CM2: Multimodal Cultural Reasoning via an Integrated Multi-Agent Framework

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable success in STEM domains, where progress is often driven by vertical, step-by-step deduction under relatively stable symbol systems. Their horizontal, interdisciplinary cultural reasoning, however, remains underexplored.We propose CM2, a multi-agent framework grounded in the cognitive pathway of human cultural interpretation. CM2 integrates multimodal perception, retrieval-augmented generation, networked reasoning, gated fusion, and reward-driven feedback.Experiments on CM2D across multiple MLLM backbones show consistent gains over CoT and typical reasoning paradigms; ablations validate each module's contribution, and conflict analyses confirm genuine cross-modal arbitration.

Embedding Large Language Models into Flow Controls: An Agentic Framework for Adaptive and Trustworthy Automated Cooking

Automated cooking robots have traditionally relied on predefined procedures and rule-based control, ensuring stable execution but offering limited personalization, whereas recent large-model approaches support natural language interaction but often suffer from opaque decision making and unreliable execution in real kitchens. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an agentic framework that systematically decomposes personalized cooking requirements into structured and verifiable control programs rather than directly mapping language to actions. Multiple AI agents collaboratively transform user intents into canonical recipes, workflow programs with explicit flow control, and executable Python code grounded in an atomic action library. The system consists of three tightly coupled stages: offline recipe-to-code generation through multiple agents, online closed-loop execution with supervisory intervention enabled by multimodal perception, and post-run adaptation that updates user preference models for long-term personalization. Real-world experiments on a physical cooking platform demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves reliable task completion, transparent execution logic, and effective anomaly handling across diverse personalized scenarios, validating its practicality for trustworthy automated cooking in real environments.

CaM-Wolf: Causal-Aware Multimodal Agents for Social Deduction Games

Social deduction games (SDGs) such as Werewolf have become challenging testbeds for AI agents. These games require complex social skills such as reasoning, deception, and collaboration. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in SDG agents, current approaches are predominantly text-based, overlooking the multimodal nature that is fundamental to human social interaction. To bridge this gap, we introduce CaM-Wolf, the first SDG agent that integrates multimodal perception and generation. CaM-Wolf processes video inputs from other players, employs a causal-aware Reasoner trained via reinforcement learning to establish logical chains between observable behaviors and hidden roles, and presents itself through an animated avatar. Our experiments and user study show that CaM-Wolf achieves superior agent gameplay performance and enhances the quality of human-AI interaction. This work represents a significant advancement towards creating more human-like AI agents capable of participating in nuanced social dynamics. Our code is available at https://3dagentworld.github.io/avatar_wolf.

PRISM: Multimodal Terrain Mapping for Rover Navigation in Unstructured Environments

Robotic navigation in unstructured environments requires robust situational awareness to safely traverse hazards such as steep slopes and rocky terrain. To address this challenge, perception systems increasingly rely on multimodal sensor fusion. Specifically, integrating thermal imagery with standard optical and depth sensors enhances terrain differentiation, directly improving the reliability of mapping algorithms. This paper presents PRISM, a multimodal perception system for terrain mapping in unstructured settings. PRISM leverages a custom sensor suite to capture aligned RGB, depth, and thermal (RGB-D-T) imagery. At its core is OmniUnet, a novel vision transformer-based network specifically designed for multimodal semantic terrain segmentation. We validated the proposed system using two newly annotated datasets (BASEPROD and LAENTIEC) and demonstrate its real-world applicability through physical field experiments. Deployed on a resource-constrained embedded computer, PRISM efficiently generates traversability maps that directly enable autonomous navigation via a rover's Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) subsystem.

Weaving Light and Time: Unified Harmonic-Geometric Representation Learning for Dense RGB-Event Parsing

Fusing standard RGB frames with asynchronous event streams has emerged as a definitive paradigm for robust perception in degraded environments. Although unified backbones have recently gained traction in multi-modal vision, adapting them to the RGB-Event domain remains fundamentally challenging. Existing architectures either resort to decoupled dual encoders that double computational overhead, or adopt generic unified designs that fail to resolve implicit geometric parallax and cross-spectral aliasing under the extreme representational divide between dense intensity grids and sparse kinematic spikes. To transcend these bottlenecks, we present Evita, the first unified backbone specifically engineered for dedicated dense RGB-Event parsing. To achieve profound modal synergy, Evita explicitly embeds a suite of intrinsic co-learning modules directly into every encoder layer. Specifically, it features Geometric Parallax Rectification for adaptive spatial alignment, Harmonic Spectral Resonance for texture transfer exclusively in the complex frequency domain, and Transient Global Routing for event-driven asymmetric attention. To guarantee robust feature extraction against spatial misalignments and decouple representations from specific event encodings, we construct N-ImageNetV2 alongside a stochastic event representation mixing pretraining protocol, empowering the network to seamlessly accommodate arbitrary event formats in downstream tasks. Extensive evaluations across the DELIVER, DDD17, and DSEC benchmarks confirm that Evita establishes new state-of-the-art metrics while delivering a superior accuracy-latency trade-off for real-time multimodal perception.The code are publicly available at: https://github.com/chaineypung/Evita.

