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Aug 7

TimeGraphs: Graph-based Temporal Reasoning

Many real-world systems exhibit temporal, dynamic behaviors, which are captured as time series of complex agent interactions. To perform temporal reasoning, current methods primarily encode temporal dynamics through simple sequence-based models. However, in general these models fail to efficiently capture the full spectrum of rich dynamics in the input, since the dynamics is not uniformly distributed. In particular, relevant information might be harder to extract and computing power is wasted for processing all individual timesteps, even if they contain no significant changes or no new information. Here we propose TimeGraphs, a novel approach that characterizes dynamic interactions as a hierarchical temporal graph, diverging from traditional sequential representations. Our approach models the interactions using a compact graph-based representation, enabling adaptive reasoning across diverse time scales. Adopting a self-supervised method, TimeGraphs constructs a multi-level event hierarchy from a temporal input, which is then used to efficiently reason about the unevenly distributed dynamics. This construction process is scalable and incremental to accommodate streaming data. We evaluate TimeGraphs on multiple datasets with complex, dynamic agent interactions, including a football simulator, the Resistance game, and the MOMA human activity dataset. The results demonstrate both robustness and efficiency of TimeGraphs on a range of temporal reasoning tasks. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art performance and leads to a performance increase of up to 12.2% on event prediction and recognition tasks over current approaches. Our experiments further demonstrate a wide array of capabilities including zero-shot generalization, robustness in case of data sparsity, and adaptability to streaming data flow.

Decoding Human Activities: Analyzing Wearable Accelerometer and Gyroscope Data for Activity Recognition

A person's movement or relative positioning effectively generates raw electrical signals that can be read by computing machines to apply various manipulative techniques for the classification of different human activities. In this paper, a stratified multi-structural approach based on a Residual network ensembled with Residual MobileNet is proposed, termed as FusionActNet. The proposed method involves using carefully designed Residual blocks for classifying the static and dynamic activities separately because they have clear and distinct characteristics that set them apart. These networks are trained independently, resulting in two specialized and highly accurate models. These models excel at recognizing activities within a specific superclass by taking advantage of the unique algorithmic benefits of architectural adjustments. Afterward, these two ResNets are passed through a weighted ensemble-based Residual MobileNet. Subsequently, this ensemble proficiently discriminates between a specific static and a specific dynamic activity, which were previously identified based on their distinct feature characteristics in the earlier stage. The proposed model is evaluated using two publicly accessible datasets; namely, UCI HAR and Motion-Sense. Therein, it successfully handled the highly confusing cases of data overlap. Therefore, the proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 96.71% and 95.35% in the UCI HAR and Motion-Sense datasets respectively.

Human-Activity AGV Quality Assessment: A Benchmark Dataset and an Objective Evaluation Metric

AI-driven video generation techniques have made significant progress in recent years. However, AI-generated videos (AGVs) involving human activities often exhibit substantial visual and semantic distortions, hindering the practical application of video generation technologies in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we conduct a pioneering study on human activity AGV quality assessment, focusing on visual quality evaluation and the identification of semantic distortions. First, we construct the AI-Generated Human activity Video Quality Assessment (Human-AGVQA) dataset, consisting of 3,200 AGVs derived from 8 popular text-to-video (T2V) models using 400 text prompts that describe diverse human activities. We conduct a subjective study to evaluate the human appearance quality, action continuity quality, and overall video quality of AGVs, and identify semantic issues of human body parts. Based on Human-AGVQA, we benchmark the performance of T2V models and analyze their strengths and weaknesses in generating different categories of human activities. Second, we develop an objective evaluation metric, named AI-Generated Human activity Video Quality metric (GHVQ), to automatically analyze the quality of human activity AGVs. GHVQ systematically extracts human-focused quality features, AI-generated content-aware quality features, and temporal continuity features, making it a comprehensive and explainable quality metric for human activity AGVs. The extensive experimental results show that GHVQ outperforms existing quality metrics on the Human-AGVQA dataset by a large margin, demonstrating its efficacy in assessing the quality of human activity AGVs. The Human-AGVQA dataset and GHVQ metric will be released in public at https://github.com/zczhang-sjtu/GHVQ.git

HARDVS: Revisiting Human Activity Recognition with Dynamic Vision Sensors

The main streams of human activity recognition (HAR) algorithms are developed based on RGB cameras which are suffered from illumination, fast motion, privacy-preserving, and large energy consumption. Meanwhile, the biologically inspired event cameras attracted great interest due to their unique features, such as high dynamic range, dense temporal but sparse spatial resolution, low latency, low power, etc. As it is a newly arising sensor, even there is no realistic large-scale dataset for HAR. Considering its great practical value, in this paper, we propose a large-scale benchmark dataset to bridge this gap, termed HARDVS, which contains 300 categories and more than 100K event sequences. We evaluate and report the performance of multiple popular HAR algorithms, which provide extensive baselines for future works to compare. More importantly, we propose a novel spatial-temporal feature learning and fusion framework, termed ESTF, for event stream based human activity recognition. It first projects the event streams into spatial and temporal embeddings using StemNet, then, encodes and fuses the dual-view representations using Transformer networks. Finally, the dual features are concatenated and fed into a classification head for activity prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our model. Both the dataset and source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/HARDVS.

