Interactivity

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable fluency across many tasks but remain limited by their static, parameter bound knowledge and their susceptibility to hallucinating information. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses these issues by incorporating external retrieval into the generation process, grounding model outputs in verifiable and up to date sources. While prior surveys primarily focus on core RAG architectures and standard pipelines, recent research explores broader challenges and capabilities that extend beyond these foundational designs. This survey provides a consolidated and structured examination of contemporary RAG developments, organizing the field into a four axis taxonomy: improving retrieval efficiency, strengthening robustness and security, supporting user driven and interactive workflows, and enabling multi step or complex reasoning. We formalize key components of the RAG framework and review methods spanning dense and sparse retrieval, fusion strategies, embedding optimizations, and reinforcement learning based retrieval policies, highlighting how these advances influence practical deployment and system design. We also synthesize evaluation practices, domain specific applications, and architectural variants such as Naive, Advanced, and Modular RAG. Finally, we outline persistent challenges related to retrieval quality, reliability, domain adaptation, scalability, and explainability, and identify opportunities for building RAG systems that are more reliable, adaptable, and transparent.

Continuous audio encoders compress audio along feature and time axes through latent width and frame rate, but their joint effect on downstream performance remains unclear. We train sixteen encoders spanning four widths and four frame rates, with downstream adapters and probes, using matched training protocols. Despite generally improved reconstruction at larger widths, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and spoken question answering (SQA) favor moderate widths at higher rates, with the best observed widths shifting toward larger values under stronger temporal compression. Frozen-model PCA interventions reveal distinct reconstruction and recognition sensitivities: removing the trailing half of the components substantially degrades ASR in high-rate 512-dimensional encoders with comparatively small reconstruction penalties, whereas 1024-dimensional encoders largely preserve both. Yet the projected 1024-dimensional model underperforms unmodified narrower models on ASR at 12.5Hz. These findings identify a width--rate interaction in downstream utility and suggest that how representations are organized during training matters beyond reconstruction fidelity and compressibility.

Real-world visualization requests are routinely ambiguous, incomplete, or factually incorrect, yet existing Text-to-Visualization (Text-to-Vis) systems assume well-specified inputs and produce charts in a single pass. When queries are imperfect, a system must \emph{interact} with the user to recover the true intent, but no benchmark or method supports this dynamic process. We introduce \textbf{VisInteract}, a new paradigm that reframes Text-to-Vis as interaction-driven intent recovery, and \textbf{VisInteract-Bench}, to our knowledge, that is the first benchmark for dynamic interactive Text-to-Vis, featuring controlled imperfection injection, a leakage-controlled User Agent for realistic multi-turn feedback, and dual-perspective (code and chart) automated evaluation. On the algorithmic side, we propose \textbf{Vis-MCTS}, a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) enhanced method, introducing improvements over classical MCTS, that \emph{Progressive Widening} to tame the unbounded tool-argument space in tree search, \emph{cross-rollout information sharing} so clarifications and critiques benefit the entire search tree, and \emph{Dimension-Aware Reward Decomposition} that routes scalar user feedback along data-fidelity, visual-design, and intent-alignment dimensions to resolve credit assignment across heterogeneous actions. Extensive Experiments across two LLM backbones show that Vis-MCTS consistently outperforms all Text-to-Vis baselines, improving end-to-end task success by $13.40\%$--$16.27\%$ over the strongest interactive baseline and by more than $5\times$ over non-interactive ones.

