docs: generalize manuscript across omni backbones

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Xin Wang
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@@ -28,3 +28,29 @@ main/
The author/affiliation, final results, Method, Experimental Setup, Results and
Conclusion are still explicit TODOs. Do not turn planned experiments into
reported findings.
The current paper thesis is model-agnostic and deliberately narrower than
addressee prediction. It asks whether general-purpose omni representations
expose the fine-grained evidence needed for 200 ms wearer floor-action
projection, whether PEFT can recover it, and whether causal local audio/person
evidence provides a reliable complement. The initial planned backbone set is:
- Qwen2.5-Omni-3B;
- Qwen2.5-Omni-7B;
- MiniCPM-o 4.5.
The backbone and final fusion method are **not frozen yet**. Current Qwen-3B
numbers are exploratory motivation, not evidence that every omni model has the
same limitation. Compare frozen, PEFT, and local-evidence protocols within each
backbone; report common local encoders separately from model-native local
encoders. Raw cross-model scores are secondary because the models expose
different streaming/readout interfaces.
Track-consistent person fusion remains one candidate after pooled and
capacity-matched controls. If selected, dataset participant IDs route
short-term causal state only; they are not semantic inputs. The publication
gate is an event-level reduction in multi-other false entries at matched
wearer-onset recall without degrading onset latency or wearer-yield behavior.
A general omni claim requires a consistent result across at least two backbone
families; otherwise the paper must state a model-specific finding. Selected
examples are explanatory evidence only.

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@@ -4,138 +4,157 @@ This is an internal execution checklist. It is not part of the submitted PDF.
## Reviewer verdict on the current draft
The research question is potentially publishable: **at matched wearer-response
recall, can correctly aligned person-level vision reduce false wearer entries
during third-party conversation without degrading legitimate wearer responses?**
The potentially publishable question is now model-agnostic: **do
general-purpose omni representations expose the fine-grained evidence needed
for 200 ms egocentric floor action, and can causal local evidence reduce false
wearer entries at matched onset recall when frozen readout or PEFT is
insufficient?**
The contribution is not “the first audio-visual multiparty turn model.” VAP,
EgoSpeak, SICNet, and MuVAP already occupy adjacent territory. The defensible
gap is continuous, causal floor-entry projection for an **invisible camera
wearer**, conditioned on addressee evidence from a variable participant set.
gap is continuous, causal floor-action projection for an invisible camera
wearer, combined with a controlled diagnosis of global omni states and a
behavior-aligned multi-other event protocol.
The current aggregate result (G+A+pooled-V minus G+A: +0.30 points at 0.2 s,
+0.29 mean mAP, one seed) motivates the question but does not establish social
grounding. Acceptance depends on the event protocol and identity controls.
Current Qwen2.5-Omni-3B results are exploratory motivation only. They neither
prove a limitation shared by omni models nor establish track-consistent fusion
as the final method. The planned initial backbone set is Qwen2.5-Omni-3B,
Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and MiniCPM-o 4.5.
## P0 — Freeze the task before training a new model
## P0 — Freeze the task before the backbone sweep
- [ ] Define the exact 5 Hz causal cutoff and physical target interval for each
of the ten 0.2 s horizons.
- [ ] Freeze addressed-response and third-party event definitions.
- [ ] Add competing-risk rules: an addressed response ends at the first wearer
onset, unrelated-other onset, timeout, or invalid annotation boundary.
- [ ] Freeze wearer-onset/yield and multi-other exchange definitions.
- [ ] Add competing-risk rules: a candidate event ends at the first matched
wearer action, incompatible floor change, timeout, or invalid source boundary.
- [ ] Specify overlap, minimum silence, maximum response delay, duplicate
detections, clip boundaries, group/none/multiple/unknown targets, and
offscreen speakers.
detections, source discontinuities, track visibility, offscreen speakers,
and whether target-of-speech strata are diagnostic only.
- [ ] Produce train/test event-count tables, duration, class prevalence, and
visibility coverage before examining model scores.
- [ ] Mark all already viewed Sessions 1–3 results as exploratory. From this
point forward, lock the event protocol and select thresholds, checkpoints,
and all hyperparameters using a training-side fold or cross-fitting over
Sessions 4–12. Run the fixed final model on Sessions 1–3 only after that
lock; do not describe the historically viewed split as untouched.
- [ ] Mark all already viewed Sessions 1–3 results as exploratory. Lock the
protocol and select thresholds, checkpoints, and hyperparameters using a
training-side fold or cross-fitting over Sessions 4–12.
**Gate:** two independent code paths or a manual sample audit must agree on at
least 100 randomly selected events. Do not start the main model sweep before
this gate passes.
least 100 randomly selected events. Publish the number of unique other IDs and
multi-other opportunity minutes before the main sweep.
## P1 — Establish matched baselines
## P1 — Audit each backbone interface
Run three seeds with identical optimizer, history, parameter budget, and event
evaluator:
For Qwen2.5-Omni-3B, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and MiniCPM-o 4.5, record:
1. G: frozen streaming omni state.
2. G+A: global state plus recent audio.
3. G+A+V-pool: the current pooled visual baseline.
4. Temporal control: G+A plus a parameter-matched non-person temporal branch.
- [ ] exact model/code revision, processor, dtype, and hardware;
- [ ] native audio/video sampling and streaming/chunk semantics;
- [ ] exact causal hidden-state readout and dimensionality;
- [ ] context limit, cache/reset behavior, and source-boundary handling;
- [ ] a cutoff/impulse test proving no future frame or sample enters the state;
- [ ] P50/P95 latency, throughput, and peak memory.
Report original ten-horizon AP/mAP and the event metrics. Confirm that changing
batching, cached features, or track padding does not change baseline outputs.
Do not force an offline or future-conditioned feature into the common table. If
a model cannot expose a comparable causal state, report that protocol as
unsupported. Raw scores are not a pure architecture ranking; emphasize
within-backbone deltas.
