Xuelian Cheng

Author directory

2026

Despite the impressive progress of recent MLLMs on spatio-temporal video grounding (STVG), existing evaluations and training data focus primarily on simple queries. They largely overlook the compositional queries prevalent in real-world scenarios, where a target must be disambiguated by jointly reasoning about its attributes and relations to other entities. To bridge this gap, we propose Compositional Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (CompSTVG), a task that requires models to process complex textual queries where every intertwined attribute and relational cue is essential for disambiguation. To facilitate this task at scale, we build a synthetic data engine that leverages a spatio-temporal scene graph as a difficulty measure and casts difficulty-controlled query synthesis as a constraint programming problem, producing difficulty-graded data for both evaluation and training. Built on this engine, we introduce STVG-CompBench, a benchmark stratified by explicit difficulty levels that jointly capture temporal complexity and spatial interference. Evaluating 11 representative STVG models on STVG-CompBench reveals that current models perform poorly on compositional queries, exhibiting a sharp performance drop that is typically obscured by overall dataset-level averages. We further construct synthetic training data and propose CurrSTVG, a curriculum reinforcement learning framework that delivers consistent gains, with the largest improvements observed on the most challenging compositional queries.
Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) aim to tailor responses to individual users, where a central challenge is preference reasoning: inferring query-relevant preferences from user-related history. Existing benchmarks, however, largely assume that such preference can be retrieved from semantically related history. We study an underexplored but practically important regime, profile-preference conceptual misalignment (PRCM), where observable profile cues and query-specific preferences lie in different concept spaces, making semantic retrieval inconsistent for personalization. We introduce Vibe-Bench, a benchmark with two psychology-grounded tasks, 3,504 personas and 12,239 dialogues, including a manually verified gold test set, and requires cross-concept preference reasoning beyond surface semantic overlap. Experiments with several personalization methods show that current PLLMs largely rely on shallow semantic correlations and fail to acquire robust cross-concept mappings. These findings establish PRCM as a distinct failure regime in PLLMs and position Vibe-Bench as a focused testbed for advancing preference reasoning beyond semantic matching.