Improving Out-of-distribution Human Activity Recognition via IMU-Video Cross-modal Representation Learning

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) based on wearable inertial sensors plays a critical role in remote health monitoring. In patients with movement disorders, the ability to detect abnormal patient movements in their home environments can enable continuous optimization of treatments and help alert caretakers as needed. Machine learning approaches have been proposed for HAR tasks using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data; however, most rely on application-specific labels and lack generalizability to data collected in different environments or populations. To address this limitation, we propose a new cross-modal self-supervised pretraining approach to learn representations from large-sale unlabeled IMU-video data and demonstrate improved generalizability in HAR tasks on out of distribution (OOD) IMU datasets, including a dataset collected from patients with Parkinson's disease. Specifically, our results indicate that the proposed cross-modal pretraining approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art IMU-video pretraining approach and IMU-only pretraining under zero-shot and few-shot evaluations. Broadly, our study provides evidence that in highly dynamic data modalities, such as IMU signals, cross-modal pretraining may be a useful tool to learn generalizable data representations. Our software is available at https://github.com/scheshmi/IMU-Video-OOD-HAR.

ColloSSL: Collaborative Self-Supervised Learning for Human Activity Recognition

A major bottleneck in training robust Human-Activity Recognition models (HAR) is the need for large-scale labeled sensor datasets. Because labeling large amounts of sensor data is an expensive task, unsupervised and semi-supervised learning techniques have emerged that can learn good features from the data without requiring any labels. In this paper, we extend this line of research and present a novel technique called Collaborative Self-Supervised Learning (ColloSSL) which leverages unlabeled data collected from multiple devices worn by a user to learn high-quality features of the data. A key insight that underpins the design of ColloSSL is that unlabeled sensor datasets simultaneously captured by multiple devices can be viewed as natural transformations of each other, and leveraged to generate a supervisory signal for representation learning. We present three technical innovations to extend conventional self-supervised learning algorithms to a multi-device setting: a Device Selection approach which selects positive and negative devices to enable contrastive learning, a Contrastive Sampling algorithm which samples positive and negative examples in a multi-device setting, and a loss function called Multi-view Contrastive Loss which extends standard contrastive loss to a multi-device setting. Our experimental results on three multi-device datasets show that ColloSSL outperforms both fully-supervised and semi-supervised learning techniques in majority of the experiment settings, resulting in an absolute increase of upto 7.9% in F_1 score compared to the best performing baselines. We also show that ColloSSL outperforms the fully-supervised methods in a low-data regime, by just using one-tenth of the available labeled data in the best case.

Multimodal Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Sampling for Human Activity Recognition

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems have been extensively studied by the vision and ubiquitous computing communities due to their practical applications in daily life, such as smart homes, surveillance, and health monitoring. Typically, this process is supervised in nature and the development of such systems requires access to large quantities of annotated data. However, the higher costs and challenges associated with obtaining good quality annotations have rendered the application of self-supervised methods an attractive option and contrastive learning comprises one such method. However, a major component of successful contrastive learning is the selection of good positive and negative samples. Although positive samples are directly obtainable, sampling good negative samples remain a challenge. As human activities can be recorded by several modalities like camera and IMU sensors, we propose a hard negative sampling method for multimodal HAR with a hard negative sampling loss for skeleton and IMU data pairs. We exploit hard negatives that have different labels from the anchor but are projected nearby in the latent space using an adjustable concentration parameter. Through extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets: UTD-MHAD and MMAct, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach forlearning strong feature representation for HAR tasks, and on the limited data setting. We further show that our model outperforms all other state-of-the-art methods for UTD-MHAD dataset, and self-supervised methods for MMAct: Cross session, even when uni-modal data are used during downstream activity recognition.

COMODO: Cross-Modal Video-to-IMU Distillation for Efficient Egocentric Human Activity Recognition

Egocentric video-based models capture rich semantic information and have demonstrated strong performance in human activity recognition (HAR). However, their high power consumption, privacy concerns, and dependence on lighting conditions limit their feasibility for continuous on-device recognition. In contrast, inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors offer an energy-efficient and privacy-preserving alternative, yet they suffer from limited large-scale annotated datasets, leading to weaker generalization in downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose COMODO, a cross-modal self-supervised distillation framework that transfers rich semantic knowledge from the video modality to the IMU modality without requiring labeled annotations. COMODO leverages a pretrained and frozen video encoder to construct a dynamic instance queue, aligning the feature distributions of video and IMU embeddings. By distilling knowledge from video representations, our approach enables the IMU encoder to inherit rich semantic information from video while preserving its efficiency for real-world applications. Experiments on multiple egocentric HAR datasets demonstrate that COMODO consistently improves downstream classification performance, achieving results comparable to or exceeding fully supervised fine-tuned models. Moreover, COMODO exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization. Benefiting from its simplicity, our method is also generally applicable to various video and time-series pre-trained models, offering the potential to leverage more powerful teacher and student foundation models in future research. The code is available at https://github.com/Breezelled/COMODO .

Directional Antenna Systems for Long-Range Through-Wall Human Activity Recognition

WiFi Channel State Information (CSI)-based human activity recognition (HAR) enables contactless, long-range sensing in spatially constrained environments while preserving visual privacy. However, despite the presence of numerous WiFi-enabled devices around us, few expose CSI to users, resulting in a lack of sensing hardware options. Variants of the Espressif ESP32 have emerged as potential low-cost and easy-to-deploy solutions for WiFi CSI-based HAR. In this work, four ESP32-S3-based 2.4GHz directional antenna systems are evaluated for their ability to facilitate long-range through-wall HAR. Two promising systems are proposed, one of which combines the ESP32-S3 with a directional biquad antenna. This combination represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first demonstration of such a system in WiFi-based HAR. The second system relies on the built-in printed inverted-F antenna (PIFA) of the ESP32-S3 and achieves directionality through a plane reflector. In a comprehensive evaluation of line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) HAR performance, both systems are deployed in an office environment spanning a distance of 18 meters across five rooms. In this experimental setup, the Wallhack1.8k dataset, comprising 1806 CSI amplitude spectrograms of human activities, is collected and made publicly available. Based on Wallhack1.8k, we train activity recognition models using the EfficientNetV2 architecture to assess system performance in LOS and NLOS scenarios. For the core NLOS activity recognition problem, the biquad antenna and PIFA-based systems achieve accuracies of 92.0pm3.5 and 86.8pm4.7, respectively, demonstrating the feasibility of long-range through-wall HAR with the proposed systems.