Digital interfaces are traditionally implemented through intermediate representations such as code, requiring their appearance and behavior to be specified in advance. We introduce Solaris, an interface world model that instead generates an interactive UI directly, frame by frame, in response to user actions. Solaris treats mouse interactions as conditioning signals and autoregressively synthesizes the resulting visual state at interactive speeds. To enable real-time generation while maintaining visual coherence over extended interactions, we combine autoregressive frame generation with few-step distillation and training on the model's own outputs. A language model complements the visual world model by interpreting user intent and specifying how interactions should affect the generated environment, separating high-level reasoning from visual rendering. By generating both the appearance and behavior of an interface dynamically, Solaris enables open-ended interactions that need not be explicitly programmed in advance. We view interface world models as a step toward a new paradigm for software, where interfaces are generated and adapted continuously around user intent rather than implemented as fixed collections of predefined states and

Splatting-based algorithms reconstruct photorealistic, real-time-renderable, and mesh-exportable 3D scenes from regular images, but they represent a scene as a single monolithic field. Therefore, the reconstruction has no object-level structure, leaving it infeasible for downstream editing or interaction. Moreover, regions that are never directly observed in the input scans are contaminated by the surrounding texture and left uncorrected, capping both mesh fidelity and novel-view synthesis. We propose a decompose-before-reconstruct approach: we segment the instances out of every frame, consider the remaining as background and inpaint it, reconstruct each instance and the background independently with mesh splatting, and compose them into a single scene. Our method significantly improves mesh fidelity (over a 5% gain in F-score) and novel-view synthesis, while supporting object-wise modifiability and interactivity. The code will be made publicly available.

Large language models have made text the default medium for human--AI interaction, buttext alone cannot express the full range of responses required by multimodal assistants,avatars, and embodied agents. While recent audio-video generative models can synthesizehigh-fidelity synchronized content, existing supervision is largely \emph{descriptive}:models are trained to render captions rather than to produce audio-visual responsescaused by external user interactions. We introduce \textbf{InteracVid}, \emph{the firstopen-source large-scale dataset that addresses this missing supervision}, so that everysample couples a preceding audio-visual context and an external stimulus with the realinteractive response that follows. We design a metadata-aware pipeline that extractsinteractive clips from long, noisy livestreams, yielding over \textbf{454K}context-query-response triplets from more than \textbf{59K} livestream videos andspanning conversation-centered, object-centric, procedural, embodied, and screen-basedscenarios. A ten-rater human study confirms that the extracted interactions are causal,natural, and temporally complete for both genuine and reconstructed queries. On aheld-out benchmark of \textbf{100} genuine live-chat queries, fine-tuning on InteracVidimproves both interaction planning and audio-video response generation, and anindependent human evaluation reproduces the system ranking and the conclusions obtainedwith our automatic judge. These results highlight interaction-structured data as acritical foundation for interactive multimodal generation.

In large-scale text analysis tasks, pre-trained language models are often used to embed text corpora for downstream analysis. However, such models may struggle to capture domain-specific semantics and adapting them typically requires large amounts of labeled data and technical expertise to implement training pipelines. Recent approaches have demonstrated how visual interactions in document projections can capture human feedback as training signals for model tuning. However, these methods operate on document-level feedback, which requires users to open and assess individual documents in order to provide effective feedback. In this paper, we propose KeySI, an interaction framework that enables feature-level feedback through keyword-based concept specification. Users specify feedback by organizing extracted keywords into groups representing concepts, which KeySI translates into document-level supervision for subsequent tuning. By operating on keywords as the primary interaction medium, KeySI reduces the need for manual document inspection and labeling and lowers the barrier to adapting embedding models. We present a prototype implementation that, given a corpus, curates representative keywords, visualizes keywords and document embeddings via dimensionality reduction, allows interactive specification of keyword groups, and supports iterative refinement through system feedback. We evaluate KeySI through a user study, usage scenarios, and quantitative experiments demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing user intent and improving embedding alignment.

Controlling attributes is a critical step toward achieving the final creative outcome, yet current approaches fall short in supporting users in the iterative refinement of generative content. We propose Spatula, a proof-of-concept system that generates on-demand, in-situ attribute control interfaces and interactions for creating motion graphics. Building on a technical probe that automatically analyzes animation context and generates corresponding attributes and UI, we frame attribute control as an explorable landscape and explore the attribute control space along four key dimensions: Discoverability, Resolution, Scope, and Expandability. Findings from a user study (N=12) show that our system provides intuitive and convenient interactions while supporting diverse needs for fine-grained parameter control. Furthermore, our applications demonstrate that the plug-and-play design generalizes to other domains, such as web design and 3D modeling.

