Video understanding requires intelligent agents to transcend mere recognition of visual facts and comprehend the underlying intents behind human actions-often termed the "dark matter" of social intelligence. To bridge the gap between visual observation and intent reasoning, we introduce a novel task, IntentQA, and contribute a large-scale VideoQA dataset specifically tailored for this purpose. However, recognizing that standard metrics may overestimate capabilities due to dataset biases, we go beyond simple accuracy to rigorously evaluate model robustness. We augment the benchmark by generating five distinct contrast sets via Large Language Models (LLMs) and introducing a "Contrast Performance Decline" metric. We propose the X-CaVIR(eXplainable Context-aware Video Intent Reasoning) framework, which leverages three types of "Cognitive Context" to enhance video analysis: i) Situational Context via a cross-modal Video Query Language (VQL) module, ii) Contrastive Context via a Contrastive Learning module, and iii) Commonsense Context via a Commonsense Reasoning module. Crucially, to overcome the lack of transparency in traditional models, we refine the integration of LLMs within X-CaVIR by employing a transparent pipeline that synergizes video captions with VQA model outputs. This approach not only improves performance by effectively utilizing rich commonsense knowledge but also renders the reasoning process explicitly interpretable. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our components, the superiority of X-CaVIR over state-of-the-art baselines, and its stability against perturbations on the contrast sets.

Despite the significant demand for assistive technology among vulnerable groups (e.g., the elderly, children, and the disabled) in daily tasks, research into advanced AI-driven assistive solutions that genuinely accommodate their diverse needs remains sparse. Traditional human-machine interaction tasks often require machines to simply help with-out nuanced consideration of human abilities and feelings, such as their opportunity for practice and learning, sense of self-improvement, and self-esteem. Addressing this gap, we define a pivotal and novel challenge Smart Help, which aims to provide proactive yet adaptive support to human agents with diverse disabilities and dynamic goals in vari-ous tasks and environments. To establish this challenge, we leverage AI2-THOR [32] to build a new interactive 3D real-istic household environment for the Smart Help task. We in-troduce an innovative opponent modeling module that pro-vides a nuanced understanding of the main agent's capa-bilities and goals, in order to optimize the assisting agent's helping policy. Rigorous experiments validate the efficacy of our model components and show the superiority of our holistic approach against established baselines. Our findings illustrate the potential of AI-imbued assistive robots in improving the well-being of vulnerable groups.

Visual planning simulates how humans make decisions to achieve desired goals in the form of searching for visual causal transitions between an initial visual state and a final visual goal state. It has become increasingly important in egocentric vision with its advantages in guiding agents to perform daily tasks in complex environments. In this paper, we propose an interpretable and generalizable visual planning framework consisting of i) a novel Substitution-based Concept Learner (SCL) that abstracts visual inputs into disentangled concept representations, ii) symbol abstraction and reasoning that performs task planning via the learned symbols, and iii) a Visual Causal Transition model (ViCT) that grounds visual causal transitions to semantically similar real-world actions. Given an initial state, we perform goal-conditioned visual planning with a symbolic reasoning method fueled by the learned representations and causal transitions to reach the goal state. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, we collect a large-scale visual planning dataset based on AI2-THOR, dubbed as CCTP. Extensive experiments on this challenging dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our method in visual planning. Empirically, we show that our framework can generalize to unseen task trajectories, unseen object categories, and real-world data. Further details of this work are provided at https://fqyqc.github.io/ConTranPlan/.

In this paper, we propose a novel task IntentQA, a special VideoQA task focusing on video intent reasoning, which has become increasingly important for AI with its advantages in equipping AI agents with the capability of reasoning beyond mere recognition in daily tasks. We also contribute a large-scale VideoQA dataset for this task. We propose a Context-aware Video Intent Reasoning model (CaVIR) consisting of i) Video Query Language (VQL) for better cross-modal representation of the situational context, ii) Contrastive Learning module for utilizing the contrastive context, and iii) Commonsense Reasoning module for incorporating the commonsense context. Comprehensive experiments on this challenging task demonstrate the effectiveness of each model component, the superiority of our full model over other baselines, and the generalizability of our model to a new VideoQA task. The dataset and codes are open-sourced at: https://github.com/JoseponLee/IntentQA.git.

