Towards Closed-Loop Embodied Empathy Evolution: Probing LLM-Centric Lifelong Empathic Motion Generation in Unseen Scenarios

In the literature, existing human-centric emotional motion generation frameworks primarily focus on boosting performance within a single scale-fixed dataset, largely neglecting the flexible and scale-increasing motion scenarios (e.g., sports, dance), whereas effectively learning these newly emerging scenarios can significantly enhance the model’s real-world generalization ability. Inspired by this, this paper proposes a new LLM-Centric Lifelong Empathic Motion Generation (L$^2$-EMG) task, which aims to equip LLMs with the capability to continually acquire emotional motion generation knowledge across different unseen scenarios, potentially contributing to building a closed-loop and self-evolving embodied agent equipped with both empathy and intelligence. Further, this paper poses two key challenges in the L$^2$-EMG task, i.e., the emotion decoupling challenge and the scenario adapting challenge. To this end, this paper proposes an Emotion-Transferable and Scenario-Adapted Mixture of Experts (ES-MoE) approach which designs a causal-guided emotion decoupling block and a scenario-adapted expert constructing block to address the two challenges, respectively. Especially, this paper constructs multiple L$^2$-EMG datasets to validate the effectiveness of the ES-MoE approach. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ES-MoE outperforms advanced baselines, highlighting the significance of these two challenges in L$^2$-EMG and the effectiveness of ES-MoE in continual emotional motion generation.