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate multi-dimensional qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and reasoning feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments on industrial datasets show that the Interactor framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding, they remain limited in spatial reasoning tasks that require active evidence acquisition and multi-step visual interaction. This limitation suggests that relying solely on implicit visual representations from vision encoders is insufficient for recovering fine-grained spatial evidence. We introduce PERception-Interaction-reason Agent (PERIA), a tool-augmented visual agent for spatial reasoning tasks across map reasoning, visual probing, and vision reconstruction. PERIA uses two lightweight tool families: vision perception tools for exposing textual, symbolic, and spatial evidence, and vision interaction tools for manipulating visual context, tracing paths, and verifying spatial relations. To train PERIA, we develop a unified recipe that combines supervised tool-use trajectory synthesis, composite rewards, and Observation-Relaxed Group-in-Group Policy Optimization (OR-GIGPO) for effective multi-tool behavior. Experiments on 13 benchmarks from 8 datasets show that PERIA-8B improves over the Qwen3-8B backbone by 10.0% on in-distribution benchmarks and 4.4% on out-of-distribution benchmarks, while outperforming previous state-of-the-art baselines of similar size by 7.0%-14.8%. It also achieves performance comparable to much larger models such as Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking and GPT-5, demonstrating the effectiveness of PERIA in enhancing spatial reasoning capabilities.

Full-duplex spoken dialogue models can listen and speak simultaneously, making them a promising architecture for natural conversation. However, current models are trained solely with supervised learning through token-level likelihood maximization, which does not directly optimize interaction-level behaviors, causing interactivity issues such as excessive silence and ill-timed turn-taking. Recent work has applied reinforcement learning (RL) to improve interactivity, but existing methods address only a limited set of interactive behaviors in their rewards. In this work, we propose a post-training alignment method that comprehensively improves the interactivity of full-duplex spoken dialogue models through RL. We address the four canonical axes of interactivity: pause handling, turn-taking, backchanneling, and user interruption. For each axis, we extract short audio segments from human conversation corpora and optimize the model with axis-specific reward functions. An extra LLM-based reward for response quality prevents semantic degradation. We apply our method to two open-source models, Moshi and PersonaPlex, demonstrating consistent improvements in interactivity on both offline evaluation with pre-recorded audio and real-time multi-turn dialogue evaluation.

Recent advances in visual language models have enabled autonomous agents for complex reasoning, tool use, and document understanding. However, existing document agents mainly transform papers into static artifacts such as summaries, webpages, or slides, which are insufficient for technical papers involving dynamic mechanisms and state transitions. In this work, we propose a Paper-to-Interactive-System Agent that converts research papers into executable interactive web systems. Given a PDF paper, the agent performs end-to-end processing without human intervention, including paper understanding, system modeling, and interactive webpage synthesis, enabling users to manipulate inputs and observe dynamic behaviors. To evaluate this task, we introduce a benchmark of 19 research papers paired with expert-built interactive systems as ground truth. We further propose PaperVoyager, a structured generation framework that explicitly models mechanisms and interaction logic during synthesis. Experiments show that PaperVoyager significantly improves the quality of generated interactive systems, offering a new paradigm for interactive scientific paper understanding.

Long-term memory is essential for persistent LLM agents, yet prevailing architectures store historical interactions as unstructured, flat text. This unconstrained storage induces provenance-role collapse, a critical failure mode where agents suffer from source-monitoring errors. To resolve this cognitive vulnerability at the architectural level, we propose MemIR, a typed Memory Intermediate Representation that operationalizes source monitoring as a structural constraint. MemIR writes long-term memory into grounded atoms that separate raw evidence, retrieval cues, and truth-bearing claims, with factual authorization restricted to supported claim atoms. It then applies multi-route atomic projection and provenance-scoped utilization to transform heterogeneous retrieval hits into claim-centered candidate bundles and a normalized fact interface for answer generation. Experiments on LoCoMo and BEAM-100K demonstrate that MemIR consistently outperforms existing memory baselines, especially on tasks requiring source tracking, temporal grounding, and aggregation of fragmented evidence.

