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}

Variational LSTM with Augmented Inputs: Nonlinear Response History Metamodeling with Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty

Uncertainty propagation in high-dimensional nonlinear dynamic structural systems is pivotal in state-of-the-art performance-based design and risk assessment, where uncertainties from both excitations and structures, i.e., the aleatoric uncertainty, must be considered. This poses a significant challenge due to heavy computational demands. Machine learning techniques are thus introduced as metamodels to alleviate this burden. However, the "black box" nature of Machine learning models underscores the necessity of avoiding overly confident predictions, particularly when data and training efforts are insufficient. This creates a need, in addition to considering the aleatoric uncertainty, of estimating the uncertainty related to the prediction confidence, i.e., epistemic uncertainty, for machine learning-based metamodels. We developed a probabilistic metamodeling technique based on a variational long short-term memory (LSTM) with augmented inputs to simultaneously capture aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. Key random system parameters are treated as augmented inputs alongside excitation series carrying record-to-record variability to capture the full range of aleatoric uncertainty. Meanwhile, epistemic uncertainty is effectively approximated via the Monte Carlo dropout scheme. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian approaches, this method incurs negligible additional training costs while enabling nearly cost-free uncertainty simulation. The proposed technique is demonstrated through multiple case studies involving stochastic seismic or wind excitations. Results show that the calibrated metamodels accurately reproduce nonlinear response time histories and provide confidence bounds indicating the associated epistemic uncertainty.

Back to Point: Exploring Point-Language Models for Zero-Shot 3D Anomaly Detection

Zero-shot (ZS) 3D anomaly detection is crucial for reliable industrial inspection, as it enables detecting and localizing defects without requiring any target-category training data. Existing approaches render 3D point clouds into 2D images and leverage pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for anomaly detection. However, such strategies inevitably discard geometric details and exhibit limited sensitivity to local anomalies. In this paper, we revisit intrinsic 3D representations and explore the potential of pre-trained Point-Language Models (PLMs) for ZS 3D anomaly detection. We propose BTP (Back To Point), a novel framework that effectively aligns 3D point cloud and textual embeddings. Specifically, BTP aligns multi-granularity patch features with textual representations for localized anomaly detection, while incorporating geometric descriptors to enhance sensitivity to structural anomalies. Furthermore, we introduce a joint representation learning strategy that leverages auxiliary point cloud data to improve robustness and enrich anomaly semantics. Extensive experiments on Real3D-AD and Anomaly-ShapeNet demonstrate that BTP achieves superior performance in ZS 3D anomaly detection. Code will be available at \href{https://github.com/wistful-8029/BTP-3DAD}{https://github.com/wistful-8029/BTP-3DAD}.

Exploring Multimodal Prompts For Unsupervised Continuous Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised Continuous Anomaly Detection (UCAD) is gaining attention for effectively addressing the catastrophic forgetting and heavy computational burden issues in traditional Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD). However, existing UCAD approaches that rely solely on visual information are insufficient to capture the manifold of normality in complex scenes, thereby impeding further gains in anomaly detection accuracy. To overcome this limitation, we propose an unsupervised continual anomaly detection framework grounded in multimodal prompting. Specifically, we introduce a Continual Multimodal Prompt Memory Bank (CMPMB) that progressively distills and retains prototypical normal patterns from both visual and textual domains across consecutive tasks, yielding a richer representation of normality. Furthermore, we devise a Defect-Semantic-Guided Adaptive Fusion Mechanism (DSG-AFM) that integrates an Adaptive Normalization Module (ANM) with a Dynamic Fusion Strategy (DFS) to jointly enhance detection accuracy and adversarial robustness. Benchmark experiments on MVTec AD and VisA datasets show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on image-level AUROC and pixel-level AUPR metrics.

DexViTac: Collecting Human Visuo-Tactile-Kinematic Demonstrations for Contact-Rich Dexterous Manipulation

Large-scale, high-quality multimodal demonstrations are essential for robot learning of contact-rich dexterous manipulation. While human-centric data collection systems lower the barrier to scaling, they struggle to capture the tactile information during physical interactions. Motivated by this, we present DexViTac, a portable, human-centric data collection system tailored for contact-rich dexterous manipulation. The system enables the high-fidelity acquisition of first-person vision, high-density tactile sensing, end-effector poses, and hand kinematics within unstructured, in-the-wild environments. Building upon this hardware, we propose a kinematics-grounded tactile representation learning algorithm that effectively resolves semantic ambiguities within tactile signals. Leveraging the efficiency of DexViTac, we construct a multimodal dataset comprising over 2,400 visuo-tactile-kinematic demonstrations. Experiments demonstrate that DexViTac achieves a collection efficiency exceeding 248 demonstrations per hour and remains robust against complex visual occlusions. Real-world deployment confirms that policies trained with the proposed dataset and learning strategy achieve an average success rate exceeding 85% across four challenging tasks. This performance significantly outperforms baseline methods, thereby validating the substantial improvement the system provides for learning contact-rich dexterous manipulation. Project page: https://xitong-c.github.io/DexViTac/.

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.