**Gate:** baseline standard deviations are known, and the event evaluator
reproduces identical scores from saved predictions.
## P2 — Establish the compact representation matrix
## P2 — Implement the minimum person-set model
Run three seeds per supported backbone with the same data, physical cutoffs,
target, prediction-head capacity, optimizer exposure, and evaluator:
- [ ] Shared temporal encoder for every face track.
- [ ] Each person representation cross-attends to the same recent mixed-audio
token sequence; no separated/close-mic audio at inference.
- [ ] Masked permutation-equivariant set encoder.
- [ ] Learned OFFSCREEN/NULL element.
- [ ] Fixed floor/address/third-party role queries.
- [ ] Zero-initialized gated residual into the frozen global state.
- [ ] Unit tests for variable `N`, empty visible set, missing frames, track-slot
permutation, padding invariance, and strict causal cutoff.
1. Frozen global causal state.
2. Pre-registered PEFT/LoRA budget.
3. Global state plus recent local audio.
4. Global state plus pooled local audio and vision.
**Gate:** with residual gate zero, logits are numerically identical to G+A; a
random permutation of track slots leaves logits unchanged.
Use a common local encoder as the primary cross-backbone control. If native
local encoders are tested, report them in a separate within-model panel. Do not
mix common-encoder and native-encoder deltas in one claim.
## P3 — Train only the ablations that answer the claim
**Gate:** baseline standard deviations are known; the evaluator reproduces
identical scores from saved predictions; parameter counts and training budgets
are reported. A single failed LoRA recipe is evidence about that recipe, not
proof that the model cannot adapt.
Use the same three seeds:
## P3 — Select local fusion only after P2
1. WearerSet with activity loss only.
2. WearerSet + per-person active-speaker auxiliary loss.
3. WearerSet + active-speaker + pure-target addressee auxiliary loss.
If local evidence gives a reliable event-level gain, compare candidates in
increasing complexity:
Mask group/unknown/offscreen target annotations from addressee loss. They may
remain in the activity loss. Do not use LLM pseudo-labels as primary gold.
1. Pooled local audio/vision.
2. Parameter-matched temporal branch.
3. Per-frame person set with no cross-time identity.
4. Shared track-wise temporal encoder.
5. Person–audio cross-attention.
6. Optional per-person active-speaker auxiliary loss, only after selecting a
person-aware activity-only model.
Stop after these stages unless a clear event-level gain appears. Broad Thinker
LoRA, 7B, and ROMA experiments are diagnostics, not the core method, because
the existing runs show negative transfer or no consistent 0.2 s benefit.
Keep the dense EgoSpeak wearer/others target as the primary task. Target of
speech is analysis-only and never model input. Describe only the train-side
winner as the final method; move rejected candidates to ablations.
## P4 — Run causal visual counterfactuals
For a track-aware candidate, temporary IDs route hidden state only: no ID
embedding, cross-recording identity, or fixed seating slot. Unit-test variable
person count, empty sets, padding, slot permutation, global ID renaming,
source/gap resets, and strict causal cutoffs.
For the frozen best checkpoint, evaluate:
## P4 — Run visual counterfactuals conditionally
Only if a track-aware candidate is selected, evaluate one frozen checkpoint
with:
- correct person tracks;
- wrong-person tracks from the same scene;
- clip-consistent global renaming, which must be invariant;
- deliberately broken cross-time identity with unchanged per-frame crops;
- time-shifted tracks with unchanged audio;
- removed/zero visual features;
- removed visual features;
- fixed-rate ID switch, box dropout, and fragmentation;
- visibility-conditioned subsets.
All controls must reuse the same model weights. Retraining each control would
mix representation and optimization effects.
The separately trained no-ID model belongs in the main ablation table. Do not
retrain test-time counterfactuals.
**Acceptance gate:** at matched addressed-response recall, correct vision must
reduce third-party false entries more than wrong/time-shifted/removed vision,
without worse response latency or wearer-yield recall. Aggregate mAP alone is
not sufficient.
## P5 — Statistics and evidence
## P5 — Statistics and analysis
- [ ] Three seeds, mean ± sample standard deviation.
- [ ] Paired cluster bootstrap by session/conversation block for 95% intervals.
- [ ] Operating points at wearer-onset recall 0.7, 0.8, and 0.9; headline 0.8.
- [ ] False wearer entries per multi-other opportunity minute, onset latency,
wearer-yield recall/latency, and original ten-horizon AP/mAP.
- [ ] Error strata: backbone, visibility, number of visible people, overlap,
offscreen activity, track age/fragmentation, and transition proxy.
- [ ] Ego4D AVD coverage audit on the exact EgoSpeak split before claiming the
same multi-other analysis.
- [ ] Provided-track and online-tracker conditions named separately.
- [ ] Three training seeds, mean ± sample standard deviation.
- [ ] Paired cluster bootstrap by session/conversation block for 95% confidence
intervals; do not bootstrap adjacent 5 Hz frames independently.
- [ ] Operating points at addressed recall 0.7, 0.8, and 0.9; headline at 0.8.
- [ ] Error strata: target visibility, number of visible people, overlap,
backchannel/interruption proxy, and offscreen target.
- [ ] P50/P95 decision latency, throughput, peak GPU memory, and trainable
parameters.
- [ ] Ego4D only as secondary aggregate activity generalization; it cannot
validate addressee grounding without comparable target labels.
Qualitative cases follow a frozen selection rule and include the largest paired
improvement, a median case, a failure, and one preserved true wearer onset.
Examples explain rates; they never replace them.
## Paper assembly order
1. Finalize the event protocol and insert counts in Experimental Setup.
2. Produce the main matched-recall table before polishing prose.
3. Produce the correct/wrong/time-shift/remove counterfactual table.
4. Draw one compact method figure with causal cutoffs and the variable set.
5. Collapse the preliminary aggregate table into the final main table if page
pressure is high.
6. Add one short failure analysis, not a catalog of all earlier experiments.
7. Replace the abstract and conclusion TODOs with exact numbers and confidence
intervals.