Protein-ligand modeling underpins computational drug discovery and molecular design. Existing protein-ligand benchmarks typically evaluate whether a protein and ligand interact and how strongly they bind, through tasks such as binary binding prediction and affinity regression. However, these evaluations provide limited evidence of whether models can localize binding sites or identify the non-covalent interactions underlying molecular recognition. To address this gap, we introduce InteractBind, a large-scale protein-ligand dataset comprising approximately 100k protein-ligand pairs, together with a benchmark for fine-grained evaluation. The core fine-grained task is that of binding-site localization, which uses protein-residue and ligand-atom interaction maps spanning six major types of non-covalent interactions to assess whether model-derived interaction maps localize binding sites. InteractBind further includes binding affinity and protein similarity-controlled splits to support realistic generalization assessment. Using InteractBind, we evaluate eight existing sequence-based and interaction-aware models, assessing binary binding prediction and binding-site localization. Results reveal limited binding-site localization despite strong binary binding prediction, with marked variation across non-covalent interaction types. Overall, InteractBind establishes a benchmark paradigm that encourages the development of more interpretable and physically grounded protein-ligand models.

Advancements at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing are crucial for applications like assistive tech, multimedia querying, and robotics. This dissertation proposes novel architectures to improve intelligent agents across three key vision-language tasks: image captioning, visual dialog, and interactive instruction following. First, we address limitations in visual representation for image captioning. Traditional models rely on region-based features from CNN detectors, which lack global context and suffer from high computational overhead. We propose GRIT (Grid and Region-based Image captioning Transformer), a transformer-only architecture. By integrating grid and region features using a DETR-based detector, GRIT enables end-to-end training and out-performs prior methods in both inference accuracy and speed. Second, we tackle visual dialog, which requires multi-turn conversation about an image. The challenge lies in efficiently modeling interactions between multiple inputs (image, question, history). We introduce LTMI (Light-weight Transformer for Many Inputs). Utilizing a specialized attention block, an LTMI layer matches the representational power of a standard Transformer extension while utilizing less than one-tenth of its parameters, as validated on the VisDial dataset. Finally, we study interactive instruction-following for embodied AI using the ALFRED dataset. We propose a framework featuring a two-stage instruction interpretation: it first decodes language directives independently of visual context to predict a tentative action-object sequence, which is then fused with visual features for final execution. Using multiple egocentric views and hierarchical attention, our method accurately localizes objects and achieves a state-of-the-art unseen success rate of 8.37%.

Collecting large-scale egocentric video datasets with dense spatial and temporal annotations is costly, slow, and often constrained by environmental biases, privacy constraints, and limited coverage of interaction patterns. While synthetic data has shown strong potential in several vision domains, its use for egocentric perception remains relatively underexplored, especially for tasks requiring temporally coherent human-object interactions. In this work, we introduce EgoInteract, a controllable simulator for egocentric video generation designed to model fine-grained egocentric interactions and their temporal dynamics. The simulator enables precise control over camera, human body and hand motion, object manipulation, and scene composition across diverse environments. Building on this framework, we generate a synthetic egocentric video dataset with dense spatial and temporal annotations for temporal action segmentation, next-active object detection, interaction anticipation, and hand-object interaction detection. We evaluate models trained with simulated data on multiple real-world egocentric benchmarks spanning diverse environments, object categories, and interaction patterns. Results show consistent improvements over strong baselines across tasks and datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness and transferability of our simulation-based approach.

