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Main Authors: Janssens, Ruben, Belpaeme, Tony
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19196
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author Janssens, Ruben
Belpaeme, Tony
author_facet Janssens, Ruben
Belpaeme, Tony
contents Large language models have given social robots the ability to autonomously engage in open-domain conversations. However, they are still missing a fundamental social skill: making use of the multiple modalities that carry social interactions. While previous work has focused on task-oriented interactions that require referencing the environment or specific phenomena in social interactions such as dialogue breakdowns, we outline the overall needs of a multimodal system for social conversations with robots. We then argue that vision-language models are able to process this wide range of visual information in a sufficiently general manner for autonomous social robots. We describe how to adapt them to this setting, which technical challenges remain, and briefly discuss evaluation practices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_19196
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Multimodal Social Conversations with Robots: Using Vision-Language Models
Janssens, Ruben
Belpaeme, Tony
Robotics
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Large language models have given social robots the ability to autonomously engage in open-domain conversations. However, they are still missing a fundamental social skill: making use of the multiple modalities that carry social interactions. While previous work has focused on task-oriented interactions that require referencing the environment or specific phenomena in social interactions such as dialogue breakdowns, we outline the overall needs of a multimodal system for social conversations with robots. We then argue that vision-language models are able to process this wide range of visual information in a sufficiently general manner for autonomous social robots. We describe how to adapt them to this setting, which technical challenges remain, and briefly discuss evaluation practices.
title Towards Multimodal Social Conversations with Robots: Using Vision-Language Models
topic Robotics
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19196