SceneCritic: A Symbolic Evaluator for 3D Indoor Scene Synthesis

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly generate indoor scenes through intermediate structures such as layouts and scene graphs, yet evaluation still relies on LLM or VLM judges that score rendered views, making judgments sensitive to viewpoint, prompt phrasing, and hallucination. When the evaluator is unstable, it becomes difficult to determine whether a model has produced a spatially plausible scene or whether the output score reflects the choice of viewpoint, rendering, or prompt. We introduce SceneCritic, a symbolic evaluator for floor-plan-level layouts. SceneCritic's constraints are grounded in SceneOnto, a structured spatial ontology we construct by aggregating indoor scene priors from 3D-FRONT, ScanNet, and Visual Genome. SceneOnto traverses this ontology to jointly verify semantic, orientation, and geometric coherence across object relationships, providing object-level and relationship-level assessments that identify specific violations and successful placements. Furthermore, we pair SceneCritic with an iterative refinement test bed that probes how models build and revise spatial structure under different critic modalities: a rule-based critic using collision constraints as feedback, an LLM critic operating on the layout as text, and a VLM critic operating on rendered observations. Through extensive experiments, we show that (a) SceneCritic aligns substantially better with human judgments than VLM-based evaluators, (b) text-only LLMs can outperform VLMs on semantic layout quality, and (c) image-based VLM refinement is the most effective critic modality for semantic and orientation correction.

EgoGroups: A Benchmark For Detecting Social Groups of People in the Wild

Social group detection, or the identification of humans involved in reciprocal interpersonal interactions (e.g., family members, friends, and customers and merchants), is a crucial component of social intelligence needed for agents transacting in the world. The few existing benchmarks for social group detection are limited by low scene diversity and reliance on third-person camera sources (e.g., surveillance footage). Consequently, these benchmarks generally lack real-world evaluation on how groups form and evolve in diverse cultural contexts and unconstrained settings. To address this gap, we introduce EgoGroups, a first-person view dataset that captures social dynamics in cities around the world. EgoGroups spans 65 countries covering low, medium, and high-crowd settings under four weather/time-of-day conditions. We include dense human annotations for person and social groups, along with rich geographic and scene metadata. Using this dataset, we performed an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLM/LLMs and supervised models on their group detection capabilities. We found several interesting findings, including VLMs and LLMs can outperform supervised baselines in a zero-shot setting, while crowd density and cultural regions clearly influence model performance.