Comparing Native and Non-native English Speakers' Behaviors in Collaborative Writing through Visual Analytics

Understanding collaborative writing dynamics between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) is critical for enhancing collaboration quality and team inclusivity. In this paper, we partnered with communication researchers to develop visual analytics solutions for comparing NS and NNS behaviors in 162 writing sessions across 27 teams. The primary challenges in analyzing writing behaviors are data complexity and the uncertainties introduced by automated methods. In response, we present \textsc{COALA}, a novel visual analytics tool that improves model interpretability by displaying uncertainties in author clusters, generating behavior summaries using large language models, and visualizing writing-related actions at multiple granularities. We validated the effectiveness of \textsc{COALA} through user studies with domain experts (N=2+2) and researchers with relevant experience (N=8). We present the insights discovered by participants using \textsc{COALA}, suggest features for future AI-assisted collaborative writing tools, and discuss the broader implications for analyzing collaborative processes beyond writing.

NatSGLD: A Dataset with Speech, Gesture, Logic, and Demonstration for Robot Learning in Natural Human-Robot Interaction

Recent advances in multimodal Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) datasets emphasize the integration of speech and gestures, allowing robots to absorb explicit knowledge and tacit understanding. However, existing datasets primarily focus on elementary tasks like object pointing and pushing, limiting their applicability to complex domains. They prioritize simpler human command data but place less emphasis on training robots to correctly interpret tasks and respond appropriately. To address these gaps, we present the NatSGLD dataset, which was collected using a Wizard of Oz (WoZ) method, where participants interacted with a robot they believed to be autonomous. NatSGLD records humans' multimodal commands (speech and gestures), each paired with a demonstration trajectory and a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula that provides a ground-truth interpretation of the commanded tasks. This dataset serves as a foundational resource for research at the intersection of HRI and machine learning. By providing multimodal inputs and detailed annotations, NatSGLD enables exploration in areas such as multimodal instruction following, plan recognition, and human-advisable reinforcement learning from demonstrations. We release the dataset and code under the MIT License at https://www.snehesh.com/natsgld/ to support future HRI research.

The Design of On-Body Robots for Older Adults

Wearable technology has significantly improved the quality of life for older adults, and the emergence of on-body, movable robots presents new opportunities to further enhance well-being. Yet, the interaction design for these robots remains under-explored, particularly from the perspective of older adults. We present findings from a two-phase co-design process involving 13 older adults to uncover design principles for on-body robots for this population. We identify a rich spectrum of potential applications and characterize a design space to inform how on-body robots should be built for older adults. Our findings highlight the importance of considering factors like co-presence, embodiment, and multi-modal communication. Our work offers design insights to facilitate the integration of on-body robots into daily life and underscores the value of involving older adults in the co-design process to promote usability and acceptance of emerging wearable robotic technologies.

DebiasPI: Inference-time Debiasing by Prompt Iteration of a Text-to-Image Generative Model

Ethical intervention prompting has emerged as a tool to counter demographic biases of text-to-image generative AI models. Existing solutions either require to retrain the model or struggle to generate images that reflect desired distributions on gender and race. We propose an inference-time process called DebiasPI for Debiasing-by-Prompt-Iteration that provides prompt intervention by enabling the user to control the distributions of individuals' demographic attributes in image generation. DebiasPI keeps track of which attributes have been generated either by probing the internal state of the model or by using external attribute classifiers. Its control loop guides the text-to-image model to select not yet sufficiently represented attributes, With DebiasPI, we were able to create images with equal representations of race and gender that visualize challenging concepts of news headlines. We also experimented with the attributes age, body type, profession, and skin tone, and measured how attributes change when our intervention prompt targets the distribution of an unrelated attribute type. We found, for example, if the text-to-image model is asked to balance racial representation, gender representation improves but the skin tone becomes less diverse. Attempts to cover a wide range of skin colors with various intervention prompts showed that the model struggles to generate the palest skin tones. We conducted various ablation studies, in which we removed DebiasPI's attribute control, that reveal the model's propensity to generate young, male characters. It sometimes visualized career success by generating two-panel images with a pre-success dark-skinned person becoming light-skinned with success, or switching gender from pre-success female to post-success male, thus further motivating ethical intervention prompting with DebiasPI.

FatesGS: Fast and Accurate Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction using Gaussian Splatting with Depth-Feature Consistency

Recently, Gaussian Splatting has sparked a new trend in the field of computer vision. Apart from novel view synthesis, it has also been extended to the area of multi-view reconstruction. The latest methods facilitate complete, detailed surface reconstruction while ensuring fast training speed. However, these methods still require dense input views, and their output quality significantly degrades with sparse views. We observed that the Gaussian primitives tend to overfit the few training views, leading to noisy floaters and incomplete reconstruction surfaces. In this paper, we present an innovative sparse-view reconstruction framework that leverages intra-view depth and multi-view feature consistency to achieve remarkably accurate surface reconstruction. Specifically, we utilize monocular depth ranking information to supervise the consistency of depth distribution within patches and employ a smoothness loss to enhance the continuity of the distribution. To achieve finer surface reconstruction, we optimize the absolute position of depth through multi-view projection features. Extensive experiments on DTU and BlendedMVS demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a speedup of 60x to 200x, achieving swift and fine-grained mesh reconstruction without the need for costly pre-training.

