Realistic Lip Motion Generation Based on 3D Dynamic Viseme and Coarticulation Modeling for Human-Robot Interaction

Realistic lip synchronization is essential for the natural human-robot non-verbal interaction of humanoid robots. Motivated by this need, this paper presents a lip motion generation framework based on 3D dynamic viseme and coarticulation modeling. By analyzing Chinese pronunciation theory, a 3D dynamic viseme library is constructed based on the ARKit standard, which offers coherent prior trajectories of lips. To resolve motion conflicts within continuous speech streams, a coarticulation mechanism is developed by incorporating initial-final (Shengmu-Yunmu) decoupling and energy modulation. After developing a strategy to retarget high-dimensional spatial lip motion to a 14-DOF lip actuation system of a humanoid head platform, the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed architecture is experimentally validated and demonstrated with quantitative ablation experiments using the metrics of the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) and the Mean Absolute Jerk (MAJ). This research offers a lightweight, efficient, and highly practical paradigm for the speech-driven lip motion generation of humanoid robots. The 3D dynamic viseme library and real-world deployment videos are available at {https://github.com/yuesheng21/Phoneme-to-Lip-14DOF}

Humanizing Robot Gaze Shifts: A Framework for Natural Gaze Shifts in Humanoid Robots

Leveraging auditory and visual feedback for attention reorientation is essential for natural gaze shifts in social interaction. However, enabling humanoid robots to perform natural and context-appropriate gaze shifts in unconstrained human--robot interaction (HRI) remains challenging, as it requires the coupling of cognitive attention mechanisms and biomimetic motion generation. In this work, we propose the Robot Gaze-Shift (RGS) framework, which integrates these two components into a unified pipeline. First, RGS employs a vision--language model (VLM)-based gaze reasoning pipeline to infer context-appropriate gaze targets from multimodal interaction cues, ensuring consistency with human gaze-orienting regularities. Second, RGS introduces a conditional Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) model for eye--head coordinated gaze-shift motion generation, producing diverse and human-like gaze-shift behaviors. Experiments validate that RGS effectively replicates human-like target selection and generates realistic, diverse gaze-shift motions.

Can LLMs Generate Reliable Test Case Generators? A Study on Competition-Level Programming Problems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, capable of tackling complex tasks during inference. However, the extent to which LLMs can be utilized for code checking or debugging through test case generation remains largely unexplored. We investigate this problem from the perspective of competition-level programming (CP) programs and propose TCGBench, a Benchmark for (LLM generation of) Test Case Generators. This benchmark comprises two tasks, aimed at studying the capabilities of LLMs in (1) generating valid test case generators for a given CP problem, and further (2) generating targeted test case generators that expose bugs in human-written code. Experimental results indicate that while state-of-the-art LLMs can generate valid test case generators in most cases, most LLMs struggle to generate targeted test cases that reveal flaws in human code effectively. Especially, even advanced reasoning models (e.g., o3-mini) fall significantly short of human performance in the task of generating targeted generators. Furthermore, we construct a high-quality, manually curated dataset of instructions for generating targeted generators. Analysis demonstrates that the performance of LLMs can be enhanced with the aid of this dataset, by both prompting and fine-tuning.