The ACM Multimedia 2025 Grand Challenge of Avatar-based Multimodal Empathetic Conversation
Han Zhang, Hao Fei, Hong Wei Han, Lizi Liao, Erik Cambria, Min Zhang · 2025
The Ava-MERG Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2025 explores avatar-based multimodal empathetic response generation by advancing dialogue systems that respond with emotional awareness across text, speech, and talking-face video. To support this goal, we constructed a high-quality dataset featuring aligned multimodal responses in diverse conversational scenarios. The challenge comprises two progressively complex subtasks centering around multimodal-aware empathetic response generation. We aim to promote research in empathetic AI and affective computing.