Aveek Purohit

Andy Zeng, Maria Attarian, Brian Ichter et al.

Large pretrained (e.g., "foundation") models exhibit distinct capabilities depending on the domain of data they are trained on. While these domains are generic, they may only barely overlap. For example, visual-language models (VLMs) are trained on Internet-scale image captions, but large language models (LMs) are further trained on Internet-scale text with no images (e.g., spreadsheets, SAT questions, code). As a result, these models store different forms of commonsense knowledge across different domains. In this work, we show that this diversity is symbiotic, and can be leveraged through Socratic Models (SMs): a modular framework in which multiple pretrained models may be composed zero-shot i.e., via multimodal-informed prompting, to exchange information with each other and capture new multimodal capabilities, without requiring finetuning. With minimal engineering, SMs are not only competitive with state-of-the-art zero-shot image captioning and video-to-text retrieval, but also enable new applications such as (i) answering free-form questions about egocentric video, (ii) engaging in multimodal assistive dialogue with people (e.g., for cooking recipes) by interfacing with external APIs and databases (e.g., web search), and (iii) robot perception and planning.

Artemis Panagopoulou, Aveek Purohit, Achin Kulshrestha et al.

While Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved human-like performance on many visual and textual reasoning tasks, their proficiency in fine-grained spatial understanding, such as route tracing on maps remains limited. Unlike humans, who can quickly learn to parse and navigate maps, current models often fail to respect fundamental path constraints, in part due to the prohibitive cost and difficulty of collecting large-scale, pixel-accurate path annotations. To address this, we introduce a scalable synthetic data generation pipeline that leverages synthetic map images and pixel-level parsing to automatically produce precise annotations for this challenging task. Using this pipeline, we construct a fine-tuning dataset of 23k path samples across 4k maps, enabling models to acquire more human-like spatial capabilities. Using this dataset, we fine-tune both open-source and proprietary MLLMs. Results on MapBench show that finetuning substantially improves robustness, raising success rates by up to 6.4 points, while also reducing path-tracing error (NDTW). These gains highlight that fine-grained spatial reasoning, absent in pretrained models, can be explicitly taught with synthetic supervision.

Xijun Wang, Tanay Sharma, Achin Kulshrestha et al.

As AR/VR technologies become integral to daily life, there's a growing need for AI that understands human social dynamics from an egocentric perspective. However, current LLMs often lack the social awareness to discern when to intervene as AI assistant. This leads to constant, socially unaware responses that may disrupt natural conversation and negatively impact user focus. To address these limitations, we introduce EgoSocial, a large-scale egocentric dataset with 13,500 social video-question pairs, specifically designed to benchmark intervention in social interaction perception. We also present an in-depth analysis of current omnimodal LLMs (OLLMs) to assess their effectiveness in detecting diverse social contextual cues. Experiments show that OLLMs still struggle to detect the intervention timing (14.4% for Gemini 2.5 Pro). We also propose EgoSoD (EgoSocial Detection), an end-to-end method for robustly discerning social dynamics. Informed by our OLLM analysis, EgoSoD integrates multimodal contextual cues (e.g., audio and visual cues) into a social thinking graph, dynamically modeling participants and interactions. Our method proactively detects intervention timing and social interactions, precisely determining when to intervene. Our EgoSoD improves Phi-4 by 45.6% and Gemini 2.5 Pro by 9.9% on Intervention Timing performance, and improves Phi-4 by 20.4% and Gemini 2.5 Pro by 6.9% on overall Social Interaction performance. We will release the dataset and code soon.