8. Remove every visible `\todo{}` marker and verify the official ICASSP 2027
template/page limit once released.
1. Freeze and audit the event protocol.
2. Implement and causally audit all backbone readouts.
3. Complete the compact frozen/PEFT/local matrix.
4. Decide whether the paper can support a cross-family or only model-specific
representation claim.
5. Select a local fusion candidate using training-side event metrics.
6. Run conditional visual/track counterfactuals.
7. Produce the cross-backbone event table and paired intervals.
8. Draw one compact final system figure; remove rejected methods from the main
narrative.
9. Replace every visible TODO and verify the ICASSP 2027 kit/page limit.
## Stop/go decision
## Stop/go decisions
- **Go:** correct person-level vision provides a statistically credible
event-level advantage over G+A, pooled-V, temporal capacity control, and
wrong/time-shifted vision.
- **Reframe:** all visual variants improve similarly. Claim better local
temporal context, not addressee grounding.
- **Stop this method:** aggregate mAP rises but third-party false entries do
not fall at matched recall, or legitimate response latency/recall degrades.
- **General claim:** at least two backbone families show the same frozen/PEFT
weakness and a reliable local-evidence improvement.
- **Model-specific claim:** the effect appears only within Qwen; say so and do
not generalize to all omni models.
- **Audio-local reframe:** local audio improves but all visual variants fail;
claim a fine-grained acoustic readout bottleneck, not social visual reasoning.
- **Track-aware method:** correct continuity beats pooled vision, temporal
capacity, no-ID/reset, broken continuity, and time-shifted controls at matched
recall without worse onset/yield behavior.
- **Stop the adapter:** aggregate mAP rises but multi-other false entries do not
fall, or legitimate onset/yield behavior degrades.

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@@ -7,11 +7,11 @@
\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb,graphicx,hyperref,xcolor}
\newcommand{\todo}[1]{\textcolor{red}{\textbf{[TODO: #1]}}}
\newcommand{\method}{WearerSet}
\newcommand{\vect}[1]{\boldsymbol{#1}}
\setlength{\emergencystretch}{2em}
\title{NOT EVERY OPEN FLOOR IS MINE: ADDRESSEE-CONDITIONED FLOOR-ENTRY
PROJECTION IN EGOCENTRIC MULTIPARTY CONVERSATION}
\title{WHEN SHOULD AN EGOCENTRIC AGENT SPEAK? DIAGNOSING AND ADAPTING
OMNI REPRESENTATIONS FOR MULTIPARTY FLOOR ACTION}
% TODO: Insert the final author list and affiliations after the ICASSP 2027
% review policy and author order are finalized.
@@ -23,55 +23,59 @@ PROJECTION IN EGOCENTRIC MULTIPARTY CONVERSATION}
\maketitle
\begin{abstract}
An egocentric conversational agent must decide not only when a speaking
opportunity arises, but also whether that opportunity belongs to it. Existing
speech-activity projection collapses all non-wearer speakers, allowing strong
frame-level accuracy to coexist with intrusive entries during conversations
between bystanders. We formulate addressee-conditioned floor-entry projection:
dense causal forecasts of wearer and non-wearer activity at 200-ms resolution,
conditioned on a variable-cardinality set of visible participants. Our model
augments a frozen streaming omni-model with person-aligned audio--visual
representations and permutation-invariant role queries for floor state,
wearer address, and third-party interaction. We further introduce an EasyCom
event protocol that separates addressed-to-wearer responses from third-party
exchanges and reports false entries at matched response recall and decision
latency. Correct-, wrong-person, time-shifted, and removed-video controls test
whether a gain follows social grounding rather than model capacity.
\todo{Replace this sentence with the main result: FP/min reduction at 80\%
response recall, response latency/recall non-degradation, and 95\% confidence
interval.}
Before generating a response, an egocentric conversational agent must decide
whether to speak or keep listening in a scene that may contain several other
people. General-purpose omni models offer broad streaming audio--visual
context, but it is unclear whether their global representations expose the
fine-grained local cues required for a decision every 200~ms. We study this
question across representative omni backbones and adaptation regimes: frozen
global readout, parameter-efficient tuning, and causal augmentation with
recent audio and visible-person histories. The human camera wearer serves as a
behavioral proxy for the agent, while the dense EgoSpeak target remains the
common output. An EasyCom event protocol reports false wearer entries during
multi-other exchanges at matched wearer-onset recall, and track/alignment
controls test whether visual gains follow person continuity rather than added
capacity. Exploratory Qwen2.5-Omni-3B results motivate the study but do not yet
establish a limitation shared by omni models or determine the final adapter.
\todo{After the train-side study is locked, name the selected backbones and
adapter and insert: frozen/PEFT/local deltas, multi-other false-entry reduction
at 80\% onset recall, onset/yield non-degradation, and 95\% intervals.}
\end{abstract}
\begin{keywords}
turn-taking, speech initiation, addressee detection, egocentric video,
audio-visual learning
turn-taking, speech initiation, egocentric video, omni models,
audio-visual adaptation
\end{keywords}
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}
Conversational agents must continuously decide whether to speak or keep
listening. In a dyadic exchange, a pause or an apparent end of turn is often
treated as an invitation to respond. This assumption fails in multiparty
interaction: one participant may finish an utterance addressed to another
participant, and an egocentric agent that reacts only to acoustic availability
will enter a floor that was never offered to it. Such an error is socially more
disruptive than a small framewise prediction error. A useful agent must
therefore distinguish \emph{when the floor may change} from \emph{whether the
change is directed to the camera wearer}.
Consider an embodied conversational agent that observes the scene through an
egocentric camera and hears mixed environmental audio. Before response
generation and speech synthesis, a causal floor controller must decide every
200~ms whether the agent should continue listening, begin speaking, or yield.
