Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising energy-efficient alternative to artificial neural networks, due to their event-driven spiking computation. However, some foundation SNN backbones (including Spikformer and SEW ResNet) suffer from non-spike computations (integer-float multiplications) caused by the structure of their residual connections. These non-spike computations increase SNNs' power consumption and make them unsuitable for deployment on mainstream neuromorphic hardware. In this paper, we analyze the spike-driven behavior of the residual connection methods in SNNs. We then present Spikingformer, a novel spiking transformer backbone that merges the MS Residual connection with Self-Attention in a biologically plausible way to address the non-spike computation challenge in Spikformer while maintaining global modeling capabilities. We evaluate Spikingformer across 13 datasets spanning large static images, neuromorphic data, and natural language tasks, and demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of Spikingformer, setting a vital benchmark for spiking neural networks. In addition, with the spike-driven features and global modeling capabilities, Spikingformer is expected to become a more efficient general-purpose SNN backbone towards energy-efficient artificial intelligence.

The Ava-MERG Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2025 explores avatar-based multimodal empathetic response generation by advancing dialogue systems that respond with emotional awareness across text, speech, and talking-face video. To support this goal, we constructed a high-quality dataset featuring aligned multimodal responses in diverse conversational scenarios. The challenge comprises two progressively complex subtasks centering around multimodal-aware empathetic response generation. We aim to promote research in empathetic AI and affective computing.

Auditory attention detection (AAD) aims to decode listeners' focus in complex auditory environments from electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, which is crucial for developing neuro-steered hearing devices. Despite recent advancements, EEG-based AAD remains hindered by the absence of synergistic frameworks that can fully leverage complementary EEG features under energy-efficiency constraints. We propose ***S$^2$M-Former***, a novel ***s***piking ***s***ymmetric ***m***ixing framework to address this limitation through two key innovations: i) Presenting a spike-driven symmetric architecture composed of parallel spatial and frequency branches with mirrored modular design, leveraging biologically plausible token-channel mixers to enhance complementary learning across branches; ii) Introducing lightweight 1D token sequences to replace conventional 3D operations, reducing parameters by 14.7$\times$. The brain-inspired spiking architecture further reduces power consumption, achieving a 5.8$\times$ energy reduction compared to recent ANN methods, while also surpassing existing SNN baselines in terms of parameter efficiency and performance. Comprehensive experiments on three AAD benchmarks (KUL, DTU and AV-GC-AAD) across three settings (within-trial, cross-trial and cross-subject) demonstrate that S$^2$M-Former achieves comparable state-of-the-art (SOTA) decoding accuracy, making it a promising low-power, high-performance solution for AAD tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/JackieWang9811/S2M-Former.

Empathetic Response Generation (ERG) is one of the key tasks of the affective computing area, which aims to produce emotionally nuanced and compassionate responses to user's queries. However, existing ERG research is predominantly confined to the singleton text modality, limiting its effectiveness since human emotions are inherently conveyed through multiple modalities. To combat this, we introduce an avatar-based Multimodal ERG (MERG) task, entailing rich text, speech, and facial vision information. We first present a large-scale high-quality benchmark dataset, AvaMERG, which extends traditional text ERG by incorporating authentic human speech audio and dynamic talking-face avatar videos, encompassing a diverse range of avatar profiles and broadly covering various topics of real-world scenarios. Further, we deliberately tailor a system, named Empatheia, for MERG. Built upon a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with multimodal encoder, speech and avatar generators, Empatheia performs end-to-end MERG, with Chain-of-Empathetic reasoning mechanism integrated for enhanced empathy understanding and reasoning.Finally, we devise a list of empathetic-enhanced tuning strategies, strengthening the capabilities of emotional accuracy and content, avatar-profile consistency across modalities. Experimental results on AvaMERG data demonstrate that Empatheia consistently shows superior performance than baseline methods on both textual ERG and MERG. All data and code are open at https://AvaMERG.github.io/.

Spiking Transformers, which integrate Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with Transformer architectures, have attracted significant attention due to their potential for low energy consumption and high performance. However, there remains a substantial gap in performance between SNNs and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). To narrow this gap, we have developed QKFormer, a direct training spiking transformer with the following features: i) _Linear complexity and high energy efficiency_, the novel spike-form Q-K attention module efficiently models the token or channel attention through binary vectors and enables the construction of larger models. ii) _Multi-scale spiking representation_, achieved by a hierarchical structure with the different numbers of tokens across blocks. iii) _Spiking Patch Embedding with Deformed Shortcut (SPEDS)_, enhances spiking information transmission and integration, thus improving overall performance. It is shown that QKFormer achieves significantly superior performance over existing state-of-the-art SNN models on various mainstream datasets. Notably, with comparable size to Spikformer (66.34 M, 74.81\%), QKFormer (64.96 M) achieves a groundbreaking top-1 accuracy of **85.65\%** on ImageNet-1k, substantially outperforming Spikformer by **10.84\%**. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that directly training SNNs have exceeded 85\% accuracy on ImageNet-1K.

Classification of electroencephalogram-based motor imagery (MI-EEG) tasks is crucial in brain computer interfaces (BCI). In view of the characteristics of non-stationarity, time-variability and individual diversity of EEG signals, a novel framework based on graph neural network is proposed for MI-EEG classification. First, an adaptive graph convolutional layer (AGCL) is constructed, by which the electrode channel information are integrated dynamically. We further propose an adaptive spatiotemporal graph convolutional network (ASTGCN), which fully exploits the characteristics of EEG signals in time domain and the channel correlations in spatial domain simultaneously. We execute the experiments using EEG signals recorded at motor imagery scenarios, where twenty-five healthy subjects performed MI movements of the right hand and feet to generate motor commands. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both classification quality and robustness. The advantages of ASTGCN include high accuracy, high efficiency, and robustness to cross-trial and cross-subject variations, making it an ideal candidate for long-term MI-EEG applications.

Classification of electroencephalogram-based motor imagery (MI-EEG) tasks raises a big challenge in the design and development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). In view of the characteristics of nonstationarity, time-variability, and individual diversity of EEG signals, a deep learning framework termed SSD-SE-convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed for MI-EEG classification. The framework consists of three parts: 1) the sparse spectrotemporal decomposition (SSD) algorithm is proposed for feature extraction, overcoming the drawbacks of conventional time-frequency analysis methods and enhancing the robustness to noise; 2) a CNN is constructed to fully exploit the time-frequency features, thus outperforming traditional classification methods both in terms of accuracy and kappa value; and 3) the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) blocks are adopted to adaptively recalibrate channelwise feature responses, which further improves the overall performance and offers a compelling classification solution for MI-EEG applications. Experimental results on two datasets reveal that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both classification quality and robustness. The advantages of SSD-SE-CNN include high accuracy, high efficiency, and robustness to cross-trial and cross-session variations, making it an ideal candidate for long-term MI-EEG applications.