InfoMAE: Pair-Efficient Cross-Modal Alignment for Multimodal Time-Series Sensing Signals

Standard multimodal self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms regard cross-modal synchronization as implicit supervisory labels during pretraining, thus posing high requirements on the scale and quality of multimodal samples. These constraints significantly limit the performance of sensing intelligence in IoT applications, as the heterogeneity and the non-interpretability of time-series signals result in abundant unimodal data but scarce high-quality multimodal pairs. This paper proposes InfoMAE, a cross-modal alignment framework that tackles the challenge of multimodal pair efficiency under the SSL setting by facilitating efficient cross-modal alignment of pretrained unimodal representations. InfoMAE achieves \textit{efficient cross-modal alignment} with \textit{limited data pairs} through a novel information theory-inspired formulation that simultaneously addresses distribution-level and instance-level alignment. Extensive experiments on two real-world IoT applications are performed to evaluate InfoMAE's pairing efficiency to bridge pretrained unimodal models into a cohesive joint multimodal model. InfoMAE enhances downstream multimodal tasks by over 60% with significantly improved multimodal pairing efficiency. It also improves unimodal task accuracy by an average of 22%.

Toward Foundation Models for Online Complex Event Detection in CPS-IoT: A Case Study

Complex events (CEs) play a crucial role in CPS-IoT applications, enabling high-level decision-making in domains such as smart monitoring and autonomous systems. However, most existing models focus on short-span perception tasks, lacking the long-term reasoning required for CE detection. CEs consist of sequences of short-time atomic events (AEs) governed by spatiotemporal dependencies. Detecting them is difficult due to long, noisy sensor data and the challenge of filtering out irrelevant AEs while capturing meaningful patterns. This work explores CE detection as a case study for CPS-IoT foundation models capable of long-term reasoning. We evaluate three approaches: (1) leveraging large language models (LLMs), (2) employing various neural architectures that learn CE rules from data, and (3) adopting a neurosymbolic approach that integrates neural models with symbolic engines embedding human knowledge. Our results show that the state-space model, Mamba, which belongs to the second category, outperforms all methods in accuracy and generalization to longer, unseen sensor traces. These findings suggest that state-space models could be a strong backbone for CPS-IoT foundation models for long-span reasoning tasks.

MobiVital: Self-supervised Time-series Quality Estimation for Contactless Respiration Monitoring Using UWB Radar

Respiration waveforms are increasingly recognized as important biomarkers, offering insights beyond simple respiration rates, such as detecting breathing irregularities for disease diagnosis or monitoring breath patterns to guide rehabilitation training. Previous works in wireless respiration monitoring have primarily focused on estimating respiration rate, where the breath waveforms are often generated as a by-product. As a result, issues such as waveform deformation and inversion have largely been overlooked, reducing the signal's utility for applications requiring breathing waveforms. To address this problem, we present a novel approach, MobiVital, that improves the quality of respiration waveforms obtained from ultra-wideband (UWB) radar data. MobiVital combines a self-supervised autoregressive model for breathing waveform extraction with a biology-informed algorithm to detect and correct waveform inversions. To encourage reproducible research efforts for developing wireless vital signal monitoring systems, we also release a 12-person, 24-hour UWB radar vital signal dataset, with time-synchronized ground truth obtained from wearable sensors. Our results show that the respiration waveforms produced by our system exhibit a 7-34% increase in fidelity to the ground truth compared to the baselines and can benefit downstream tasks such as respiration rate estimation.

NARCE: A Mamba-Based Neural Algorithmic Reasoner Framework for Online Complex Event Detection

Current machine learning models excel in short-span perception tasks but struggle to derive high-level insights from long-term observation, a capability central to understanding complex events (CEs). CEs, defined as sequences of short-term atomic events (AEs) governed by spatiotemporal rules, are challenging to detect online due to the need to extract meaningful patterns from long and noisy sensor data while ignoring irrelevant events. We hypothesize that state-based methods are well-suited for CE detection, as they capture event progression through state transitions without requiring long-term memory. Baseline experiments validate this, demonstrating that the state-space model Mamba outperforms existing architectures. However, Mamba's reliance on extensive labeled data, which are difficult to obtain, motivates our second hypothesis: decoupling CE rule learning from noisy sensor data can reduce data requirements. To address this, we propose NARCE, a framework that combines Neural Algorithmic Reasoning (NAR) to split the task into two components: (i) learning CE rules independently of sensor data using synthetic concept traces generated by LLMs and (ii) mapping sensor inputs to these rules via an adapter. Our results show that NARCE outperforms baselines in accuracy, generalization to unseen and longer sensor data, and data efficiency, significantly reducing annotation costs while advancing robust CE detection.