In a dyadic exchange, a pause or an apparent end of turn may be an invitation
to respond. This assumption fails in multiparty interaction: one participant
may hand the floor to another visible participant, and an agent that reacts
only to acoustic availability may interrupt an exchange that does not involve
it. We study this floor-action controller; response content generation and
closed-loop conversational effects are outside our scope. The observed human
camera wearer is a behavioral proxy rather than an equivalent autonomous
agent: its activity supplies human demonstrations of floor timing under the
same first-person observation geometry.
Voice Activity Projection (VAP) models future joint speech activity and
derives turn-taking events without manually labeling each event
\cite{ekstedt2022vap}. EgoSpeak extends future activity prediction to causal,
untrimmed egocentric video, forecasting wearer and aggregate non-wearer
activity over the next two seconds \cite{kim2025egospeak}. Its role-relative
output is attractive for a wearable agent, but an ``others'' channel cannot
distinguish an utterance addressed to the wearer from an exchange between
bystanders. Conventional per-frame average precision can consequently be
dominated by ordinary activity while hiding precisely the false-entry behavior
that visual social cues should prevent. Event-oriented evaluation likewise
emphasizes recall, false alarms, and latency rather than a single frame-level
score \cite{jiang2026turnbench}.
output is attractive for a wearable agent, but an ``others'' channel discards
whether the same or different visible people produced the recent activity and
how their behavior evolved across time. Conventional per-frame average
precision can consequently be dominated by ordinary activity while hiding
precisely the false-entry behavior that person-consistent visual cues may
prevent. Event-oriented evaluation likewise emphasizes recall, false alarms,
and latency rather than a single frame-level score \cite{jiang2026turnbench}.
Related work supplies complementary parts of the problem. Egocentric
talking-to-me detection predicts whether a completed utterance addresses the
@@ -79,46 +83,44 @@ camera wearer and benefits from long-term social context
\cite{kong2024sicnet}. Multiparty VAP grounds future activity in visible face
tracks to predict floor shifts and next visible speakers \cite{qi2026muvap}.
The former is generally utterance-level rather than continuous anticipation;
the latter does not ask whether an invisible camera wearer should enter. Our
gap is therefore narrower than ``audio--visual multiparty turn taking'': we
study continuous, wearer-relative floor action when the candidate responder is
behind the camera and the number of visible participants changes over time.
the latter predicts visible participants rather than the floor action of an
invisible camera wearer. Our gap is therefore narrower than ``audio--visual
multiparty turn taking'': we study whether short-term anonymous participant
continuity helps direct, continuous wearer-action projection when the candidate
responder is behind the camera and the visible participant set changes.
We call this task \emph{addressee-conditioned egocentric floor-entry
projection}. A global streaming audio--video representation supplies broad
context, while a set branch preserves individual visual histories and their
alignment to recent mixed audio. Fixed semantic role queries compress a
variable participant set into wearer-address and third-party evidence without
assuming a fixed seating order. EasyCom is suitable because it provides
synchronized egocentric audio--video, per-person tracks, voice activity, and
target-of-speech annotations \cite{donley2021easycom}. Target annotations are
used only for training-side supervision and evaluation strata, never as input
at test time.
We call this task \emph{egocentric floor-action projection}. The study asks
four questions: (RQ1) how much wearer activity is linearly or shallowly
readable from a frozen global omni state; (RQ2) whether standard
parameter-efficient tuning recovers missing performance; (RQ3) whether causal
local audio and person-level visual evidence provide complementary information;
and (RQ4) whether any aggregate gain reduces false agent entries without
making the controller globally passive. EasyCom is suitable because it
provides synchronized egocentric audio--video, per-person tracks, and voice
activity \cite{donley2021easycom}. Target-of-speech annotations, when used, are
analysis strata only and are never model input or required output.
Our contributions are threefold. (1) We formulate continuous speech
initiation as recipient-aware floor-entry projection for an invisible camera
wearer. (2) We propose a causal set-based fusion module that grounds mixed
audio in a variable number of visible participants and preserves the original
dense EgoSpeak target. (3) We introduce an event evaluation that reports
third-party false entries at matched addressed-response recall, accompanied by
latency and visual counterfactual controls. This design makes the scientific
claim falsifiable: visual fusion is useful only if \emph{correctly aligned}
vision improves the operating trade-off without suppressing legitimate wearer
responses.
The intended contributions are therefore a controlled cross-backbone
representation diagnosis, a lightweight local-evidence adaptation selected
from pre-registered candidates, and a behavior-aligned event evaluation. The
current Qwen2.5-Omni observations are motivation, not a claim that all omni
models intrinsically fail. Likewise, track-consistent cross-attention becomes
the final method only if it beats pooled, no-ID, and capacity-matched controls.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\fbox{\parbox[c][1.05in][c]{0.94\columnwidth}{\centering
\todo{Draw the final method figure: causal omni state $\vect g_t$; recent
mixed-audio tokens; a masked set of face-track histories; shared per-person
audio--visual grounding; three role queries; zero-initialized residual; and
the $10\times3$ activity head. Mark all causal cutoffs and masks.}}}
\caption{Proposed wearer-relative set fusion. The number and ordering of
visible participants may change, while the output remains fixed-size.}
\todo{After model selection, draw the final system figure. For now it must show
the shared experiment interface: raw causal AV, backbone-specific global
readout, frozen/PEFT/local-adapter branches, optional recent audio and anonymous
person histories, and the common $10\times3$ head. Mark causal cutoffs,
trainable modules, parameter budgets, and source-boundary resets.}}}
\caption{Planned model-agnostic floor-action study. The local adapter remains a
candidate family until the controlled train-side comparison is complete.}
\label{fig:method}
\end{figure}
\section{Task and Method}
\section{Methods}
\label{sec:method}
\subsection{Wearer-relative activity projection}
@@ -141,74 +143,109 @@ windows; elsewhere it remains a future-activity probability. This retains the
EgoSpeak target and evaluation while exposing a deployable 5-Hz decision
signal.
