Mental manipulation severely undermines mental wellness by covertly and negatively distorting decision-making. While there is an increasing interest in mental health care within the natural language processing community, progress in tackling manipulation remains limited due to the complexity of detecting subtle, covert tactics in conversations. In this paper, we propose Intent-Aware Prompting (IAP), a novel approach for detecting mental manipulations using large language models (LLMs), providing a deeper understanding of manipulative tactics by capturing the underlying intents of participants. Experimental results on the MentalManip dataset demonstrate superior effectiveness of IAP against other advanced prompting strategies. Notably, our approach substantially reduces false negatives, helping detect more instances of mental manipulation with minimal misjudgment of positive cases. The code of this paper is available at https://github.com/Anton-Jiayuan-MA/Manip-IAP.

Object functionality refers to the quality of an object that allows humans to perform some specific actions. It has been shown in psychology that functionality (affordance) is at least as essential as appearance in object recognition by humans. In computer vision, most previous work on functionality either assumes exactly one functionality for each object, or requires detailed annotation of human poses and objects. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised approach to discover all possible object functionalities. Each object functionality is represented by a specific type of human-object interaction. Our method takes any possible human-object interaction into consideration, and evaluates image similarity in 3D rather than 2D in order to cluster human-object interactions more coherently. Experimental results on a dataset of people interacting with musical instruments show the effectiveness of our approach.