SSL4Eco: A Global Seasonal Dataset for Geospatial Foundation Models in Ecology

With the exacerbation of the biodiversity and climate crises, macroecological pursuits such as global biodiversity mapping become more urgent. Remote sensing offers a wealth of Earth observation data for ecological studies, but the scarcity of labeled datasets remains a major challenge. Recently, self-supervised learning has enabled learning representations from unlabeled data, triggering the development of pretrained geospatial models with generalizable features. However, these models are often trained on datasets biased toward areas of high human activity, leaving entire ecological regions underrepresented. Additionally, while some datasets attempt to address seasonality through multi-date imagery, they typically follow calendar seasons rather than local phenological cycles. To better capture vegetation seasonality at a global scale, we propose a simple phenology-informed sampling strategy and introduce corresponding SSL4Eco, a multi-date Sentinel-2 dataset, on which we train an existing model with a season-contrastive objective. We compare representations learned from SSL4Eco against other datasets on diverse ecological downstream tasks and demonstrate that our straightforward sampling method consistently improves representation quality, highlighting the importance of dataset construction. The model pretrained on SSL4Eco reaches state of the art performance on 7 out of 8 downstream tasks spanning (multi-label) classification and regression. We release our code, data, and model weights to support macroecological and computer vision research at https://github.com/PlekhanovaElena/ssl4eco.

TASAR: Transfer-based Attack on Skeletal Action Recognition

Skeletal sequence data, as a widely employed representation of human actions, are crucial in Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Recently, adversarial attacks have been proposed in this area, which exposes potential security concerns, and more importantly provides a good tool for model robustness test. Within this research, transfer-based attack is an important tool as it mimics the real-world scenario where an attacker has no knowledge of the target model, but is under-explored in Skeleton-based HAR (S-HAR). Consequently, existing S-HAR attacks exhibit weak adversarial transferability and the reason remains largely unknown. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon via the characterization of the loss function. We find that one prominent indicator of poor transferability is the low smoothness of the loss function. Led by this observation, we improve the transferability by properly smoothening the loss when computing the adversarial examples. This leads to the first Transfer-based Attack on Skeletal Action Recognition, TASAR. TASAR explores the smoothened model posterior of pre-trained surrogates, which is achieved by a new post-train Dual Bayesian optimization strategy. Furthermore, unlike existing transfer-based methods which overlook the temporal coherence within sequences, TASAR incorporates motion dynamics into the Bayesian attack, effectively disrupting the spatial-temporal coherence of S-HARs. For exhaustive evaluation, we build the first large-scale robust S-HAR benchmark, comprising 7 S-HAR models, 10 attack methods, 3 S-HAR datasets and 2 defense models. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority of TASAR. Our benchmark enables easy comparisons for future studies, with the code available in the https://github.com/yunfengdiao/Skeleton-Robustness-Benchmark.

EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding

We introduce EgoSchema, a very long-form video question-answering dataset, and benchmark to evaluate long video understanding capabilities of modern vision and language systems. Derived from Ego4D, EgoSchema consists of over 5000 human curated multiple choice question answer pairs, spanning over 250 hours of real video data, covering a very broad range of natural human activity and behavior. For each question, EgoSchema requires the correct answer to be selected between five given options based on a three-minute-long video clip. While some prior works have proposed video datasets with long clip lengths, we posit that merely the length of the video clip does not truly capture the temporal difficulty of the video task that is being considered. To remedy this, we introduce temporal certificate sets, a general notion for capturing the intrinsic temporal understanding length associated with a broad range of video understanding tasks & datasets. Based on this metric, we find EgoSchema to have intrinsic temporal lengths over 5.7x longer than the second closest dataset and 10x to 100x longer than any other video understanding dataset. Further, our evaluation of several current state-of-the-art video and language models shows them to be severely lacking in long-term video understanding capabilities. Even models with several billions of parameters achieve QA accuracy less than 33% (random is 20%) on the EgoSchema multi-choice question answering task, while humans achieve about 76% accuracy. We posit that {}, with its long intrinsic temporal structures and diverse complexity, would serve as a valuable evaluation probe for developing effective long-term video understanding systems in the future. Data and Zero-shot model evaluation code are open-sourced for both public and commercial use under the Ego4D license at http://egoschema.github.io

UniMTS: Unified Pre-training for Motion Time Series

Motion time series collected from mobile and wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches offer significant insights into human behavioral patterns, with wide applications in healthcare, automation, IoT, and AR/XR due to their low-power, always-on nature. However, given security and privacy concerns, building large-scale motion time series datasets remains difficult, preventing the development of pre-trained models for human activity analysis. Typically, existing models are trained and tested on the same dataset, leading to poor generalizability across variations in device location, device mounting orientation and human activity type. In this paper, we introduce UniMTS, the first unified pre-training procedure for motion time series that generalizes across diverse device latent factors and activities. Specifically, we employ a contrastive learning framework that aligns motion time series with text descriptions enriched by large language models. This helps the model learn the semantics of time series to generalize across activities. Given the absence of large-scale motion time series data, we derive and synthesize time series from existing motion skeleton data with all-joint coverage. Spatio-temporal graph networks are utilized to capture the relationships across joints for generalization across different device locations. We further design rotation-invariant augmentation to make the model agnostic to changes in device mounting orientations. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 18 motion time series classification benchmark datasets, outperforming the best baselines by 340% in the zero-shot setting, 16.3% in the few-shot setting, and 9.2% in the full-shot setting.