\subsection{Frozen global stream and local participant set}
\subsection{Omni backbones and representation protocols}
We obtain a causal global state $\vect{g}_t$ from the streaming Thinker of
Qwen2.5-Omni \cite{xu2025qwenomni}. The backbone is frozen in the main
experiment because preliminary LoRA adaptation caused negative transfer
(Sec.~\ref{sec:results}). From the most recent $L_a$ seconds, a shared audio
encoder produces token sequence $\vect{A}_t$. For each visible track
$i\in\{1,\ldots,N_t\}$, a shared temporal visual encoder produces
$\vect{v}_{t,i}$ from its recent face history. Person-aligned evidence is
Let $m$ index an omni backbone and let $\vect{g}^{(m)}_t$ be a
backbone-specific causal global readout at the same physical cutoff $t$.
Qwen2.5-Omni \cite{xu2025qwenomni} is the currently implemented family;
Qwen2.5-Omni-3B, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and MiniCPM-o~4.5
\cite{cui2026minicpmo45} form the planned initial comparison. These models have
different native streaming APIs, temporal tokenization, hidden dimensions, and
adaptation interfaces. We therefore emphasize within-backbone deltas rather
than treating raw cross-model scores as a pure architecture ranking.
Every supported backbone is evaluated under three representation protocols:
(i) a frozen global readout with a dimension-matched prediction head;
(ii) a pre-registered parameter-efficient adaptation budget; and (iii) the
same global readout augmented by causal local evidence. Input cutoffs, EgoSpeak
targets, context duration, training examples, head capacity, and evaluation
are held fixed whenever the backbone permits it. A failure of one LoRA recipe
is reported as that recipe's result, not as proof that the backbone cannot
adapt.
\todo{Implement and audit one adapter for each planned backbone. For every
model, document model revision, processor, native audio/video rates, exact
hidden-state readout, causal/streaming semantics, context limit, dtype,
trainable LoRA targets/rank, parameter count, peak memory, and P50/P95 latency.
Verify no future frames or samples enter $\vect g^{(m)}_t$. If a model cannot
expose a comparable causal state, report it as unsupported rather than inventing
a non-equivalent readout. Add future backbones only before the experiment
protocol is locked.}
\subsection{Candidate local-evidence adaptation}
The current hypothesis is that global omni states preserve broad semantic
context but may make recent prosody, activity boundaries, and individual
visual motion difficult for a shallow floor head to recover. From the most
recent $L_a$ seconds, a local encoder produces audio evidence $\vect A_t$ and,
optionally, an anonymous visible-person set $\mathcal P_t$. A generic candidate
adapter is
\begin{equation}
\vect{p}_{t,i}=\vect{v}_{t,i}+
\mathrm{CA}(\vect{v}_{t,i},\vect{A}_t,\vect{A}_t),
\label{eq:person}
\vect z^{(m)}_t=\vect g^{(m)}_t+
\gamma_t H_\phi(\vect g^{(m)}_t,\vect A_t,\mathcal P_t),
\qquad \gamma_t\vert_{\mathrm{init}}=0,
\label{eq:adapter}
\end{equation}
so every participant queries the same mixed audio rather than requiring
unavailable separated microphones. A masked set encoder models interactions
among $\mathcal{P}_t=\{\vect{p}_{t,i}\}_{i=1}^{N_t}$ and is permutation
equivariant \cite{lee2019settransformer}. Missing detections use a learned
\textsc{offscreen/null} element. In minibatches, sets are padded to
$N_{\max}$ with an attention mask; no slot-ID embedding is used, and track
slots are randomly permuted during training.
followed by the common prediction head. Local evidence is derived from the
same causal raw media, not close microphones, transcripts, speaker labels, or
future frames.
\todo{Implement and verify the shared track encoder, mixed-audio
cross-attention, OFFSCREEN token, padding mask, and numerical invariance under
track-slot permutation. Freeze $L_a$, visual crop history, $N_{\max}$, and
face-track confidence filtering from train-side experiments only.}
We evaluate candidates in increasing structural complexity: pooled recent
audio/vision; a capacity-matched temporal branch; a per-frame person set with
no cross-time identity; a shared track-wise temporal encoder; and person--audio
cross-attention. Only a candidate that improves the pre-registered event metric
over simpler and capacity-matched controls becomes the final method. If
person continuity is selected, temporary IDs route hidden state only---there
is no ID embedding, name recognition, or cross-recording identity---and the set
operator is permutation equivariant \cite{lee2019settransformer}.
\subsection{Role-query fusion}
Mean pooling can erase which participant is speaking to whom. Instead, three
learned semantic queries represent floor state, address-to-wearer evidence,
and third-party interaction. Each query is conditioned on $\vect{g}_t$ and
cross-attends to the participant set:
\begin{align}
\vect{Q}_t &= [\vect{q}_{\mathrm{floor}};
\vect{q}_{\mathrm{addr}};
\vect{q}_{\mathrm{third}}]+W_g\vect{g}_t,\\
\vect{R}_t &= \mathrm{MHA}(\vect{Q}_t,\widetilde{\mathcal P}_t,
\widetilde{\mathcal P}_t),\\
\vect{z}_t &= \vect{g}_t+\tanh(\alpha)W_r\mathrm{vec}(\vect{R}_t),
\label{eq:fusion}
\end{align}
where $\alpha$ is initialized to zero. The zero-initialized residual makes the
starting model identical to the frozen global baseline and allows the visual
branch to be removed exactly. A two-layer prediction head maps $\vect{z}_t$ to
Eq.~\eqref{eq:task}.
\todo{Run the candidate ladder before fixing $H_\phi$. Match trainable
parameters and effective local history. Compare a shared local encoder across
backbones (cross-model control) with each backbone's native local encoder
(within-model control); do not mix these protocols in one claimed delta.