Rethinking ANN-based Retrieval: Multifaceted Learnable Index for Large-scale Recommendation System

Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search is widely used in the retrieval stage of large-scale recommendation systems. In this stage, candidate items are indexed using their learned embedding vectors, and ANN search is executed for each user (or item) query to retrieve a set of relevant items. However, ANN-based retrieval has two key limitations. First, item embeddings and their indices are typically learned in separate stages: indexing is often performed offline after embeddings are trained, which can yield suboptimal retrieval quality-especially for newly created items. Second, although ANN offers sublinear query time, it must still be run for every request, incurring substantial computation cost at industry scale. In this paper, we propose MultiFaceted Learnable Index (MFLI), a scalable, real-time retrieval paradigm that learns multifaceted item embeddings and indices within a unified framework and eliminates ANN search at serving time. Specifically, we construct a multifaceted hierarchical codebook via residual quantization of item embeddings and co-train the codebook with the embeddings. We further introduce an efficient multifaceted indexing structure and mechanisms that support real-time updates. At serving time, the learned hierarchical indices are used directly to identify relevant items, avoiding ANN search altogether. Extensive experiments on real-world data with billions of users show that MFLI improves recall on engagement tasks by up to 11.8\%, cold-content delivery by up to 57.29\%, and semantic relevance by 13.5\% compared with prior state-of-the-art methods. We also deploy MFLI in the system and report online experimental results demonstrating improved engagement, less popularity bias, and higher serving efficiency.

TextEditBench: Evaluating Reasoning-aware Text Editing Beyond Rendering

Text rendering has recently emerged as one of the most challenging frontiers in visual generation, drawing significant attention from large-scale diffusion and multimodal models. However, text editing within images remains largely unexplored, as it requires generating legible characters while preserving semantic, geometric, and contextual coherence. To fill this gap, we introduce TextEditBench, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark that explicitly focuses on text-centric regions in images. Beyond basic pixel manipulations, our benchmark emphasizes reasoning-intensive editing scenarios that require models to understand physical plausibility, linguistic meaning, and cross-modal dependencies. We further propose a novel evaluation dimension, Semantic Expectation (SE), which measures reasoning ability of model to maintain semantic consistency, contextual coherence, and cross-modal alignment during text editing. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art editing systems reveal that while current models can follow simple textual instructions, they still struggle with context-dependent reasoning, physical consistency, and layout-aware integration. By focusing evaluation on this long-overlooked yet fundamental capability, TextEditBench establishes a new testing ground for advancing text-guided image editing and reasoning in multimodal generation.

Cross-Sparsity-Enabled Multipath Perception via Structured Bayesian Inference for Multi-Target Estimation

In this paper, we investigate a multi-target sensing system in multipath environment, where inter-target scattering gives rise to first-order reflected paths whose angles of departure (AoDs) and angles of arrival (AoAs) coincide with the direct-path angles of different targets. Unlike other multipath components, these first-order paths carry structural information that can be exploited as additional prior knowledge for target direction estimation. To exploit this property, we construct a sparse representation of the multi-target sensing channel and propose a novel cross sparsity structure under a three-layer hierarchical structured (3LHS) prior model, which leverages the first-order paths to enhance the prior probability of the direct paths and thereby improve the estimation accuracy. Building on this model, we propose a structured fast turbo variational Bayesian inference (SF-TVBI) algorithm, which integrates an efficient message-passing strategy to enable tractable probabilistic exchange within the cross sparsity, and a two-timescale update scheme to reduce the update frequency of the high-dimensional sparse vector. Simulation results demonstrate that leveraging the proposed cross sparsity structure is able to improve the target angle estimation accuracy substantially, and the SF-TVBI algorithm achieves estimation performance comparable to that of the Turbo-VBI, but with lower computational complexity.

Skeletons Speak Louder than Text: A Motion-Aware Pretraining Paradigm for Video-Based Person Re-Identification

Multimodal pretraining has revolutionized visual understanding, but its impact on video-based person re-identification (ReID) remains underexplored. Existing approaches often rely on video-text pairs, yet suffer from two fundamental limitations: (1) lack of genuine multimodal pretraining, and (2) text poorly captures fine-grained temporal motion-an essential cue for distinguishing identities in video. In this work, we take a bold departure from text-based paradigms by introducing the first skeleton-driven pretraining framework for ReID. To achieve this, we propose Contrastive Skeleton-Image Pretraining for ReID (CSIP-ReID), a novel two-stage method that leverages skeleton sequences as a spatiotemporally informative modality aligned with video frames. In the first stage, we employ contrastive learning to align skeleton and visual features at sequence level. In the second stage, we introduce a dynamic Prototype Fusion Updater (PFU) to refine multimodal identity prototypes, fusing motion and appearance cues. Moreover, we propose a Skeleton Guided Temporal Modeling (SGTM) module that distills temporal cues from skeleton data and integrates them into visual features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CSIP-ReID achieves new state-of-the-art results on standard video ReID benchmarks (MARS, LS-VID, iLIDS-VID). Moreover, it exhibits strong generalization to skeleton-only ReID tasks (BIWI, IAS), significantly outperforming previous methods. CSIP-ReID pioneers an annotation-free and motion-aware pretraining paradigm for ReID, opening a new frontier in multimodal representation learning.