From Technical Metrics to User Perception: A User Study of a Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction System for Object Detection and Grasping

Improvements in the technical performance of human--robot interaction (HRI) systems do not automatically translate into differences that human users can detect during live interaction. This paper investigates whether a 15 percentage point gain in end-to-end task success (from 75% in a multimodal baseline system to 90% in an improved configuration identified through a prior ablation study) is sufficient to produce consistent and measurable differences in user perception. The baseline system combines Whisper for speech recognition, Florence-2 for open-vocabulary object detection, LLaMA 3.1 for action extraction, and an interval Type-2 fuzzy logic controller for motion execution. The improved configuration replaces the perception and language modules with Grounding DINO + SAM and Qwen 3.5 9B, respectively, while retaining the same controller. A within-subject user study with 24 participants compared both systems on the same tabletop object-grasping task. After interacting with each configuration, participants rated perceived speed, reliability, and overall competence and fluency on a 7-point Likert scale. Results show that 17 out of 24 participants (70.83%) preferred the improved system (exact binomial test, p = 0.043, h = 0.43), and all three perceptual constructs were rated significantly higher for the improved configuration after Holm correction, with large to very large effect sizes (p < 0.001). These findings confirm that the identified technical improvements are perceptible to users in direct interaction and underscore the importance of complementing benchmark evaluation with user-centred evidence when assessing robotic manipulation pipelines.

OctoSense: Self-Supervised Learning for Multimodal Robot Perception

We present OctoSense, an open-source sensor platform with stereo RGB and event cameras, LiDAR, a thermal camera, an inertial measurement unit, RTK-corrected global positioning system, and proprioception (CAN bus data from a car, and joint angles for a quadruped robot). The eponymous OctoSense dataset contains 59 hours of time-synchronized driving data across different types of environments at different times of the day, including situations with highly degraded sensors. We demonstrate multi-modal self-supervised learning using such real-world robotics data, where sensors have different representations, frequencies, latencies and noise. Our approach, a "late-fusion" masked autoencoder, (i) uses modality-specific tokenizers to account for different spatiotemporal characteristics of these sensors, and (ii) caches modality-specific tokens at inference time to process new measurements as they come. This architecture (i) is fast (6.68 ms and 112 ms on NVIDIA 5090 and Orin NX respectively, to compute the representation), (ii) performs better than existing image-only foundation models on tasks such as estimation of optical flow, depth, semantic segmentation, and ego-motion (translation, rotation, and steering angle), and (iii) predicts robustly at nighttime or in situations where sensory data is degraded. See our project page for links to the dataset, code, and supplementary videos: https://abisulco.com/octosense/.

Resonant Minds: Closed-Loop Social Avatars with Theory of Mind

Creating lifelike digital humans with genuine social intelligence requires unifying cognitive reasoning and multimodal generation within a coherent framework. Current approaches treat these as separate tasks: Large Language Models excel at dialogue but lack embodied expression, while diffusion-based talking head models achieve visual fidelity but ignore social cognition. To bridge this gap, we propose a closed-loop dual-agent framework integrating perception, social reasoning, and expression into a continuous interaction cycle. The perception module analyzes partners' multimodal behaviors from video, while the social reasoning module infers hidden mental states through Theory of Mind and selects responses via an ensemble mechanism. The expression module then generates emotion-controllable videos that jointly synthesize speaker speech and facial expressions with listener reactive behaviors, capturing bidirectional dynamics absent in prior work. We further construct a hierarchical Persona-Scenario dataset with psychologically grounded personas and private social goals to support evaluation under information asymmetry. Experiments on this dataset demonstrate competitive or superior performance on both dialogue quality and video generation metrics. Notably, our method surpasses even the full-information Script mode on key dialogue quality dimensions, suggesting that explicit mental state inference under uncertainty can elicit more thoughtful dialogue than unrestricted information access. Project page: https://resonantminds.github.io/.