Humans communicate with graphical sketches apart from symbolic languages. Primarily focusing on the latter, recent studies of emergent communication overlook the sketches; they do not account for the evolution process through which symbolic sign systems emerge in the trade-off between iconicity and symbolicity. In this work, we take the very first step to model and simulate this process via two neural agents playing a visual communication game; the sender communicates with the receiver by sketching on a canvas. We devise a novel reinforcement learning method such that agents are evolved jointly towards successful communication and abstract graphical conventions. To inspect the emerged conventions, we define three key properties -- iconicity, symbolicity, and semanticity -- and design evaluation methods accordingly. Our experimental results under different controls are consistent with the observation in studies of human graphical conventions. Of note, we find that evolved sketches can preserve the continuum of semantics under proper environmental pressures. More interestingly, co-evolved agents can switch between conventionalized and iconic communication based on their familiarity with referents. We hope the present research can pave the path for studying emergent communication with the modality of sketches.

Humans possess a unique social cognition capability [43], [20]; nonverbal communication can convey rich social information among agents. In contrast, such crucial social characteristics are mostly missing in the existing scene understanding literature. In this paper, we incorporate different nonverbal communication cues (e.g., gaze, human poses, and gestures) to represent, model, learn, and infer agents’ mental states from pure visual inputs. Crucially, such a mental representation takes the agent’s belief into account so that it represents what the true world state is and infers the beliefs in each agent’s mental state, which may differ from the true world states. By aggregating different beliefs and true world states, our model essentially forms "five minds" during the interactions between two agents. This "five minds" model differs from prior works that infer beliefs in an infinite recursion; instead, agents’ beliefs are converged into a "common mind" [31], [47]. Based on this representation, we further devise a hierarchical energy-based model that jointly tracks and predicts all five minds. From this new perspective, a social event is interpreted by a series of nonverbal communication and belief dynamics, which transcends the classic keyframe video summary. In the experiments, we demonstrate that using such a social account provides a better video summary on videos with rich social interactions compared with state-of-the-art keyframe video summary methods.

Aiming to understand how human (false-)belief- a core socio-cognitive ability-would affect human interactions with robots, this paper proposes to adopt a graphical model to unify the representation of object states, robot knowledge, and human (false-)beliefs. Specifically, a parse graph (pg) is learned from a single-view spatiotemporal parsing by aggregating various object states along the time; such a learned representation is accumulated as the robot's knowledge. An inference algorithm is derived to fuse individual pg from all robots across multi-views into a joint pg, which affords more effective reasoning and inference capability to overcome the errors originated from a single view. In the experiments, through the joint inference over pgs, the system correctly recognizes human (false-)belief in various settings and achieves better cross-view accuracy on a challenging small object tracking dataset.

This paper addresses a new problem of understanding human gaze communication in social videos from both atomic-level and event-level, which is significant for studying human social interactions. To tackle this novel and challenging problem, we contribute a large-scale video dataset, VACATION, which covers diverse daily social scenes and gaze communication behaviors with complete annotations of objects and human faces, human attention, and communication structures and labels in both atomic-level and event-level. Together with VACATION, we propose a spatio-temporal graph neural network to explicitly represent the diverse gaze interactions in the social scenes and to infer atomic-level gaze communication by message passing. We further propose an event network with encoder-decoder structure to predict the event-level gaze communication. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model improves various baselines significantly in predicting the atomic-level and event-level gaze communications.

This paper addresses a new problem of inferring shared attention in third-person social scene videos. Shared attention is a phenomenon that two or more individuals simultaneously look at a common target in social scenes. Perceiving and identifying shared attention in videos plays crucial roles in social activities and social scene understanding. We propose a spatial-temporal neural network to detect shared attention intervals in videos and predict shared attention locations in frames. In each video frame, human gaze directions and potential target boxes are two key features for spatially detecting shared attention in the social scene. In temporal domain, a convolutional Long Short-Term Memory network utilizes the temporal continuity and transition constraints to optimize the predicted shared attention heatmap. We collect a new dataset VideoCoAtt1 from public TV show videos, containing 380 complex video sequences with more than 492,000 frames that include diverse social scenes for shared attention study. Experiments on this dataset show that our model can effectively infer shared attention in videos. We also empirically verify the effectiveness of different components in our model.