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Enabling humanoid robots to exploit physical contact, rather than simply avoid collisions, is crucial for autonomy in unstructured environments. Traditional optimization-based planners struggle with contact complexity, while on-policy…
In order to be widely applicable, speech-driven 3D head avatars must articulate their lips in accordance with speech, while also conveying the appropriate emotions with dynamically changing facial expressions. The key problem is that…
Humans and other intelligent animals evolved highly sophisticated perception systems that combine multiple sensory modalities. On the other hand, state-of-the-art artificial agents rely mostly on visual inputs or structured low-dimensional…
Humanoid robots promise general-purpose assistance, yet real-world humanoid loco-manipulation remains challenging because it requires whole-body stability, end-effector dexterity, and contact-aware interaction under frequent contact…
Imitation Learning is a promising paradigm for learning complex robot manipulation skills by reproducing behavior from human demonstrations. However, manipulation tasks often contain bottleneck regions that require a sequence of precise…
This paper extends recent work in interactive machine learning (IML) focused on effectively incorporating human feedback. We show how control and feedback signals complement each other in systems which model human reward. We demonstrate…
Recent advances in Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have made real-time, streaming spoken interaction increasingly practical. In this setting, reasoning quality and responsiveness are tightly coupled: delaying reasoning until the speech…
Medical consultations are intrinsically speech-centric. However, most prior works focus on long-text-based interactions, which are cumbersome and patient-unfriendly. Recent advances in speech language models (SpeechLMs) have enabled more…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has driven significant progress in robotics, but its complexity and long training times remain major bottlenecks. In this report, we introduce FastTD3, a simple, fast, and capable RL algorithm that significantly…
Smart assistants increasingly act proactively, yet mistimed or intrusive behavior often causes users to lose trust and disable these features. Learning user preferences for proactive assistance is difficult because real-world studies are…
This paper proposes a neural network-based user simulator that can provide a multimodal interactive environment for training Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in collaborative tasks involving multiple modes of communication. The simulator…
Visual navigation by mobile robots is classically tackled through SLAM plus optimal planning, and more recently through end-to-end training of policies implemented as deep networks. While the former are often limited to waypoint planning,…
Supporting real-time interactions between human controllers and remote devices remains a challenging goal in the Metaverse due to the stringent requirements on computing workload, communication throughput, and round-trip latency. In this…
Spoken conversational systems require more than accurate speech generation to have human-like conversations: to feel natural and engaging, they must produce conversational behaviour that adapts dynamically to the context. Current spoken…
Speech-to-speech models handle turn-taking naturally but offer limited support for tool-calling or complex reasoning, while production ASR-LLM-TTS voice pipelines offer these capabilities but rely on silence timeouts, which lead to…
Agentic AI assistants that autonomously perform multi-step tasks raise open questions for user experience: how should such systems communicate progress and reasoning during extended operations, especially in attention-critical contexts such…
Human social interactions depend on the ability to infer others' unspoken intentions, emotions, and beliefs-a cognitive skill grounded in the psychological concept of Theory of Mind (ToM). While large language models (LLMs) excel in…
Underlying mechanisms of speech perception masked by background speakers, a common daily listening condition, are often investigated using various and lengthy psychophysical tests. The presence of a social agent, such as an interactive…
When engaging in conversations, dialogue agents in a virtual simulation environment may exhibit their own emotional states that are unrelated to the immediate conversational context, a phenomenon known as self-emotion. This study explores…
Tool-calling agents are evaluated on tool selection, parameter accuracy, and scope recognition, yet LLM trajectory assessments remain inherently post-hoc. Disconnected from the active execution loop, such assessments identify errors that…