CoNav Chair: Design of a ROS-based Smart Wheelchair for Shared Control Navigation in the Built Environment

With the number of people with disabilities (PWD) increasing worldwide each year, the demand for mobility support to enable independent living and social integration is also growing. Wheelchairs commonly support the mobility of PWD in both indoor and outdoor environments. However, current powered wheelchairs (PWC) often fail to meet the needs of PWD, who may find it difficult to operate them. Furthermore, existing research on robotic wheelchairs typically focuses either on full autonomy or enhanced manual control, which can lead to reduced efficiency and user trust. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Robot Operating System (ROS)-based smart wheelchair, called CoNav Chair, that incorporates a shared control navigation algorithm and obstacle avoidance to support PWD while fostering efficiency and trust between the robot and the user. Our design consists of hardware and software components. Experimental results conducted in a typical indoor social environment demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the smart wheelchair hardware and software design. This integrated design promotes trust and autonomy, which are crucial for the acceptance of assistive mobility technologies in the built environment.

Seeing with Partial Certainty: Conformal Prediction for Robotic Scene Recognition in Built Environments

In assistive robotics serving people with disabilities (PWD), accurate place recognition in built environments is crucial to ensure that robots navigate and interact safely within diverse indoor spaces. Language interfaces, particularly those powered by Large Language Models (LLM) and Vision Language Models (VLM), hold significant promise in this context, as they can interpret visual scenes and correlate them with semantic information. However, such interfaces are also known for their hallucinated predictions. In addition, language instructions provided by humans can also be ambiguous and lack precise details about specific locations, objects, or actions, exacerbating the hallucination issue. In this work, we introduce Seeing with Partial Certainty (SwPC) - a framework designed to measure and align uncertainty in VLM-based place recognition, enabling the model to recognize when it lacks confidence and seek assistance when necessary. This framework is built on the theory of conformal prediction to provide statistical guarantees on place recognition while minimizing requests for human help in complex indoor environment settings. Through experiments on the widely used richly-annotated scene dataset Matterport3D, we show that SwPC significantly increases the success rate and decreases the amount of human intervention required relative to the prior art. SwPC can be utilized with any VLMs directly without requiring model fine-tuning, offering a promising, lightweight approach to uncertainty modeling that complements and scales alongside the expanding capabilities of foundational models.

DynamicLip: Shape-Independent Continuous Authentication via Lip Articulator Dynamics

Biometrics authentication has become increasingly popular due to its security and convenience; however, traditional biometrics are becoming less desirable in scenarios such as new mobile devices, Virtual Reality, and Smart Vehicles. For example, while face authentication is widely used, it suffers from significant privacy concerns. The collection of complete facial data makes it less desirable for privacy-sensitive applications. Lip authentication, on the other hand, has emerged as a promising biometrics method. However, existing lip-based authentication methods heavily depend on static lip shape when the mouth is closed, which can be less robust due to lip shape dynamic motion and can barely work when the user is speaking. In this paper, we revisit the nature of lip biometrics and extract shape-independent features from the lips. We study the dynamic characteristics of lip biometrics based on articulator motion. Building on the knowledge, we propose a system for shape-independent continuous authentication via lip articulator dynamics. This system enables robust, shape-independent and continuous authentication, making it particularly suitable for scenarios with high security and privacy requirements. We conducted comprehensive experiments in different environments and attack scenarios and collected a dataset of 50 subjects. The results indicate that our system achieves an overall accuracy of 99.06% and demonstrates robustness under advanced mimic attacks and AI deepfake attacks, making it a viable solution for continuous biometric authentication in various applications.