Automated laboratories hold the promise of accelerating scientific discovery, yet their deployment is bottlenecked by the difficulty of designing safe and executable environments. While simulator-based design offers scalability, existing 3D scene generation methods are primarily tailored for household settings, optimizing for visual plausibility while neglecting the protocol grounding and layout-level safety constraints essential for scientific experimentation. We present LabBuilder, an end-to-end system that generates and verifies 3D laboratory layouts from concise textual specifications. It operates through three tightly coupled components: LabForge first curates a meta-dataset of annotated assets and chemical knowledge, translating natural language specifications into structured protocols; building on these protocols, LabGen synthesizes laboratory layouts via an iterative, constraint-aware optimization strategy; finally, LabTouchstone evaluates the resulting layouts as a unified benchmark. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LabBuilder significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, producing laboratory environments that are realistic and valid under modeled geometric, chemical-safety, and navigation constraints.

Reconstructing 3D Human-Object Interaction from an RGB image is essential for perceptive systems. Yet, this remains challenging as it requires capturing the subtle physical coupling between the body and objects. While current methods rely on sparse, binary contact cues, these fail to model the continuous proximity and dense spatial relationships that characterize natural interactions. We address this limitation via InterFields, a representation that encodes dense, continuous proximity across the entire body and object surfaces. However, inferring these fields from single images is inherently ill-posed. To tackle this, our intuition is that interaction patterns are characteristically structured by the action and object geometry. We capture this structure in LEXIS, a novel discrete manifold of interaction signatures learned via a VQ-VAE. We then develop LEXIS-Flow, a diffusion framework that leverages LEXIS signatures to estimate human and object meshes alongside their InterFields. Notably, these InterFields help in a guided refinement that ensures physically-plausible, proximity-aware reconstructions without requiring post-hoc optimization. Evaluation on Open3DHOI and BEHAVE shows that LEXIS-Flow significantly outperforms existing SotA baselines in reconstruction, contact, and proximity quality. Our approach not only improves generalization but also yields reconstructions perceived as more realistic, moving us closer to holistic 3D scene understanding. Code & models will be public at https://anticdimi.github.io/lexis.

Synthesizing human--object interaction (HOI) videos has broad practical value in e-commerce, digital advertising, and virtual marketing. However, current diffusion models, despite their photorealistic rendering capability, still frequently fail on (i) the structural stability of sensitive regions such as hands and faces and (ii) physically plausible contact (e.g., avoiding hand--object interpenetration). We present CoInteract, an end-to-end framework for HOI video synthesis conditioned on a person reference image, a product reference image, text prompts, and speech audio. CoInteract introduces two complementary designs embedded into a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbone. First, we propose a Human-Aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) that routes tokens to lightweight, region-specialized experts via spatially supervised routing, improving fine-grained structural fidelity with minimal parameter overhead. Second, we propose Spatially-Structured Co-Generation, a dual-stream training paradigm that jointly models an RGB appearance stream and an auxiliary HOI structure stream to inject interaction geometry priors. During training, the HOI stream attends to RGB tokens and its supervision regularizes shared backbone weights; at inference, the HOI branch is removed for zero-overhead RGB generation. Experimental results demonstrate that CoInteract significantly outperforms existing methods in structural stability, logical consistency, and interaction realism.

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based biomechanical simulations have the potential to revolutionise HCI research and interaction design, but currently lack usability and interpretability. Using the Human Action Cycle as a design lens, we identify key limitations of biomechanical RL frameworks and develop MyoInteract, a novel framework for fast prototyping of biomechanical HCI tasks. MyoInteract allows designers to setup tasks, user models, and training parameters from an easy-to-use GUI within minutes. It trains and evaluates muscle-actuated simulated users within minutes, reducing training times by up to 98%. A workshop study with 12 interaction designers revealed that MyoInteract allowed novices in biomechanical RL to successfully setup, train, and assess goal-directed user movements within a single session. By transforming biomechanical RL from a days-long expert task into an accessible hour-long workflow, this work significantly lowers barriers to entry and accelerates iteration cycles in HCI biomechanics research.