Related papers: ECHO: An Automated Contextual Inquiry Framework fo…
We study contextual search, a generalization of binary search in higher dimensions, which captures settings such as feature-based dynamic pricing. Standard formulations of this problem assume that agents act in accordance with a specific…
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated the capacity of large language models to perform complex reasoning through intermediate steps. While effective, current CoT methods face challenges: Zero-shot-CoT can lead to reasoning…
Audio captioning is an important research area that aims to generate meaningful descriptions for audio clips. Most of the existing research extracts acoustic features of audio clips as input to encoder-decoder and transformer architectures…
What if accessing the web did not require a screen, a stable desk, or even free hands? For people navigating crowded cities, living with low vision, or experiencing cognitive overload, smart glasses coupled with AI agents could turn the web…
Emotional Support Conversation aims at reducing the seeker's emotional distress through supportive response. Existing approaches have two limitations: (1) They ignore the emotion causes of the distress, which is important for fine-grained…
Conversational question answering (ConvQA) tackles sequential information needs where contexts in follow-up questions are left implicit. Current ConvQA systems operate over homogeneous sources of information: either a knowledge base (KB),…
Cognitive behavioural therapy is widely used to help patients understand and manage psychological distress. It is often delivered through spoken conversation, where therapists attend not only to what patients say, but also to how they say…
A stream of conscious experience is extremely contextual; it is impacted by sensory stimuli, drives and emotions, and the web of associations that link, directly or indirectly, the subject of experience to other elements of the individual's…
Error attribution in Large Language Model (LLM) multi-agent systems presents a significant challenge in debugging and improving collaborative AI systems. Current approaches to pinpointing agent and step level failures in interaction traces…
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must be both safe and trustworthy to gain social acceptance and become a viable option for everyday public transportation. Explanations about the system behaviour can increase safety and trust in AVs.…
Conversational agents are increasingly woven into individuals' personal lives, yet users often underestimate the privacy risks associated with them. The moment users share information with these agents-such as large language models…
This paper describes an experimental study that aims at assessing the actual contribution of voice system messages to visual search efficiency and comfort. Messages which include spatial information on the target location are meant to…
An approach for encoding abstract dialectical frameworks and their semantics into classical higher-order logic is presented. Important properties and semantic relationships are formally encoded and proven using the proof assistant…
Both humans and machines learn the meaning of unknown words through contextual information in a sentence, but not all contexts are equally helpful for learning. We introduce an effective method for capturing the level of contextual…
Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires an agent to interpret language, perceive its environment, and navigate within 3D scenes to produce responses. Existing EQA benchmarks assume that every question must be answered, but embodied…
The audio visual benefit in speech perception, where congruent visual input enhances auditory processing, is well documented across age groups, particularly in challenging listening conditions and among individuals with varying hearing…
Voice-controlled house-hold devices, like Amazon Echo or Google Home, face the problem of performing speech recognition of device-directed speech in the presence of interfering background speech, i.e., background noise and interfering…
Identifying the topic (domain) of each user's utterance in open-domain conversational systems is a crucial step for all subsequent language understanding and response tasks. In particular, for complex domains, an utterance is often routed…
We introduce proactive hearing assistants that automatically identify and separate the wearer's conversation partners, without requiring explicit prompts. Our system operates on egocentric binaural audio and uses the wearer's self-speech as…
While affective computing has advanced considerably, multimodal emotion prediction in aging populations remains underexplored, largely due to the scarcity of dedicated datasets. Existing multimodal benchmarks predominantly target young,…