Fine-grained Video-Text Retrieval: A New Benchmark and Method

The ability of perceiving fine-grained spatial and temporal information is crucial for video-language retrieval. However, the existing video retrieval benchmarks, such as MSRVTT and MSVD, fail to efficiently evaluate the fine-grained retrieval ability of video-language models (VLMs) due to a lack of detailed annotations. To address this problem, we present FIBER, a FIne-grained BEnchmark for text to video Retrieval, containing 1,000 videos sourced from the FineAction dataset. Uniquely, our FIBER benchmark provides detailed human-annotated spatial annotations and temporal annotations for each video, making it possible to independently evaluate the spatial and temporal bias of VLMs on video retrieval task. Besides, we employ a text embedding method to unlock the capability of fine-grained video-language understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Surprisingly, the experiment results show that our Video Large Language Encoder (VLLE) performs comparably to CLIP-based models on traditional benchmarks and has a stronger capability of fine-grained representation with lower spatial-temporal bias. Project page: https://fiber-bench.github.io.

Cross-Task Inconsistency Based Active Learning (CTIAL) for Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition is a critical component of affective computing. Training accurate machine learning models for emotion recognition typically requires a large amount of labeled data. Due to the subtleness and complexity of emotions, multiple evaluators are usually needed for each affective sample to obtain its ground-truth label, which is expensive. To save the labeling cost, this paper proposes an inconsistency-based active learning approach for cross-task transfer between emotion classification and estimation. Affective norms are utilized as prior knowledge to connect the label spaces of categorical and dimensional emotions. Then, the prediction inconsistency on the two tasks for the unlabeled samples is used to guide sample selection in active learning for the target task. Experiments on within-corpus and cross-corpus transfers demonstrated that cross-task inconsistency could be a very valuable metric in active learning. To our knowledge, this is the first work that utilizes prior knowledge on affective norms and data in a different task to facilitate active learning for a new task, even the two tasks are from different datasets.

AndroidLab: Training and Systematic Benchmarking of Android Autonomous Agents

Autonomous agents have become increasingly important for interacting with the real world. Android agents, in particular, have been recently a frequently-mentioned interaction method. However, existing studies for training and evaluating Android agents lack systematic research on both open-source and closed-source models. In this work, we propose AndroidLab as a systematic Android agent framework. It includes an operation environment with different modalities, action space, and a reproducible benchmark. It supports both large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models (LMMs) in the same action space. AndroidLab benchmark includes predefined Android virtual devices and 138 tasks across nine apps built on these devices. By using the AndroidLab environment, we develop an Android Instruction dataset and train six open-source LLMs and LMMs, lifting the average success rates from 4.59\% to 21.50\% for LLMs and from 1.93\% to 13.28\% for LMMs. AndroidLab is open-sourced and publicly available at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/Android-Lab}.

AutoGLM: Autonomous Foundation Agents for GUIs

We present AutoGLM, a new series in the ChatGLM family, designed to serve as foundation agents for autonomous control of digital devices through Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). While foundation models excel at acquiring human knowledge, they often struggle with decision-making in dynamic real-world environments, limiting their progress toward artificial general intelligence. This limitation underscores the importance of developing foundation agents capable of learning through autonomous environmental interactions by reinforcing existing models. Focusing on Web Browser and Phone as representative GUI scenarios, we have developed AutoGLM as a practical foundation agent system for real-world GUI interactions. Our approach integrates a comprehensive suite of techniques and infrastructures to create deployable agent systems suitable for user delivery. Through this development, we have derived two key insights: First, the design of an appropriate "intermediate interface" for GUI control is crucial, enabling the separation of planning and grounding behaviors, which require distinct optimization for flexibility and accuracy respectively. Second, we have developed a novel progressive training framework that enables self-evolving online curriculum reinforcement learning for AutoGLM. Our evaluations demonstrate AutoGLM's effectiveness across multiple domains. For web browsing, AutoGLM achieves a 55.2% success rate on VAB-WebArena-Lite (improving to 59.1% with a second attempt) and 96.2% on OpenTable evaluation tasks. In Android device control, AutoGLM attains a 36.2% success rate on AndroidLab (VAB-Mobile) and 89.7% on common tasks in popular Chinese APPs.