For track candidates, specify visibility/age masks, gap/source resets,
OFFSCREEN handling, and global-rename invariance. Describe only the selected
architecture as the final method; move rejected candidates to ablations.}
\subsection{Training objectives}
The main loss is class-balanced binary cross entropy over all horizons and
activity channels. When annotations are available, auxiliary heads predict
per-track active-speaker state and whether the current source addresses the
wearer:
The common main loss is class-balanced binary cross entropy over all horizons
and activity channels. This dense EgoSpeak target is the only supervision
required by the task. If a person-aware candidate survives the activity-only
comparison, an optional auxiliary head predicts current active-speaker state:
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{L}=\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{act}}+
\lambda_{\mathrm{asd}}\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{asd}}+
\lambda_{\mathrm{addr}}\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{addr}}.
\lambda_{\mathrm{asd}}\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{asd}}.
\label{eq:loss}
\end{equation}
Ambiguous, group-addressed, and offscreen-target samples are masked from
$\mathcal{L}_{\mathrm{addr}}$, but remain in activity training. No language
model or pseudo-label is used to define primary test events.
Participant ID, target-of-speech, transcript, close-microphone audio, and
future frames are never model inputs. Target-of-speech may stratify qualitative
analysis but is not a predicted variable or a requirement for the primary
multi-other event definition.
\todo{Run the staged ablation: activity only; +ASD; +addressee. Select
$\lambda$ values and early stopping on a training-side calibration fold. Do
not inspect Sessions 1--3 during selection.}
\todo{First compare all representation/adaptation protocols with activity loss
only. Then ablate +ASD for the selected person-aware candidate. Add an
event-specific wearer onset/yield loss only as a separately reported extension.
Select all coefficients and early stopping on a training-side calibration
fold; do not inspect Sessions 1--3 during selection.}
\section{Experimental Setup}
\subsection{Track source and deployment contract}
Person-aware candidates first use dataset-provided boxes and anonymous IDs to
isolate the value of local visual structure. A deployable version instead
obtains causal tracklets from a face/head detector followed by an online
multi-object tracker; no future-frame smoothing or cross-session recognition
is permitted. EasyCom IDs are continued only across genuinely adjacent source
segments and reset across redacted gaps. Ego4D IDs are local to a clip.
\todo{If a person-aware candidate is selected, state precisely whether face or
head boxes are used. Report provided-track
coverage, mean/maximum people, occlusion gaps, track fragments, and source-gap
resets for both datasets. Add either one online detector/tracker experiment or
controlled box jitter, dropout, fragmentation, and ID-switch curves; otherwise
limit every deployment claim to ``given causal participant tracklets.''}
\section{Experiments}
\label{sec:setup}
\textbf{Data and splits.}
@@ -216,45 +253,83 @@ We use the EgoSpeak EasyCom protocol: Sessions 4--12 for model development and
Sessions 1--3 for final reporting. All architecture, checkpoint, threshold,
and hyperparameter choices use training-side folds only. Inputs contain the
camera stream and shared array audio available to the wearer; close-talking
microphones and target-of-speech labels are supervision only. We also report aggregate
activity forecasting on the EgoSpeak Ego4D split \cite{grauman2022ego4d}, but
do not claim addressee grounding there because comparable target annotations
are absent.
microphones, per-person voice labels, and target-of-speech labels are not model
inputs. We also report aggregate activity forecasting on the EgoSpeak Ego4D
split \cite{grauman2022ego4d}. Ego4D Audio-Visual Diarization supplies
clip-local anonymous participant tracks; its per-person voice coverage on the
433-clip EgoSpeak split must be audited before reporting the same multi-other
event analysis.
\textbf{Backbone comparison.}
The initial study covers Qwen2.5-Omni-3B, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and
MiniCPM-o~4.5. For each backbone $m$, we first compare its frozen causal state
$G_m$, a parameter-efficiently adapted state $P_m$, and local-evidence
augmentation $G_m+L$. The primary diagnostic is the within-backbone change;
cross-backbone absolute scores are secondary because native tokenization,
pretraining, streaming interfaces, and hidden-state semantics differ. Common
local encoders test whether adaptation transfers across global backbones,
whereas native local encoders are a separate, model-specific protocol. All
rows share physical input cutoffs, targets, data splits, and evaluation.
Unsupported causal readouts are disclosed rather than replaced by offline or
future-conditioned features.
\todo{Implement the three backbone adapters and validate state timestamps with
an impulse/cutoff test. Pre-register one matched PEFT budget and one common
local branch. Report native-vs-common local encoders in separate table panels.
Keep future model additions outside the confirmatory comparison once this
matrix is locked.}
\textbf{Event construction.}
An \emph{addressed response} starts from a pure other-to-wearer utterance and
requires a wearer onset before an unrelated other onset. A \emph{third-party
exchange} starts from a pure other-to-other target while the wearer remains
silent. Group, none, multiple, and unknown targets form a separate diagnostic
stratum. Threshold $\tau_r$ is selected on the development split to obtain
addressed-response recall $r\in\{0.7,0.8,0.9\}$ and is then frozen. The primary
metric is false wearer entries per minute of third-party opportunity at
matched recall; the headline operating point is $r=0.8$. We also report
addressed-response recall, signed detection latency, wearer yield recall, and
the original ten-horizon per-frame mAP.
We derive \emph{wearer onset} events directly from the wearer activity target.
A \emph{multi-other exchange} is a wearer-silent opportunity interval in which
at least two distinct non-wearer participant IDs contribute temporally ordered
speech activity. It is an observable interaction proxy, not a claim about the
speakers' mental intent or addressee. Threshold $\tau_r$ is selected on the
development split to obtain wearer-onset recall
$r\in\{0.7,0.8,0.9\}$ and is then frozen. The primary metric is false wearer
entries per minute of multi-other opportunity at matched onset recall; the
headline operating point is $r=0.8$. We also report signed onset latency,
wearer-yield recall/latency, and the original ten-horizon per-frame mAP.