ADMN: A Layer-Wise Adaptive Multimodal Network for Dynamic Input Noise and Compute Resources

Multimodal deep learning systems are deployed in dynamic scenarios due to the robustness afforded by multiple sensing modalities. Nevertheless, they struggle with varying compute resource availability (due to multi-tenancy, device heterogeneity, etc.) and fluctuating quality of inputs (from sensor feed corruption, environmental noise, etc.). Current multimodal systems employ static resource provisioning and cannot easily adapt when compute resources change over time. Additionally, their reliance on processing sensor data with fixed feature extractors is ill-equipped to handle variations in modality quality. Consequently, uninformative modalities, such as those with high noise, needlessly consume resources better allocated towards other modalities. We propose ADMN, a layer-wise Adaptive Depth Multimodal Network capable of tackling both challenges - it adjusts the total number of active layers across all modalities to meet compute resource constraints, and continually reallocates layers across input modalities according to their modality quality. Our evaluations showcase ADMN can match the accuracy of state-of-the-art networks while reducing up to 75% of their floating-point operations.

AutoLife: Automatic Life Journaling with Smartphones and LLMs

This paper introduces a novel mobile sensing application - life journaling - designed to generate semantic descriptions of users' daily lives. We present AutoLife, an automatic life journaling system based on commercial smartphones. AutoLife only inputs low-cost sensor data (without photos or audio) from smartphones and can automatically generate comprehensive life journals for users. To achieve this, we first derive time, motion, and location contexts from multimodal sensor data, and harness the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), enriched with commonsense knowledge about human lives, to interpret diverse contexts and generate life journals. To manage the task complexity and long sensing duration, a multilayer framework is proposed, which decomposes tasks and seamlessly integrates LLMs with other techniques for life journaling. This study establishes a real-life dataset as a benchmark and extensive experiment results demonstrate that AutoLife produces accurate and reliable life journals.

Analysing Explanation-Related Interactions in Collaborative Perception-Cognition-Communication-Action

Effective communication is essential in collaborative tasks, so AI-equipped robots working alongside humans need to be able to explain their behaviour in order to cooperate effectively and earn trust. We analyse and classify communications among human participants collaborating to complete a simulated emergency response task. The analysis identifies messages that relate to various kinds of interactive explanations identified in the explainable AI literature. This allows us to understand what type of explanations humans expect from their teammates in such settings, and thus where AI-equipped robots most need explanation capabilities. We find that most explanation-related messages seek clarification in the decisions or actions taken. We also confirm that messages have an impact on the performance of our simulated task.

MMBind: Unleashing the Potential of Distributed and Heterogeneous Data for Multimodal Learning in IoT

Multimodal sensing systems are increasingly prevalent in various real-world applications. Most existing multimodal learning approaches heavily rely on training with a large amount of complete multimodal data. However, such a setting is impractical in real-world IoT sensing applications where data is typically collected by distributed nodes with heterogeneous data modalities, and is also rarely labeled. In this paper, we propose MMBind, a new framework for multimodal learning on distributed and heterogeneous IoT data. The key idea of MMBind is to construct a pseudo-paired multimodal dataset for model training by binding data from disparate sources and incomplete modalities through a sufficiently descriptive shared modality. We demonstrate that data of different modalities observing similar events, even captured at different times and locations, can be effectively used for multimodal training. Moreover, we propose an adaptive multimodal learning architecture capable of training models with heterogeneous modality combinations, coupled with a weighted contrastive learning approach to handle domain shifts among disparate data. Evaluations on ten real-world multimodal datasets highlight that MMBind outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under varying data incompleteness and domain shift, and holds promise for advancing multimodal foundation model training in IoT applications.

Artificial Intelligence of Things: A Survey

The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) has given rise to a new paradigm known as the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). In this survey, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review of AIoT research. We examine AIoT literature related to sensing, computing, and networking & communication, which form the three key components of AIoT. In addition to advancements in these areas, we review domain-specific AIoT systems that are designed for various important application domains. We have also created an accompanying GitHub repository, where we compile the papers included in this survey: https://github.com/AIoT-MLSys-Lab/AIoT-Survey. This repository will be actively maintained and updated with new research as it becomes available. As both IoT and AI become increasingly critical to our society, we believe AIoT is emerging as an essential research field at the intersection of IoT and modern AI. We hope this survey will serve as a valuable resource for those engaged in AIoT research and act as a catalyst for future explorations to bridge gaps and drive advancements in this exciting field.

SensorBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Coding-Based Sensor Processing

Effective processing, interpretation, and management of sensor data have emerged as a critical component of cyber-physical systems. Traditionally, processing sensor data requires profound theoretical knowledge and proficiency in signal-processing tools. However, recent works show that Large Language Models (LLMs) have promising capabilities in processing sensory data, suggesting their potential as copilots for developing sensing systems. To explore this potential, we construct a comprehensive benchmark, SensorBench, to establish a quantifiable objective. The benchmark incorporates diverse real-world sensor datasets for various tasks. The results show that while LLMs exhibit considerable proficiency in simpler tasks, they face inherent challenges in processing compositional tasks with parameter selections compared to engineering experts. Additionally, we investigate four prompting strategies for sensor processing and show that self-verification can outperform all other baselines in 48% of tasks. Our study provides a comprehensive benchmark and prompting analysis for future developments, paving the way toward an LLM-based sensor processing copilot.