Point2Graph: An End-to-end Point Cloud-based 3D Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph for Robot Navigation

Current open-vocabulary scene graph generation algorithms highly rely on both 3D scene point cloud data and posed RGB-D images and thus have limited applications in scenarios where RGB-D images or camera poses are not readily available. To solve this problem, we propose Point2Graph, a novel end-to-end point cloud-based 3D open-vocabulary scene graph generation framework in which the requirement of posed RGB-D image series is eliminated. This hierarchical framework contains room and object detection/segmentation and open-vocabulary classification. For the room layer, we leverage the advantage of merging the geometry-based border detection algorithm with the learning-based region detection to segment rooms and create a "Snap-Lookup" framework for open-vocabulary room classification. In addition, we create an end-to-end pipeline for the object layer to detect and classify 3D objects based solely on 3D point cloud data. Our evaluation results show that our framework can outperform the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-vocabulary object and room segmentation and classification algorithm on widely used real-scene datasets.

VisualAgentBench: Towards Large Multimodal Models as Visual Foundation Agents

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have ushered in a new era in artificial intelligence, merging capabilities in both language and vision to form highly capable Visual Foundation Agents. These agents are postulated to excel across a myriad of tasks, potentially approaching general artificial intelligence. However, existing benchmarks fail to sufficiently challenge or showcase the full potential of LMMs in complex, real-world environments. To address this gap, we introduce VisualAgentBench (VAB), a comprehensive and pioneering benchmark specifically designed to train and evaluate LMMs as visual foundation agents across diverse scenarios, including Embodied, Graphical User Interface, and Visual Design, with tasks formulated to probe the depth of LMMs' understanding and interaction capabilities. Through rigorous testing across nine proprietary LMM APIs and eight open models, we demonstrate the considerable yet still developing agent capabilities of these models. Additionally, VAB constructs a trajectory training set constructed through hybrid methods including Program-based Solvers, LMM Agent Bootstrapping, and Human Demonstrations, promoting substantial performance improvements in LMMs through behavior cloning. Our work not only aims to benchmark existing models but also provides a solid foundation for future development into visual foundation agents. Code, train \& test data, and part of fine-tuned open LMMs are available at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/VisualAgentBench}.

ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools

We introduce ChatGLM, an evolving family of large language models that we have been developing over time. This report primarily focuses on the GLM-4 language series, which includes GLM-4, GLM-4-Air, and GLM-4-9B. They represent our most capable models that are trained with all the insights and lessons gained from the preceding three generations of ChatGLM. To date, the GLM-4 models are pre-trained on ten trillions of tokens mostly in Chinese and English, along with a small set of corpus from 24 languages, and aligned primarily for Chinese and English usage. The high-quality alignment is achieved via a multi-stage post-training process, which involves supervised fine-tuning and learning from human feedback. Evaluations show that GLM-4 1) closely rivals or outperforms GPT-4 in terms of general metrics such as MMLU, GSM8K, MATH, BBH, GPQA, and HumanEval, 2) gets close to GPT-4-Turbo in instruction following as measured by IFEval, 3) matches GPT-4 Turbo (128K) and Claude 3 for long context tasks, and 4) outperforms GPT-4 in Chinese alignments as measured by AlignBench. The GLM-4 All Tools model is further aligned to understand user intent and autonomously decide when and which tool(s) touse -- including web browser, Python interpreter, text-to-image model, and user-defined functions -- to effectively complete complex tasks. In practical applications, it matches and even surpasses GPT-4 All Tools in tasks like accessing online information via web browsing and solving math problems using Python interpreter. Over the course, we have open-sourced a series of models, including ChatGLM-6B (three generations), GLM-4-9B (128K, 1M), GLM-4V-9B, WebGLM, and CodeGeeX, attracting over 10 million downloads on Hugging face in the year 2023 alone. The open models can be accessed through https://github.com/THUDM and https://huggingface.co/THUDM.