\todo{Freeze the event pairing and competing-risk rules, including pre/post
windows, minimum silence, maximum response delay, overlap handling, and one
detection per event. Publish counts for train/test positive and negative
events, visibility, duration, and excluded target types. Treat all previously
viewed Sessions 1--3 scores as exploratory; lock the final protocol and model
before the confirmatory three-seed run.}
\todo{Freeze the event pairing and competing-risk rules, including the
multi-other alternation window, minimum speech/silence, overlap, maximum onset
delay, duplicate detections, one detection per event, track visibility, source
boundaries, and group/offscreen cases. Publish train/test onset counts,
multi-other events/minutes, number of distinct visible speakers, and exclusion
counts. Manually audit at least 100 events. Treat all previously viewed
Sessions 1--3 scores as exploratory; lock the protocol and model before the
confirmatory three-seed run.}
\textbf{Baselines and controls.}
We compare: global omni state (G); G plus recent audio (G+A); G+A plus pooled
visual context (G+A+V-pool); a parameter-matched temporal branch without
person identity; and the proposed set branch. Required counterfactuals replace
correct tracks with (i) wrong participants from the same scene, (ii)
time-shifted tracks, and (iii) zeros. These controls share parameter count,
audio history, and optimization budget.
For each backbone we compare: frozen global state $G_m$; PEFT $P_m$; $G_m$
plus recent local audio; and $G_m$ plus pooled local audio--visual evidence.
This compact matrix tests the representation hypothesis before investing in a
complex fusion module. If local vision survives three seeds and the event
gate, we then compare a parameter-matched temporal branch without person
continuity, a separately trained per-frame/no-ID set branch, and a
track-consistent branch. On a frozen track-aware checkpoint, a clip-consistent
global renaming must leave outputs unchanged, whereas \emph{broken
continuity} periodically remaps IDs while preserving every crop, timestamp,
audio sample, and target. Time-shifted and removed vision provide additional
alignment controls.
\todo{Define the broken-continuity corruption before evaluation: remap only at
pre-registered 1-s boundaries or report a fixed ID-switch-rate curve. Do not
call a clip-consistent slot permutation ``broken ID.'' Verify unchanged crops,
frame counts, audio, labels, and visibility masks. Train the no-ID/reset
baseline from scratch with matched parameters; evaluate all test-time
counterfactuals using one frozen checkpoint and one frozen threshold.}
\textbf{Implementation and statistics.}
All models run at 5~Hz with an 8-s causal memory. The 3B Thinker is frozen and
local audio/face histories are encoded causally. We report three seeds and
mean$\pm$standard deviation. Confidence intervals for event metrics use paired
cluster bootstrap over sessions/conversation blocks rather than treating
adjacent frames as independent. Runtime includes P50/P95 decision latency,
peak memory, and trainable parameter count.
All prediction heads run at 5~Hz and use an 8-s causal observation window;
model-specific deviations required by a native streaming interface are stated
explicitly. In the frozen protocol the omni backbone does not update. In PEFT
and local protocols, trainable parameters and optimizer exposure are reported
separately. Every temporal state resets at non-contiguous source boundaries.
We report three seeds and mean$\pm$standard deviation. Confidence intervals for
event metrics use paired cluster bootstrap over sessions/conversation blocks
rather than treating adjacent frames as independent. Runtime includes P50/P95
decision latency, throughput, peak memory, and trainable parameter count.
\todo{Fill optimizer, learning rate, batch size, epochs, feature dimensions,
$L_a$, crop rate/resolution, number of heads/layers, $N_{\max}$, parameter
@@ -264,95 +339,138 @@ count, hardware, and real-time latency after the architecture is frozen.}
\label{sec:results}
\begin{table}[t]
\caption{Current aggregate evidence on EasyCom test Sessions 1--3. Values are
percentages from one seed and are motivation, not the final main result.}
\caption{Exploratory Qwen2.5-Omni-3B local-branch evidence on EasyCom test
Sessions 1--3. Values are percentages from one seed, not a cross-backbone or
confirmatory result.}
\label{tab:preliminary}
\centering
\small
\resizebox{\columnwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{lccc}
\hline
Model & 0.2-s mAP & 0.2-s wearer AP & Mean mAP\\
\hline
G+A & 81.72 & 85.07 & 65.11\\
G+A+V-pool & 82.03 & 85.09 & 65.40\\
Qwen-3B $G$+local A & 81.72 & 85.07 & 65.11\\
Qwen-3B $G$+local AV-pool & 82.03 & 85.09 & 65.40\\
\hline
$\Delta$ visual & +0.30 & +0.02 & +0.29\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{tabular}}
\end{table}
Table~\ref{tab:preliminary} shows why aggregate mAP alone is insufficient.
Pooled vision gives a small gain, while immediate wearer AP is nearly
unchanged. This is compatible with either weak but useful social grounding or
generic visual regularization; only matched-recall event evaluation and
counterfactual identity controls can distinguish them.
track-continuity controls can distinguish them.
A separate Qwen-3B dense-cache diagnostic gave 58.16 mean mAP for its frozen
readout and 56.20 for one LoRA recipe. Because that diagnostic used a different
feature protocol, it is not combined numerically with
Table~\ref{tab:preliminary}; it only shows why a fair, protocol-matched PEFT
study remains necessary.
