Xianzhe Zhang

Xianzhe Zhang, Mingxuan Hu, Bufan Xue et al.

We present SmartWalkCoach, a mobile AI companion that supports the full walking journey: from pre-walk planning to in-walk guidance through to post-walk reflection. Addressing a gap between map navigation and motivational coaching, SmartWalkCoach orchestrates three lightweight agents: (1) GeographyAgent for conversational route curation from nearby points of interest and user preferences while delegating pathfinding to map APIs; (2) AccompanyAgent for context-aware, just-in-time prompts that blend informational cues with relational encouragement; and (3) SummaryAgent for concise reflection and next-step planning. This end-to-end, tool-using design aims to lower cognitive load in planning and sustain engagement and motivation during walking through delivering dynamic, cadence-aware interventions. We conducted an in-the-wild, two-period AB/BA crossover study (N=12), where each participant completed two comparable walks with counterbalanced conditions: Information-only versus Information+Motivation. Linear mixed models show that adding motivational, companion-like dialogue significantly improved outcomes: participants reported higher positive feelings and better user experience, with no evidence of carryover. Thematic analysis surfaced two design imperatives for mobile companions: supportive, relational expression and context-aware timing (e.g., avoiding high-load moments, intervening at fatigue/milestones). Our contributions are: (i) an end-to-end, tool-using agent architecture for everyday walking that reduces cognitive load during planning and accompaniment; (ii) a controlled field evaluation linking context-aware motivation to affect and UX gains; and (iii) actionable design guidance on expression, timing, and frequency for mHealth companions.We outline limitations and paths toward multimodal, voice-first companions, with adaptive personalization mechanisms.

Dongya Sun, Yunfei Hu, Xianzhe Zhang et al.

Facial expression manipulation aims to change human facial expressions without affecting face recognition. In order to transform the facial expressions to target expressions, previous methods relied on expression labels to guide the manipulation process. However, these methods failed to preserve the details of facial features, which causes the weakening or the loss of identity information in the output image. In our work, we propose WEM-GAN, in short for wavelet-based expression manipulation GAN, which puts more efforts on preserving the details of the original image in the editing process. Firstly, we take advantage of the wavelet transform technique and combine it with our generator with a U-net autoencoder backbone, in order to improve the generator's ability to preserve more details of facial features. Secondly, we also implement the high-frequency component discriminator, and use high-frequency domain adversarial loss to further constrain the optimization of our model, providing the generated face image with more abundant details. Additionally, in order to narrow the gap between generated facial expressions and target expressions, we use residual connections between encoder and decoder, while also using relative action units (AUs) several times. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments have demonstrated that our model performs better in preserving identity features, editing capability, and image generation quality on the AffectNet dataset. It also shows superior performance in metrics such as Average Content Distance (ACD) and Expression Distance (ED).

Hang Jiang, Xianzhe Zhang, Jinho D. Choi

Previous works related to automatic personality recognition focus on using traditional classification models with linguistic features. However, attentive neural networks with contextual embeddings, which have achieved huge success in text classification, are rarely explored for this task. In this project, we have two major contributions. First, we create the first dialogue-based personality dataset, FriendsPersona, by annotating 5 personality traits of speakers from Friends TV Show through crowdsourcing. Second, we present a novel approach to automatic personality recognition using pre-trained contextual embeddings (BERT and RoBERTa) and attentive neural networks. Our models largely improve the state-of-art results on the monologue Essays dataset by 2.49%, and establish a solid benchmark on our FriendsPersona. By comparing results in two datasets, we demonstrate the challenges of modeling personality in multi-party dialogue.