Sparis: Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction of Indoor Scenes from Sparse Views

In recent years, reconstructing indoor scene geometry from multi-view images has achieved encouraging accomplishments. Current methods incorporate monocular priors into neural implicit surface models to achieve high-quality reconstructions. However, these methods require hundreds of images for scene reconstruction. When only a limited number of views are available as input, the performance of monocular priors deteriorates due to scale ambiguity, leading to the collapse of the reconstructed scene geometry. In this paper, we propose a new method, named Sparis, for indoor surface reconstruction from sparse views. Specifically, we investigate the impact of monocular priors on sparse scene reconstruction, introducing a novel prior based on inter-image matching information. Our prior offers more accurate depth information while ensuring cross-view matching consistency. Additionally, we employ an angular filter strategy and an epipolar matching weight function, aiming to reduce errors due to view matching inaccuracies, thereby refining the inter-image prior for improved reconstruction accuracy. The experiments conducted on widely used benchmarks demonstrate superior performance in sparse-view scene reconstruction.

Predicting Long Term Sequential Policy Value Using Softer Surrogates

Performing policy evaluation in education, healthcare and online commerce can be challenging, because it can require waiting substantial amounts of time to observe outcomes over the desired horizon of interest. While offline evaluation methods can be used to estimate the performance of a new decision policy from historical data in some cases, such methods struggle when the new policy involves novel actions or is being run in a new decision process with potentially different dynamics. Here we consider how to estimate the full-horizon value of a new decision policy using only short-horizon data from the new policy, and historical full-horizon data from a different behavior policy. We introduce two new estimators for this setting, including a doubly robust estimator, and provide formal analysis of their properties. Our empirical results on two realistic simulators, of HIV treatment and sepsis treatment, show that our methods can often provide informative estimates of a new decision policy ten times faster than waiting for the full horizon, highlighting that it may be possible to quickly identify if a new decision policy, involving new actions, is better or worse than existing past policies.

Predicting Long-Term Student Outcomes from Short-Term EdTech Log Data

Educational stakeholders are often particularly interested in sparse, delayed student outcomes, like end-of-year statewide exams. The rare occurrence of such assessments makes it harder to identify students likely to fail such assessments, as well as making it slow for researchers and educators to be able to assess the effectiveness of particular educational tools. Prior work has primarily focused on using logs from students full usage (e.g. year-long) of an educational product to predict outcomes, or considered predictive accuracy using a few minutes to predict outcomes after a short (e.g. 1 hour) session. In contrast, we investigate machine learning predictors using students' logs during their first few hours of usage can provide useful predictive insight into those students' end-of-school year external assessment. We do this on three diverse datasets: from students in Uganda using a literacy game product, and from students in the US using two mathematics intelligent tutoring systems. We consider various measures of the accuracy of the resulting predictors, including its ability to identify students at different parts along the assessment performance distribution. Our findings suggest that short-term log usage data, from 2-5 hours, can be used to provide valuable signal about students' long-term external performance.

HIIF: Hierarchical Encoding based Implicit Image Function for Continuous Super-resolution

Recent advances in implicit neural representations (INRs) have shown significant promise in modeling visual signals for various low-vision tasks including image super-resolution (ISR). INR-based ISR methods typically learn continuous representations, providing flexibility for generating high-resolution images at any desired scale from their low-resolution counterparts. However, existing INR-based ISR methods utilize multi-layer perceptrons for parameterization in the network; this does not take account of the hierarchical structure existing in local sampling points and hence constrains the representation capability. In this paper, we propose a new \textbf{H}ierarchical encoding based \textbf{I}mplicit \textbf{I}mage \textbf{F}unction for continuous image super-resolution, \textbf{HIIF}, which leverages a novel hierarchical positional encoding that enhances the local implicit representation, enabling it to capture fine details at multiple scales. Our approach also embeds a multi-head linear attention mechanism within the implicit attention network by taking additional non-local information into account. Our experiments show that, when integrated with different backbone encoders, HIIF outperforms the state-of-the-art continuous image super-resolution methods by up to 0.17dB in PSNR. The source code of HIIF will be made publicly available at \url{www.github.com}.

BVI-CR: A Multi-View Human Dataset for Volumetric Video Compression

The advances in immersive technologies and 3D reconstruction have enabled the creation of digital replicas of real-world objects and environments with fine details. These processes generate vast amounts of 3D data, requiring more efficient compression methods to satisfy the memory and bandwidth constraints associated with data storage and transmission. However, the development and validation of efficient 3D data compression methods are constrained by the lack of comprehensive and high-quality volumetric video datasets, which typically require much more effort to acquire and consume increased resources compared to 2D image and video databases. To bridge this gap, we present an open multi-view volumetric human dataset, denoted BVI-CR, which contains 18 multi-view RGB-D captures and their corresponding textured polygonal meshes, depicting a range of diverse human actions. Each video sequence contains 10 views in 1080p resolution with durations between 10-15 seconds at 30FPS. Using BVI-CR, we benchmarked three conventional and neural coordinate-based multi-view video compression methods, following the MPEG MIV Common Test Conditions, and reported their rate quality performance based on various quality metrics. The results show the great potential of neural representation based methods in volumetric video compression compared to conventional video coding methods (with an up to 38\% average coding gain in PSNR). This dataset provides a development and validation platform for a variety of tasks including volumetric reconstruction, compression, and quality assessment. The database will be shared publicly at \url{https://github.com/fan-aaron-zhang/bvi-cr}.