\begin{table}[t]
\caption{Primary EasyCom event evaluation. Lower $\mathrm{FP}_{\mathrm{3p}}$
is better; all rows use the same development-selected operating protocol.}
\caption{Planned cross-backbone EasyCom event evaluation. Lower
$\mathrm{FP}_{\mathrm{mo}}$ is better; all rows use the same
development-selected operating protocol. ``Local'' denotes the train-side
selected common local-evidence candidate.}
\label{tab:main}
\centering
\small
\resizebox{\columnwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{lccccc}
\hline
Model & $\mathrm{FP}_{\mathrm{3p}}$/min@$R=.8$ & $R_{\mathrm{addr}}$ &
Latency & Yield R & Mean mAP\\
Backbone/protocol & $\mathrm{FP}_{\mathrm{mo}}$/min@$R=.8$ & Onset R &
Onset latency & Yield R & Mean mAP\\
\hline
G & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
G+A & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
G+A+V-pool & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Temporal control & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
\method{} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
\method{}+ASD & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
\method{}+Addr & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Qwen-3B frozen & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Qwen-3B PEFT & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Qwen-3B + local & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Qwen-7B frozen & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Qwen-7B PEFT/local & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
MiniCPM-o frozen & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
MiniCPM-o PEFT/local & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
\hline
\end{tabular}}
\end{table}
\todo{Report Table~\ref{tab:main} as mean$\pm$standard deviation over three
seeds, plus 95\% paired cluster-bootstrap confidence intervals for the
proposed-vs-G+A difference. The paper's main claim is supported only if
third-party FP/min decreases at matched recall without worse response latency
or wearer-yield recall.}
seeds, plus 95\% paired cluster-bootstrap confidence intervals for frozen vs
PEFT and frozen vs local within each backbone. A general omni-representation
claim requires a consistent pattern across at least two backbone families; an
effect confined to Qwen must be stated as Qwen-specific. The behavior claim is
supported only if multi-other FP/min decreases at matched wearer-onset recall
without worse onset latency or wearer-yield recall. If the selected local
candidate uses tracks, also report its paired intervals against no-ID and
temporal-capacity controls.}
\begin{table}[t]
\caption{Visual grounding counterfactual on the frozen best model.}
\caption{Conditional track-continuity counterfactual on the best track-aware
model. This table is retained only if train-side selection chooses such a
candidate; all rows reuse one frozen checkpoint.}
\label{tab:counterfactual}
\centering
\small
\resizebox{\columnwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{lccc}
\hline
Visual evidence & $\mathrm{FP}_{\mathrm{3p}}$/min & Addr. recall & 0.2-s mAP\\
Track/visual evidence & $\mathrm{FP}_{\mathrm{mo}}$/min & Onset recall & 0.2-s mAP\\
\hline
Correct tracks & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Wrong person & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Global ID rename & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Broken continuity & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Time shifted & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
Removed & \todo{--} & \todo{--} & \todo{--}\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{tabular}}
\end{table}
Table~\ref{tab:counterfactual} is the identity test. A true social-grounding
effect should be largest for correct tracks and should collapse for wrong or
time-shifted people. If every visual variant improves equally, the defensible
conclusion is additional capacity/history, not addressee grounding.
If a track-aware candidate is selected, Table~\ref{tab:counterfactual} is the
continuity test. Global renaming must be
numerically invariant because IDs carry no semantics. If the model exploits
person history, correct tracks should outperform broken continuity even though
both contain exactly the same per-frame people. If broken, time-shifted, and
removed variants perform similarly to correct tracks, the defensible
conclusion is additional capacity or generic visual context, not useful
person-continuous reasoning.
\todo{Add one compact error analysis split by target visibility, number of
visible people, overlap, and backchannel/interruption proxy. Include event
counts with every rate. Move negative LoRA/7B/ROMA diagnostics to supplementary
material unless they directly explain the final method.}
\todo{Add one compact error analysis split by model family, track visibility,
number of visible people, overlap, track age/fragmentation, and
backchannel/interruption proxy. Include event counts with every rate. Move
rejected PEFT recipes and fusion candidates to supplementary material unless
they directly explain the selected method.}
\textbf{Qualitative evidence.}
For a multi-other exchange, visualize per-person speech activity and track IDs,
wearer ground truth, the frozen-global and selected-local wearer-entry scores,
and the single frozen threshold on one physical time axis. If the selected
candidate is track-aware, also show its broken-continuity score. A useful
example shows the frozen baseline rising at an other-speaker boundary while
the selected adapter remains below threshold; a companion positive example
must show that a real wearer onset is not suppressed.
\todo{Do not hand-pick only successful clips. Before viewing the final test
plots, freeze a deterministic selection rule and show: largest paired
improvement, near-median improvement, one failure, and one correctly retained
wearer onset. Include full local timelines and source frame times, not cropped
screenshots without context. State that examples illustrate the aggregate
event result and cannot establish it alone.}
\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec:conclusion}
We study when an egocentric agent should enter a multiparty floor, not merely
whether someone will speak. The proposed formulation retains dense future
activity prediction while grounding wearer entry in a variable set of visible
participants. Its event protocol tests the intended behavior directly:
reducing intrusions into third-party exchanges at matched legitimate-response
recall. \todo{Replace with one quantitative conclusion and one limitation;
do not claim success from aggregate mAP alone.}
We study when an egocentric agent should enter or yield a multiparty floor, not
merely whether someone will speak. The central question is model-agnostic:
whether frozen or parameter-efficiently adapted omni representations expose
the fine-grained floor cues required by a 5-Hz controller, and whether causal
local evidence closes any gap. Dense activity forecasting supplies a common
target, while matched-recall event evaluation tests whether an apparent gain
actually prevents intrusions during multi-other exchanges. Current Qwen-3B
results are exploratory motivation only. \todo{After the controlled study,
state which backbone/adapter was selected, whether the representation pattern
generalized beyond Qwen, the quantitative false-entry and onset/yield results,
and the main deployment limitation. Do not infer success from aggregate mAP or
selected examples alone.}
\bibliographystyle{IEEEbib}
\bibliography{references}

View File

@@ -48,6 +48,13 @@
year = {2025}
}
@article{cui2026minicpmo45,
author = {Junbo Cui and Bokai Xu and Chongyi Wang and Tianyu Yu and Weiyue Sun and Yingjing Xu and Tianran Wang and Zhihui He and Wenshuo Ma and Tianchi Cai and others},
title = {{MiniCPM-o 4.5}: Towards Real-Time Full-Duplex Omni-Modal Interaction},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.27393},
year = {2026}
}
@inproceedings{lee2019settransformer,
author = {Juho Lee and Yoonho Lee and Jungtaek Kim and Adam Kosiorek and Seungjin Choi and Yee Whye Teh},
title = {Set Transformer: A Framework for Attention-Based Permutation-Invariant Neural Networks},