Jianxu Shangguan

Jianxu Shangguan, Jing Xu, Hang Ye et al.

Creating lifelike digital humans with genuine social intelligence requires unifying cognitive reasoning and multimodal generation within a coherent framework. Current approaches treat these as separate tasks: Large Language Models excel at dialogue but lack embodied expression, while diffusion-based talking head models achieve visual fidelity but ignore social cognition. To bridge this gap, we propose a closed-loop dual-agent framework integrating perception, social reasoning, and expression into a continuous interaction cycle. The perception module analyzes partners' multimodal behaviors from video, while the social reasoning module infers hidden mental states through Theory of Mind and selects responses via an ensemble mechanism. The expression module then generates emotion-controllable dual-agent videos synthesizing both speaker speech and expression alongside listener reactive behaviors, capturing bidirectional dynamics absent in prior work. We construct a hierarchical Persona-Scenario dataset with psychologically grounded personas and private social goals to support evaluation under information asymmetry. Experiments on this dataset demonstrate competitive or superior performance on both dialogue quality and video generation metrics. Notably, our method surpasses even the full-information Script mode on key dialogue quality dimensions, suggesting that explicit mental state inference under uncertainty can elicit more thoughtful dialogue than unrestricted information access.

Hsiang-Wei Huang, Junbin Lu, Kuang-Ming Chen et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on spatial question answering benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether such gains reflect genuine spatial intelligence. We show that existing spatial VLMs lack basic camera motion understanding, a key component of spatial cognition. We propose the Spatial Narrative Score (SNS), an evaluation framework that requires VLMs to generate explicit spatial narratives capturing both scene semantics and camera motion, followed by reasoning with a frozen proxy LLM. Under SNS, state-of-the-art spatial VLMs exhibit significant performance degradation despite high direct question answering accuracy. To address this gap, we introduce CaMo, a camera motion grounded VLM that achieves consistent performance across SNS evaluation and direct spatial question answering accuracy. Our results highlight the importance of explicit spatial narrative externalization for evaluating VLMs with transferable 3D spatial understanding. Our code, data, and model is available at https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/CaMo