Brain Captioning: Decoding human brain activity into images and text

Every day, the human brain processes an immense volume of visual information, relying on intricate neural mechanisms to perceive and interpret these stimuli. Recent breakthroughs in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have enabled scientists to extract visual information from human brain activity patterns. In this study, we present an innovative method for decoding brain activity into meaningful images and captions, with a specific focus on brain captioning due to its enhanced flexibility as compared to brain decoding into images. Our approach takes advantage of cutting-edge image captioning models and incorporates a unique image reconstruction pipeline that utilizes latent diffusion models and depth estimation. We utilized the Natural Scenes Dataset, a comprehensive fMRI dataset from eight subjects who viewed images from the COCO dataset. We employed the Generative Image-to-text Transformer (GIT) as our backbone for captioning and propose a new image reconstruction pipeline based on latent diffusion models. The method involves training regularized linear regression models between brain activity and extracted features. Additionally, we incorporated depth maps from the ControlNet model to further guide the reconstruction process. We evaluate our methods using quantitative metrics for both generated captions and images. Our brain captioning approach outperforms existing methods, while our image reconstruction pipeline generates plausible images with improved spatial relationships. In conclusion, we demonstrate significant progress in brain decoding, showcasing the enormous potential of integrating vision and language to better understand human cognition. Our approach provides a flexible platform for future research, with potential applications in various fields, including neural art, style transfer, and portable devices.

Improving visual image reconstruction from human brain activity using latent diffusion models via multiple decoded inputs

The integration of deep learning and neuroscience has been advancing rapidly, which has led to improvements in the analysis of brain activity and the understanding of deep learning models from a neuroscientific perspective. The reconstruction of visual experience from human brain activity is an area that has particularly benefited: the use of deep learning models trained on large amounts of natural images has greatly improved its quality, and approaches that combine the diverse information contained in visual experiences have proliferated rapidly in recent years. In this technical paper, by taking advantage of the simple and generic framework that we proposed (Takagi and Nishimoto, CVPR 2023), we examine the extent to which various additional decoding techniques affect the performance of visual experience reconstruction. Specifically, we combined our earlier work with the following three techniques: using decoded text from brain activity, nonlinear optimization for structural image reconstruction, and using decoded depth information from brain activity. We confirmed that these techniques contributed to improving accuracy over the baseline. We also discuss what researchers should consider when performing visual reconstruction using deep generative models trained on large datasets. Please check our webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/stablediffusion-with-brain/. Code is also available at https://github.com/yu-takagi/StableDiffusionReconstruction.

A New Dataset and Performance Benchmark for Real-time Spacecraft Segmentation in Onboard Flight Computers

Spacecraft deployed in outer space are routinely subjected to various forms of damage due to exposure to hazardous environments. In addition, there are significant risks to the subsequent process of in-space repairs through human extravehicular activity or robotic manipulation, incurring substantial operational costs. Recent developments in image segmentation could enable the development of reliable and cost-effective autonomous inspection systems. While these models often require large amounts of training data to achieve satisfactory results, publicly available annotated spacecraft segmentation data are very scarce. Here, we present a new dataset of nearly 64k annotated spacecraft images that was created using real spacecraft models, superimposed on a mixture of real and synthetic backgrounds generated using NASA's TTALOS pipeline. To mimic camera distortions and noise in real-world image acquisition, we also added different types of noise and distortion to the images. Finally, we finetuned YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 segmentation models to generate performance benchmarks for the dataset under well-defined hardware and inference time constraints to mimic real-world image segmentation challenges for real-time onboard applications in space on NASA's inspector spacecraft. The resulting models, when tested under these constraints, achieved a Dice score of 0.92, Hausdorff distance of 0.69, and an inference time of about 0.5 second. The dataset and models for performance benchmark are available at https://github.com/RiceD2KLab/SWiM.

Activity-aware Human Mobility Prediction with Hierarchical Graph Attention Recurrent Network

Human mobility prediction is a fundamental task essential for various applications in urban planning, location-based services and intelligent transportation systems. Existing methods often ignore activity information crucial for reasoning human preferences and routines, or adopt a simplified representation of the dependencies between time, activities and locations. To address these issues, we present Hierarchical Graph Attention Recurrent Network (HGARN) for human mobility prediction. Specifically, we construct a hierarchical graph based on past mobility records and employ a Hierarchical Graph Attention Module to capture complex time-activity-location dependencies. This way, HGARN can learn representations with rich human travel semantics to model user preferences at the global level. We also propose a model-agnostic history-enhanced confidence (MAHEC) label to incorporate each user's individual-level preferences. Finally, we introduce a Temporal Module, which employs recurrent structures to jointly predict users' next activities and their associated locations, with the former used as an auxiliary task to enhance the latter prediction. For model evaluation, we test the performance of HGARN against existing state-of-the-art methods in both the recurring (i.e., returning to a previously visited location) and explorative (i.e., visiting a new location) settings. Overall, HGARN outperforms other baselines significantly in all settings based on two real-world human mobility data benchmarks. These findings confirm the important role that human activities play in determining mobility decisions, illustrating the need to develop activity-aware intelligent transportation systems. Source codes of this study are available at https://github.com/YihongT/HGARN.

Brain-Like Language Processing via a Shallow Untrained Multihead Attention Network

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective models of the human language system, with some models predicting most explainable variance of brain activity in current datasets. Even in untrained models, the representations induced by architectural priors can exhibit reasonable alignment to brain data. In this work, we investigate the key architectural components driving the surprising alignment of untrained models. To estimate LLM-to-brain similarity, we first select language-selective units within an LLM, similar to how neuroscientists identify the language network in the human brain. We then benchmark the brain alignment of these LLM units across five different brain recording datasets. By isolating critical components of the Transformer architecture, we identify tokenization strategy and multihead attention as the two major components driving brain alignment. A simple form of recurrence further improves alignment. We further demonstrate this quantitative brain alignment of our model by reproducing landmark studies in the language neuroscience field, showing that localized model units -- just like language voxels measured empirically in the human brain -- discriminate more reliably between lexical than syntactic differences, and exhibit similar response profiles under the same experimental conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our model's representations for language modeling, achieving improved sample and parameter efficiency over comparable architectures. Our model's estimates of surprisal sets a new state-of-the-art in the behavioral alignment to human reading times. Taken together, we propose a highly brain- and behaviorally-aligned model that conceptualizes the human language system as an untrained shallow feature encoder, with structural priors, combined with a trained decoder to achieve efficient and performant language processing.

