Exploring Human-AI Perception Alignment in Sensory Experiences: Do LLMs Understand Textile Hand?

Aligning large language models (LLMs) behaviour with human intent is critical for future AI. An important yet often overlooked aspect of this alignment is the perceptual alignment. Perceptual modalities like touch are more multifaceted and nuanced compared to other sensory modalities such as vision. This work investigates how well LLMs align with human touch experiences using the "textile hand" task. We created a "Guess What Textile" interaction in which participants were given two textile samples -- a target and a reference -- to handle. Without seeing them, participants described the differences between them to the LLM. Using these descriptions, the LLM attempted to identify the target textile by assessing similarity within its high-dimensional embedding space. Our results suggest that a degree of perceptual alignment exists, however varies significantly among different textile samples. For example, LLM predictions are well aligned for silk satin, but not for cotton denim. Moreover, participants didn't perceive their textile experiences closely matched by the LLM predictions. This is only the first exploration into perceptual alignment around touch, exemplified through textile hand. We discuss possible sources of this alignment variance, and how better human-AI perceptual alignment can benefit future everyday tasks.

MiliPoint: A Point Cloud Dataset for mmWave Radar

Millimetre-wave (mmWave) radar has emerged as an attractive and cost-effective alternative for human activity sensing compared to traditional camera-based systems. mmWave radars are also non-intrusive, providing better protection for user privacy. However, as a Radio Frequency (RF) based technology, mmWave radars rely on capturing reflected signals from objects, making them more prone to noise compared to cameras. This raises an intriguing question for the deep learning community: Can we develop more effective point set-based deep learning methods for such attractive sensors? To answer this question, our work, termed MiliPoint, delves into this idea by providing a large-scale, open dataset for the community to explore how mmWave radars can be utilised for human activity recognition. Moreover, MiliPoint stands out as it is larger in size than existing datasets, has more diverse human actions represented, and encompasses all three key tasks in human activity recognition. We have also established a range of point-based deep neural networks such as DGCNN, PointNet++ and PointTransformer, on MiliPoint, which can serve to set the ground baseline for further development.

TextileNet: A Material Taxonomy-based Fashion Textile Dataset

The rise of Machine Learning (ML) is gradually digitalizing and reshaping the fashion industry. Recent years have witnessed a number of fashion AI applications, for example, virtual try-ons. Textile material identification and categorization play a crucial role in the fashion textile sector, including fashion design, retails, and recycling. At the same time, Net Zero is a global goal and the fashion industry is undergoing a significant change so that textile materials can be reused, repaired and recycled in a sustainable manner. There is still a challenge in identifying textile materials automatically for garments, as we lack a low-cost and effective technique for identifying them. In light of this, we build the first fashion textile dataset, TextileNet, based on textile material taxonomies - a fibre taxonomy and a fabric taxonomy generated in collaboration with material scientists. TextileNet can be used to train and evaluate the state-of-the-art Deep Learning models for textile materials. We hope to standardize textile related datasets through the use of taxonomies. TextileNet contains 33 fibres labels and 27 fabrics labels, and has in total 760,949 images. We use standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) to establish baselines for this dataset. Future applications for this dataset range from textile classification to optimization of the textile supply chain and interactive design for consumers. We envision that this can contribute to the development of a new AI-based fashion platform.