Related papers: Lightweight Visual Reasoning for Socially-Aware Ro…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) empowers agents to associate time-sequenced visual observations with corresponding instructions to make sequential decisions. However, generalization remains a persistent challenge, particularly when…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for eliciting reasoning chains before generating final answers. However, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generate reasoning that lacks integration of visual…
Robot navigation in dynamic, human-centered environments requires socially-compliant decisions grounded in robust scene understanding. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit promising capabilities such as object recognition,…
Despite interpretability work analyzing VIT encoders and transformer activations, we don't yet understand why Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) struggle on perception-heavy tasks. We offer an under-studied perspective by examining how…
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated potential in enhancing mobile robot navigation in human-centric environments by understanding contextual cues, human intentions, and social dynamics while exhibiting reasoning…
Robots operating in human-shared environments must not only achieve task-level navigation objectives such as safety and efficiency, but also adapt their behavior to human preferences. However, as human preferences are typically expressed in…
Automated vehicles lack natural communication channels with other road users, making external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) essential for conveying intent and maintaining trust in shared environments. However, most eHMI studies rely on…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) presents a complex challenge in embodied AI, requiring agents to interpret natural language instructions and navigate through visually rich, unfamiliar environments. Recent advances in large…
The socially-aware navigation system has evolved to adeptly avoid various obstacles while performing multiple tasks, such as point-to-point navigation, human-following, and -guiding. However, a prominent gap persists: in Human-Robot…
Robots operating in everyday environments must often decide when and whether to engage with people, yet such decisions often hinge on subtle nonverbal cues that unfold over time and are difficult to model explicitly. Drawing on a five-day…
As robotics become increasingly integrated into construction workflows, their ability to interpret and respond to human behavior will be essential for enabling safe and effective collaboration. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as…
Mobile robot platforms will increasingly be tasked with activities that involve grasping and manipulating objects in open world environments. Affordance understanding provides a robot with means to realise its goals and execute its tasks,…
This paper investigates the potential of vision-language models (VLMs) to assist people with blindness and low vision (pBLV) in navigation tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art closed-source models, including GPT-4V, GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro,…
Autonomous driving systems often infer pedestrian yielding behavior from geometric and kinematic cues alone, limiting their ability to reason about visual scene context and age-dependent behavioral variability. This limitation can produce…
One of the current trends in robotics is to employ large language models (LLMs) to provide non-predefined command execution and natural human-robot interaction. It is useful to have an environment map together with its language…
Service and assistive robots are increasingly being deployed in dynamic social environments; however, ensuring transparent and explainable interactions remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a multimodal explainability module…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has been studied mainly in either discrete or continuous settings, with little attention to dynamic, crowded environments. We present HA-VLN 2.0, a unified benchmark introducing explicit social-awareness…
The deployment of artificial intelligence models at the edge is increasingly critical for autonomous robots operating in GPS-denied environments where local, resource-efficient reasoning is essential. This work demonstrates the feasibility…
Industrial warehouses are congested with moving forklifts, shelves and personnel, making robot teleoperation particularly risky and demanding for blind and low-vision (BLV) operators. Although accessible teleoperation plays a key role in…
This report provides an architecture-led analysis of two modern vision-language models (VLMs), Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct, and explains how their architectural properties map to a practical video-to-artifact…