EgoSim: An Egocentric Multi-view Simulator and Real Dataset for Body-worn Cameras during Motion and Activity

Research on egocentric tasks in computer vision has mostly focused on head-mounted cameras, such as fisheye cameras or embedded cameras inside immersive headsets. We argue that the increasing miniaturization of optical sensors will lead to the prolific integration of cameras into many more body-worn devices at various locations. This will bring fresh perspectives to established tasks in computer vision and benefit key areas such as human motion tracking, body pose estimation, or action recognition -- particularly for the lower body, which is typically occluded. In this paper, we introduce EgoSim, a novel simulator of body-worn cameras that generates realistic egocentric renderings from multiple perspectives across a wearer's body. A key feature of EgoSim is its use of real motion capture data to render motion artifacts, which are especially noticeable with arm- or leg-worn cameras. In addition, we introduce MultiEgoView, a dataset of egocentric footage from six body-worn cameras and ground-truth full-body 3D poses during several activities: 119 hours of data are derived from AMASS motion sequences in four high-fidelity virtual environments, which we augment with 5 hours of real-world motion data from 13 participants using six GoPro cameras and 3D body pose references from an Xsens motion capture suit. We demonstrate EgoSim's effectiveness by training an end-to-end video-only 3D pose estimation network. Analyzing its domain gap, we show that our dataset and simulator substantially aid training for inference on real-world data. EgoSim code & MultiEgoView dataset: https://siplab.org/projects/EgoSim

Urban Mobility Assessment Using LLMs

Understanding urban mobility patterns and analyzing how people move around cities helps improve the overall quality of life and supports the development of more livable, efficient, and sustainable urban areas. A challenging aspect of this work is the collection of mobility data by means of user tracking or travel surveys, given the associated privacy concerns, noncompliance, and high cost. This work proposes an innovative AI-based approach for synthesizing travel surveys by prompting large language models (LLMs), aiming to leverage their vast amount of relevant background knowledge and text generation capabilities. Our study evaluates the effectiveness of this approach across various U.S. metropolitan areas by comparing the results against existing survey data at different granularity levels. These levels include (i) pattern level, which compares aggregated metrics like the average number of locations traveled and travel time, (ii) trip level, which focuses on comparing trips as whole units using transition probabilities, and (iii) activity chain level, which examines the sequence of locations visited by individuals. Our work covers several proprietary and open-source LLMs, revealing that open-source base models like Llama-2, when fine-tuned on even a limited amount of actual data, can generate synthetic data that closely mimics the actual travel survey data, and as such provides an argument for using such data in mobility studies.

EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30: Densely annotated cooking dataset with 3D kinematics to challenge video and language models

Understanding behavior requires datasets that capture humans while carrying out complex tasks. The kitchen is an excellent environment for assessing human motor and cognitive function, as many complex actions are naturally exhibited in kitchens from chopping to cleaning. Here, we introduce the EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset, collected in a noninvasive motion capture platform inside a kitchen environment. Nine static RGB-D cameras, inertial measurement units (IMUs) and one head-mounted HoloLens~2 headset were used to capture 3D hand, body, and eye movements. The EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset is a multi-view action dataset with synchronized exocentric, egocentric, depth, IMUs, eye gaze, body and hand kinematics spanning 29.7 hours of 16 subjects cooking four different recipes. Action sequences were densely annotated with 33.78 action segments per minute. Leveraging this multi-modal dataset, we propose four benchmarks to advance behavior understanding and modeling through 1) a vision-language benchmark, 2) a semantic text-to-motion generation benchmark, 3) a multi-modal action recognition benchmark, 4) a pose-based action segmentation benchmark. We expect the EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30 dataset to pave the way for better methods as well as insights to understand the nature of ecologically-valid human behavior. Code and data are available at https://github.com/amathislab/EPFL-Smart-Kitchen

Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI

Given the rapid adoption of generative AI and its potential to impact a wide range of tasks, understanding the effects of AI on the economy is one of society's most important questions. In this work, we take a step toward that goal by analyzing the work activities people do with AI, how successfully and broadly those activities are done, and combine that with data on what occupations do those activities. We analyze a dataset of 200k anonymized and privacy-scrubbed conversations between users and Microsoft Bing Copilot, a publicly available generative AI system. We find the most common work activities people seek AI assistance for involve gathering information and writing, while the most common activities that AI itself is performing are providing information and assistance, writing, teaching, and advising. Combining these activity classifications with measurements of task success and scope of impact, we compute an AI applicability score for each occupation. We find the highest AI applicability scores for knowledge work occupation groups such as computer and mathematical, and office and administrative support, as well as occupations such as sales whose work activities involve providing and communicating information. Additionally, we characterize the types of work activities performed most successfully, how wage and education correlate with AI applicability, and how real-world usage compares to predictions of occupational AI impact.

