence, which is then used for intent-guided navigation taking into account social and proxemic constraints. We propose a transformer-based model that works on commodity RGB-D cameras mounted onto a moving robot. Our intent prediction routine is integrated into a mapless navigation scheme and makes no assumptions about the environment of pedestrian motion. Our navigation scheme consists of a novel obstacle profile representation methodology that is dynamically adjusted based on the pedestrian pose, intent, and affect. The navigation scheme is based on a reinforcement learning algorithm that takes pedestrian intent and robot's impact on pedestrian intent into consideration, in addition to the environmental configuration. We outperform current state-of-art algorithms for intent prediction from 3D gaits.

Videsh Suman, Phu Pham, Aniket Bera

A key aspect of driving a road vehicle is to interact with other road users, assess their intentions and make risk-aware tactical decisions. An intuitive approach to enabling an intelligent automated driving system would be incorporating some aspects of human driving behavior. To this end, we propose a novel driving framework for egocentric views based on spatio-temporal traffic graphs. The traffic graphs model not only the spatial interactions amongst the road users but also their individual intentions through temporally associated message passing. We leverage a spatio-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) to train the graph edges. These edges are formulated using parameterized functions of 3D positions and scene-aware appearance features of road agents. Along with tactical behavior prediction, it is crucial to evaluate the risk-assessing ability of the proposed framework. We claim that our framework learns risk-aware representations by improving on the task of risk object identification, especially in identifying objects with vulnerable interactions like pedestrians and cyclists.

Pooja Guhan, Naman Awasthi, and Kathryn McDonald et al.

We discuss MET, a learning-based algorithm proposed for perceiving a patient's level of engagement during telehealth sessions. We leverage latent vectors corresponding to Affective and Cognitive features frequently used in psychology literature to understand a person's level of engagement in a semi-supervised GAN-based framework. We showcase the efficacy of this method from the perspective of mental health and more specifically how this can be leveraged for a better understanding of patient engagement during telemental health sessions. To further the development of similar technologies that can be useful for telehealth, we also plan to release a dataset MEDICA containing 1299 video clips, each 3 seconds long and show experiments on the same. Our framework reports a 40% improvement in RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) over state-of-the-art methods for engagement estimation. In our real-world tests, we also observed positive correlations between the working alliance inventory scores reported by psychotherapists. This indicates the potential of the proposed model to present patient engagement estimations that aligns well with the engagement measures used by psychotherapists.

Rohan Chandra, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha

Studies have shown that autonomous vehicles (AVs) behave conservatively in a traffic environment composed of human drivers and do not adapt to local conditions and socio-cultural norms. It is known that socially aware AVs can be designed if there exist a mechanism to understand the behaviors of human drivers. We present a notion of Machine Theory of Mind (M-ToM) to infer the behaviors of human drivers by observing the trajectory of their vehicles. Our M-ToM approach, called StylePredict, is based on trajectory analysis of vehicles, which has been investigated in robotics and computer vision. StylePredict mimics human ToM to infer driver behaviors, or styles, using a computational mapping between the extracted trajectory of a vehicle in traffic and the driver behaviors using graph-theoretic techniques, including spectral analysis and centrality functions. We use StylePredict to analyze driver behavior in different cultures in the USA, China, India, and Singapore, based on traffic density, heterogeneity, and conformity to traffic rules and observe an inverse correlation between longitudinal (overspeeding) and lateral (overtaking, lane-changes) driving styles.

Vishnu Sashank Dorbala, Arjun Srinivasan, Aniket Bera

Humans are known to construct cognitive maps of their everyday surroundings using a variety of perceptual inputs. As such, when a human is asked for directions to a particular location, their wayfinding capability in converting this cognitive map into directional instructions is challenged. Owing to spatial anxiety, the language used in the spoken instructions can be vague and often unclear. To account for this unreliability in navigational guidance, we propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based trust-driven robot navigation algorithm that learns humans' trustworthiness to perform a language guided navigation task. Our approach seeks to answer the question as to whether a robot can trust a human's navigational guidance or not. To this end, we look at training a policy that learns to navigate towards a goal location using only trustworthy human guidance, driven by its own robot trust metric. We look at quantifying various affective features from language-based instructions and incorporate them into our policy's observation space in the form of a human trust metric. We utilize both these trust metrics into an optimal cognitive reasoning scheme that decides when and when not to trust the given guidance. Our results show that the learned policy can navigate the environment in an optimal, time-efficient manner as opposed to an explorative approach that performs the same task. We showcase the efficacy of our results both in simulation and a real-world environment.

Abhishek Banerjee, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Aniket Bera

We present a novel generalized zero-shot algorithm to recognize perceived emotions from gestures. Our task is to map gestures to novel emotion categories not encountered in training. We introduce an adversarial, autoencoder-based representation learning that correlates 3D motion-captured gesture sequence with the vectorized representation of the natural-language perceived emotion terms using word2vec embeddings. The language-semantic embedding provides a representation of the emotion label space, and we leverage this underlying distribution to map the gesture-sequences to the appropriate categorical emotion labels. We train our method using a combination of gestures annotated with known emotion terms and gestures not annotated with any emotions. We evaluate our method on the MPI Emotional Body Expressions Database (EBEDB) and obtain an accuracy of $58.43\%$. This improves the performance of current state-of-the-art algorithms for generalized zero-shot learning by $25$--$27\%$ on the absolute.

Trisha Mittal, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Rohan Chandra et al.

We present a learning-based method for detecting real and fake deepfake multimedia content. To maximize information for learning, we extract and analyze the similarity between the two audio and visual modalities from within the same video. Additionally, we extract and compare affective cues corresponding to perceived emotion from the two modalities within a video to infer whether the input video is "real" or "fake". We propose a deep learning network, inspired by the Siamese network architecture and the triplet loss. To validate our model, we report the AUC metric on two large-scale deepfake detection datasets, DeepFake-TIMIT Dataset and DFDC. We compare our approach with several SOTA deepfake detection methods and report per-video AUC of 84.4% on the DFDC and 96.6% on the DF-TIMIT datasets, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first approach that simultaneously exploits audio and video modalities and also perceived emotions from the two modalities for deepfake detection.