Yang Liu

Other people with similar names: Yang Janet Liu (Georgetown University; 刘洋), Yang Liu (Tsinghua), Yang Liu (Fudan), Yang Liu (BIGAI), Yang Liu (Hunan), Yang Liu, Yang Liu (3M Health Information Systems), Yang Liu, Yang Liu, Yang Liu (UC Santa Cruz), Yang Liu (South China University of Technology), Yang Liu, Yang Liu, Yang Liu (NTU), Yang Liu (Sun Yat-sen University), Yang Liu (North Carolina Central University), Yang Liu (Beijing Language and Culture University), Yang Liu (National University of Defense Technology), Yang Liu (Edinburgh Ph.D., Microsoft), Yang Liu (University of Helsinki), Yang Liu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)), Yang Liu (刘扬) (刘扬; Ph.D Purdue; ICSI, Dallas, Facebook, Liulishuo, Amazon), Yang Liu (刘洋) (刘洋; ICT, Tsinghua, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence), Yang Liu (Microsoft Cognitive Services Research), Yang Liu (刘扬) (Peking University), Yang Liu (Samsung Research Center Beijing), Yang Liu (Tianjin University, China), Yang Liu (Univ. of Michigan, UC Santa Cruz), Yang Liu (Wilfrid Laurier University)

Unverified author pages with similar names: Yang Liu


2026

Traditional Video Quality Assessment (VQA) focuses narrowly on aesthetic fidelity, overlooking the complex social dynamics that define quality in User-Generated Content (UGC). In this work, we propose a paradigm shift from signal-centric metrics to human-centric resonance assessment. We introduce CASTER (Community-Aware Assessment of Social Textual Engagement and Resonance), a new task that evaluates whether a UGC item achieves positive community resonance based on its multimodal attributes rather than visual quality alone. To address this, we present MEDEA (Multimodal Engagement-Driven Evaluation Architecture), which introduces a novel Social Chain-of-Thought (Social-CoT) mechanism. Unlike traditional logical CoT, Social-CoT performs multimodal perspective-taking, instantiating diverse viewer personas to simulate collective cognitive and emotional reactions (i.e., the "community mind") before deriving a quality judgment. MEDEA is trained via a two-stage approach involving supervised fine-tuning and process-supervised reinforcement learning with Social Alignment Reward to ensure reasoning paths are grounded in authentic human social cognition. To support this task, we release CASTER-Bench, a comprehensive human-annotated benchmark covering diverse UGC categories. Experiments demonstrate that MEDEA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CASTER-Bench while providing interpretable and empathetic reasoning paths that align with real community feedback.