Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with 3D spatial reasoning, as they fail to construct structured abstractions of the 3D environment depicted in video inputs. To bridge this gap, drawing inspiration from cognitive theories of allocentric spatial reasoning, we investigate how to enable MLLMs to model and reason over text-based spatial representations of video. Specifically, we introduce Textual Representation of Allocentric Context from Egocentric Video (TRACE), a prompting method that induces MLLMs to generate text-based representations of 3D environments as intermediate reasoning traces for more accurate spatial question answering. TRACE encodes meta-context, camera trajectories, and detailed object entities to support structured spatial reasoning over egocentric videos. Extensive experiments on VSI-Bench and OST-Bench demonstrate that TRACE yields notable and consistent improvements over prior prompting strategies across a diverse range of MLLM backbones, spanning different parameter scales and training schemas. We further present ablation studies to validate our design choices, along with detailed analyses that probe the bottlenecks of 3D spatial reasoning in MLLMs.

Building pluralistic AI requires designing models that are able to be shaped to represent a wide range of value systems and cultures. Achieving this requires first being able to evaluate the degree to which a given model is capable of reflecting various personas. To this end, we propose a benchmark for evaluating the steerability of model personas as a function of prompting. Our design is based on a formal definition of prompt steerability, which analyzes the degree to which a model’s joint behavioral distribution can be shifted from its baseline. By defining steerability indices and inspecting how these indices change as a function of steering effort, we can estimate the steerability of a model across various persona dimensions and directions. Our benchmark reveals that the steerability of many current models is limited — due to both a skew in their baseline behavior and an asymmetry in their steerability across many persona dimensions. We release an implementation of our benchmark at https://github.com/IBM/prompt-steering.

Long-form egocentric video understanding provides rich contextual information and unique insights into long-term human behaviors, holding significant potential for applications in embodied intelligence, long-term activity analysis, and personalized assistive technologies. However, existing benchmark datasets primarily focus on single, short (e.g., minutes to tens of minutes) to moderately long videos, leaving a substantial gap in evaluating extensive, ultra-long egocentric video recordings. To address this, we introduce X-LeBench, a novel benchmark dataset meticulously designed to fill this gap by focusing on tasks requiring a comprehensive understanding of extremely long egocentric video recordings. Our X-LeBench develops a life-logging simulation pipeline that produces realistic, coherent daily plans aligned with real-world video data. This approach enables the flexible integration of synthetic daily plans with real-world footage from Ego4D—a massive-scale egocentric video dataset covers a wide range of daily life scenarios—resulting in 432 simulated video life logs spanning from 23 minutes to 16.4 hours. The evaluations of several baseline systems and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveal their poor performance across the board, highlighting the inherent challenges of long-form egocentric video understanding, such as temporal localization and reasoning, context aggregation, and memory retention, and underscoring the need for more advanced models.

Persuasion modeling is a key building block for conversational agents. Existing works in this direction are limited to analyzing textual dialogue corpus. We argue that visual signals also play an important role in understanding human persuasive behaviors. In this paper, we introduce the first multimodal dataset for modeling persuasion behaviors. Our dataset includes 199 dialogue transcriptions and videos captured in a multi-player social deduction game setting, 26,647 utterance level annotations of persuasion strategy, and game level annotations of deduction game outcomes. We provide extensive experiments to show how dialogue context and visual signals benefit persuasion strategy prediction. We also explore the generalization ability of language models for persuasion modeling and the role of persuasion strategies in predicting social deduction game outcomes. Our dataset can be found at https://persuasion-deductiongame. socialai-data.org. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/PersuationGames.