Yurui Dong

Ziyue Wang, Yurui Dong, Fuwen Luo et al.

The rapid advancing of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has spurred interest in complex multimodal reasoning tasks in the real-world and virtual environment, which require coordinating multiple abilities, including visual perception, visual reasoning, spatial awareness, and target deduction. However, existing evaluations primarily assess the final task completion, often degrading assessments to isolated abilities such as visual grounding and visual question answering. Less attention is given to comprehensively and quantitatively analyzing reasoning process in multimodal environments, which is crucial for understanding model behaviors and underlying reasoning mechanisms beyond merely task success. To address this, we introduce MM-Escape, an extensible benchmark for investigating multimodal reasoning, inspired by real-world escape games. MM-Escape emphasizes intermediate model behaviors alongside final task completion. To achieve this, we develop EscapeCraft, a customizable and open environment that enables models to engage in free-form exploration for assessing multimodal reasoning. Extensive experiments show that MLLMs, regardless of scale, can successfully complete the simplest room escape tasks, with some exhibiting human-like exploration strategies. Yet, performance dramatically drops as task difficulty increases. Moreover, we observe that performance bottlenecks vary across models, revealing distinct failure modes and limitations in their multimodal reasoning abilities, such as repetitive trajectories without adaptive exploration, getting stuck in corners due to poor visual spatial awareness, and ineffective use of acquired props, such as the key. We hope our work sheds light on new challenges in multimodal reasoning, and uncovers potential improvements in MLLMs capabilities.

Yurui Dong, Luozhijie Jin, Yao Yang et al.

Purpose: Emotion is a fundamental component of human communication, shaping understanding, trust, and engagement across domains such as education, healthcare, and mental health. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning and knowledge generation capabilities, they still struggle to express emotions in a consistent, controllable, and contextually appropriate manner. This limitation restricts their potential for authentic human-AI interaction. Methods: We propose a controllable emotion generation framework based on Emotion Vectors (EVs) - latent representations derived from internal activation shifts between neutral and emotion-conditioned responses. By injecting these vectors into the hidden states of pretrained LLMs during inference, our method enables fine-grained, continuous modulation of emotional tone without any additional training or architectural modification. We further provide theoretical analysis proving that EV steering enhances emotional expressivity while maintaining semantic fidelity and linguistic fluency. Results: Extensive experiments across multiple LLM families show that the proposed approach achieves consistent emotional alignment, stable topic adherence, and controllable affect intensity. Compared with existing prompt-based and fine-tuning-based baselines, our method demonstrates superior flexibility and generalizability. Conclusion: Emotion Vector (EV) steering provides an efficient and interpretable means of bridging rational reasoning and affective understanding in large language models, offering a promising direction for building emotionally resonant AI systems capable of more natural human-machine interaction.