Multimodal Fusion with LLMs for Engagement Prediction in Natural Conversation

Over the past decade, wearable computing devices (``smart glasses'') have undergone remarkable advancements in sensor technology, design, and processing power, ushering in a new era of opportunity for high-density human behavior data. Equipped with wearable cameras, these glasses offer a unique opportunity to analyze non-verbal behavior in natural settings as individuals interact. Our focus lies in predicting engagement in dyadic interactions by scrutinizing verbal and non-verbal cues, aiming to detect signs of disinterest or confusion. Leveraging such analyses may revolutionize our understanding of human communication, foster more effective collaboration in professional environments, provide better mental health support through empathetic virtual interactions, and enhance accessibility for those with communication barriers. In this work, we collect a dataset featuring 34 participants engaged in casual dyadic conversations, each providing self-reported engagement ratings at the end of each conversation. We introduce a novel fusion strategy using Large Language Models (LLMs) to integrate multiple behavior modalities into a ``multimodal transcript'' that can be processed by an LLM for behavioral reasoning tasks. Remarkably, this method achieves performance comparable to established fusion techniques even in its preliminary implementation, indicating strong potential for further research and optimization. This fusion method is one of the first to approach ``reasoning'' about real-world human behavior through a language model. Smart glasses provide us the ability to unobtrusively gather high-density multimodal data on human behavior, paving the way for new approaches to understanding and improving human communication with the potential for important societal benefits. The features and data collected during the studies will be made publicly available to promote further research.

PeopleSansPeople: A Synthetic Data Generator for Human-Centric Computer Vision

In recent years, person detection and human pose estimation have made great strides, helped by large-scale labeled datasets. However, these datasets had no guarantees or analysis of human activities, poses, or context diversity. Additionally, privacy, legal, safety, and ethical concerns may limit the ability to collect more human data. An emerging alternative to real-world data that alleviates some of these issues is synthetic data. However, creation of synthetic data generators is incredibly challenging and prevents researchers from exploring their usefulness. Therefore, we release a human-centric synthetic data generator PeopleSansPeople which contains simulation-ready 3D human assets, a parameterized lighting and camera system, and generates 2D and 3D bounding box, instance and semantic segmentation, and COCO pose labels. Using PeopleSansPeople, we performed benchmark synthetic data training using a Detectron2 Keypoint R-CNN variant [1]. We found that pre-training a network using synthetic data and fine-tuning on various sizes of real-world data resulted in a keypoint AP increase of +38.03 (44.43 pm 0.17 vs. 6.40) for few-shot transfer (limited subsets of COCO-person train [2]), and an increase of +1.47 (63.47 pm 0.19 vs. 62.00) for abundant real data regimes, outperforming models trained with the same real data alone. We also found that our models outperformed those pre-trained with ImageNet with a keypoint AP increase of +22.53 (44.43 pm 0.17 vs. 21.90) for few-shot transfer and +1.07 (63.47 pm 0.19 vs. 62.40) for abundant real data regimes. This freely-available data generator should enable a wide range of research into the emerging field of simulation to real transfer learning in the critical area of human-centric computer vision.

Playing for 3D Human Recovery

Image- and video-based 3D human recovery (i.e., pose and shape estimation) have achieved substantial progress. However, due to the prohibitive cost of motion capture, existing datasets are often limited in scale and diversity. In this work, we obtain massive human sequences by playing the video game with automatically annotated 3D ground truths. Specifically, we contribute GTA-Human, a large-scale 3D human dataset generated with the GTA-V game engine, featuring a highly diverse set of subjects, actions, and scenarios. More importantly, we study the use of game-playing data and obtain five major insights. First, game-playing data is surprisingly effective. A simple frame-based baseline trained on GTA-Human outperforms more sophisticated methods by a large margin. For video-based methods, GTA-Human is even on par with the in-domain training set. Second, we discover that synthetic data provides critical complements to the real data that is typically collected indoor. Our investigation into domain gap provides explanations for our data mixture strategies that are simple yet useful. Third, the scale of the dataset matters. The performance boost is closely related to the additional data available. A systematic study reveals the model sensitivity to data density from multiple key aspects. Fourth, the effectiveness of GTA-Human is also attributed to the rich collection of strong supervision labels (SMPL parameters), which are otherwise expensive to acquire in real datasets. Fifth, the benefits of synthetic data extend to larger models such as deeper convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers, for which a significant impact is also observed. We hope our work could pave the way for scaling up 3D human recovery to the real world. Homepage: https://caizhongang.github.io/projects/GTA-Human/

VIGMA: An Open-Access Framework for Visual Gait and Motion Analytics

Gait disorders are commonly observed in older adults, who frequently experience various issues related to walking. Additionally, researchers and clinicians extensively investigate mobility related to gait in typically and atypically developing children, athletes, and individuals with orthopedic and neurological disorders. Effective gait analysis enables the understanding of the causal mechanisms of mobility and balance control of patients, the development of tailored treatment plans to improve mobility, the reduction of fall risk, and the tracking of rehabilitation progress. However, analyzing gait data is a complex task due to the multivariate nature of the data, the large volume of information to be interpreted, and the technical skills required. Existing tools for gait analysis are often limited to specific patient groups (e.g., cerebral palsy), only handle a specific subset of tasks in the entire workflow, and are not openly accessible. To address these shortcomings, we conducted a requirements assessment with gait practitioners (e.g., researchers, clinicians) via surveys and identified key components of the workflow, including (1) data processing and (2) data analysis and visualization. Based on the findings, we designed VIGMA, an open-access visual analytics framework integrated with computational notebooks and a Python library, to meet the identified requirements. Notably, the framework supports analytical capabilities for assessing disease progression and for comparing multiple patient groups. We validated the framework through usage scenarios with experts specializing in gait and mobility rehabilitation. VIGMA is available at https://github.com/komar41/VIGMA.

Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control

There is a growing interest in device-control systems that can interpret human natural language instructions and execute them on a digital device by directly controlling its user interface. We present a dataset for device-control research, Android in the Wild (AITW), which is orders of magnitude larger than current datasets. The dataset contains human demonstrations of device interactions, including the screens and actions, and corresponding natural language instructions. It consists of 715k episodes spanning 30k unique instructions, four versions of Android (v10-13),and eight device types (Pixel 2 XL to Pixel 6) with varying screen resolutions. It contains multi-step tasks that require semantic understanding of language and visual context. This dataset poses a new challenge: actions available through the user interface must be inferred from their visual appearance. And, instead of simple UI element-based actions, the action space consists of precise gestures (e.g., horizontal scrolls to operate carousel widgets). We organize our dataset to encourage robustness analysis of device-control systems, i.e., how well a system performs in the presence of new task descriptions, new applications, or new platform versions. We develop two agents and report performance across the dataset. The dataset is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/android_in_the_wild.

FineBio: A Fine-Grained Video Dataset of Biological Experiments with Hierarchical Annotation

In the development of science, accurate and reproducible documentation of the experimental process is crucial. Automatic recognition of the actions in experiments from videos would help experimenters by complementing the recording of experiments. Towards this goal, we propose FineBio, a new fine-grained video dataset of people performing biological experiments. The dataset consists of multi-view videos of 32 participants performing mock biological experiments with a total duration of 14.5 hours. One experiment forms a hierarchical structure, where a protocol consists of several steps, each further decomposed into a set of atomic operations. The uniqueness of biological experiments is that while they require strict adherence to steps described in each protocol, there is freedom in the order of atomic operations. We provide hierarchical annotation on protocols, steps, atomic operations, object locations, and their manipulation states, providing new challenges for structured activity understanding and hand-object interaction recognition. To find out challenges on activity understanding in biological experiments, we introduce baseline models and results on four different tasks, including (i) step segmentation, (ii) atomic operation detection (iii) object detection, and (iv) manipulated/affected object detection. Dataset and code are available from https://github.com/aistairc/FineBio.

Towards a Personal Health Large Language Model

In health, most large language model (LLM) research has focused on clinical tasks. However, mobile and wearable devices, which are rarely integrated into such tasks, provide rich, longitudinal data for personal health monitoring. Here we present Personal Health Large Language Model (PH-LLM), fine-tuned from Gemini for understanding and reasoning over numerical time-series personal health data. We created and curated three datasets that test 1) production of personalized insights and recommendations from sleep patterns, physical activity, and physiological responses, 2) expert domain knowledge, and 3) prediction of self-reported sleep outcomes. For the first task we designed 857 case studies in collaboration with domain experts to assess real-world scenarios in sleep and fitness. Through comprehensive evaluation of domain-specific rubrics, we observed that Gemini Ultra 1.0 and PH-LLM are not statistically different from expert performance in fitness and, while experts remain superior for sleep, fine-tuning PH-LLM provided significant improvements in using relevant domain knowledge and personalizing information for sleep insights. We evaluated PH-LLM domain knowledge using multiple choice sleep medicine and fitness examinations. PH-LLM achieved 79% on sleep and 88% on fitness, exceeding average scores from a sample of human experts. Finally, we trained PH-LLM to predict self-reported sleep quality outcomes from textual and multimodal encoding representations of wearable data, and demonstrate that multimodal encoding is required to match performance of specialized discriminative models. Although further development and evaluation are necessary in the safety-critical personal health domain, these results demonstrate both the broad knowledge and capabilities of Gemini models and the benefit of contextualizing physiological data for personal health applications as done with PH-LLM.

Using Sequences of Life-events to Predict Human Lives

Over the past decade, machine learning has revolutionized computers' ability to analyze text through flexible computational models. Due to their structural similarity to written language, transformer-based architectures have also shown promise as tools to make sense of a range of multi-variate sequences from protein-structures, music, electronic health records to weather-forecasts. We can also represent human lives in a way that shares this structural similarity to language. From one perspective, lives are simply sequences of events: People are born, visit the pediatrician, start school, move to a new location, get married, and so on. Here, we exploit this similarity to adapt innovations from natural language processing to examine the evolution and predictability of human lives based on detailed event sequences. We do this by drawing on arguably the most comprehensive registry data in existence, available for an entire nation of more than six million individuals across decades. Our data include information about life-events related to health, education, occupation, income, address, and working hours, recorded with day-to-day resolution. We create embeddings of life-events in a single vector space showing that this embedding space is robust and highly structured. Our models allow us to predict diverse outcomes ranging from early mortality to personality nuances, outperforming state-of-the-art models by a wide margin. Using methods for interpreting deep learning models, we probe the algorithm to understand the factors that enable our predictions. Our framework allows researchers to identify new potential mechanisms that impact life outcomes and associated possibilities for personalized interventions.

When do they StOP?: A First Step Towards Automatically Identifying Team Communication in the Operating Room

Purpose: Surgical performance depends not only on surgeons' technical skills but also on team communication within and across the different professional groups present during the operation. Therefore, automatically identifying team communication in the OR is crucial for patient safety and advances in the development of computer-assisted surgical workflow analysis and intra-operative support systems. To take the first step, we propose a new task of detecting communication briefings involving all OR team members, i.e. the team Time-out and the StOP?-protocol, by localizing their start and end times in video recordings of surgical operations. Methods: We generate an OR dataset of real surgeries, called Team-OR, with more than one hundred hours of surgical videos captured by the multi-view camera system in the OR. The dataset contains temporal annotations of 33 Time-out and 22 StOP?-protocol activities in total. We then propose a novel group activity detection approach, where we encode both scene context and action features, and use an efficient neural network model to output the results. Results: The experimental results on the Team-OR dataset show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art temporal action detection approaches. It also demonstrates the lack of research on group activities in the OR, proving the significance of our dataset. Conclusion: We investigate the Team Time-Out and the StOP?-protocol in the OR, by presenting the first OR dataset with temporal annotations of group activities protocols, and introducing a novel group activity detection approach that outperforms existing approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/Team-OR.

Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Human Models for Human-Robot Interaction

Human models play a crucial role in human-robot interaction (HRI), enabling robots to consider the impact of their actions on people and plan their behavior accordingly. However, crafting good human models is challenging; capturing context-dependent human behavior requires significant prior knowledge and/or large amounts of interaction data, both of which are difficult to obtain. In this work, we explore the potential of large-language models (LLMs) -- which have consumed vast amounts of human-generated text data -- to act as zero-shot human models for HRI. Our experiments on three social datasets yield promising results; the LLMs are able to achieve performance comparable to purpose-built models. That said, we also discuss current limitations, such as sensitivity to prompts and spatial/numerical reasoning mishaps. Based on our findings, we demonstrate how LLM-based human models can be integrated into a social robot's planning process and applied in HRI scenarios. Specifically, we present one case study on a simulated trust-based table-clearing task and replicate past results that relied on custom models. Next, we conduct a new robot utensil-passing experiment (n = 65) where preliminary results show that planning with a LLM-based human model can achieve gains over a basic myopic plan. In summary, our results show that LLMs offer a promising (but incomplete) approach to human modeling for HRI.

Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding

Computer vision has a great potential to help our daily lives by searching for lost keys, watering flowers or reminding us to take a pill. To succeed with such tasks, computer vision methods need to be trained from real and diverse examples of our daily dynamic scenes. While most of such scenes are not particularly exciting, they typically do not appear on YouTube, in movies or TV broadcasts. So how do we collect sufficiently many diverse but boring samples representing our lives? We propose a novel Hollywood in Homes approach to collect such data. Instead of shooting videos in the lab, we ensure diversity by distributing and crowdsourcing the whole process of video creation from script writing to video recording and annotation. Following this procedure we collect a new dataset, Charades, with hundreds of people recording videos in their own homes, acting out casual everyday activities. The dataset is composed of 9,848 annotated videos with an average length of 30 seconds, showing activities of 267 people from three continents. Each video is annotated by multiple free-text descriptions, action labels, action intervals and classes of interacted objects. In total, Charades provides 27,847 video descriptions, 66,500 temporally localized intervals for 157 action classes and 41,104 labels for 46 object classes. Using this rich data, we evaluate and provide baseline results for several tasks including action recognition and automatic description generation. We believe that the realism, diversity, and casual nature of this dataset will present unique challenges and new opportunities for computer vision community.

AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions

This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 430 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.58M action labels with multiple labels per person occurring frequently. The key characteristics of our dataset are: (1) the definition of atomic visual actions, rather than composite actions; (2) precise spatio-temporal annotations with possibly multiple annotations for each person; (3) exhaustive annotation of these atomic actions over 15-minute video clips; (4) people temporally linked across consecutive segments; and (5) using movies to gather a varied set of action representations. This departs from existing datasets for spatio-temporal action recognition, which typically provide sparse annotations for composite actions in short video clips. We will release the dataset publicly. AVA, with its realistic scene and action complexity, exposes the intrinsic difficulty of action recognition. To benchmark this, we present a novel approach for action localization that builds upon the current state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrates better performance on JHMDB and UCF101-24 categories. While setting a new state of the art on existing datasets, the overall results on AVA are low at 15.6% mAP, underscoring the need for developing new approaches for video understanding.

Action in Mind: A Neural Network Approach to Action Recognition and Segmentation

Recognizing and categorizing human actions is an important task with applications in various fields such as human-robot interaction, video analysis, surveillance, video retrieval, health care system and entertainment industry. This thesis presents a novel computational approach for human action recognition through different implementations of multi-layer architectures based on artificial neural networks. Each system level development is designed to solve different aspects of the action recognition problem including online real-time processing, action segmentation and the involvement of objects. The analysis of the experimental results are illustrated and described in six articles. The proposed action recognition architecture of this thesis is composed of several processing layers including a preprocessing layer, an ordered vector representation layer and three layers of neural networks. It utilizes self-organizing neural networks such as Kohonen feature maps and growing grids as the main neural network layers. Thus the architecture presents a biological plausible approach with certain features such as topographic organization of the neurons, lateral interactions, semi-supervised learning and the ability to represent high dimensional input space in lower dimensional maps. For each level of development the system is trained with the input data consisting of consecutive 3D body postures and tested with generalized input data that the system has never met before. The experimental results of different system level developments show that the system performs well with quite high accuracy for recognizing human actions.

Detecting Human-Object Contact in Images

Humans constantly contact objects to move and perform tasks. Thus, detecting human-object contact is important for building human-centered artificial intelligence. However, there exists no robust method to detect contact between the body and the scene from an image, and there exists no dataset to learn such a detector. We fill this gap with HOT ("Human-Object conTact"), a new dataset of human-object contacts for images. To build HOT, we use two data sources: (1) We use the PROX dataset of 3D human meshes moving in 3D scenes, and automatically annotate 2D image areas for contact via 3D mesh proximity and projection. (2) We use the V-COCO, HAKE and Watch-n-Patch datasets, and ask trained annotators to draw polygons for the 2D image areas where contact takes place. We also annotate the involved body part of the human body. We use our HOT dataset to train a new contact detector, which takes a single color image as input, and outputs 2D contact heatmaps as well as the body-part labels that are in contact. This is a new and challenging task that extends current foot-ground or hand-object contact detectors to the full generality of the whole body. The detector uses a part-attention branch to guide contact estimation through the context of the surrounding body parts and scene. We evaluate our detector extensively, and quantitative results show that our model outperforms baselines, and that all components contribute to better performance. Results on images from an online repository show reasonable detections and generalizability.

Automated Coding of Under-Studied Medical Concept Domains: Linking Physical Activity Reports to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health

Linking clinical narratives to standardized vocabularies and coding systems is a key component of unlocking the information in medical text for analysis. However, many domains of medical concepts lack well-developed terminologies that can support effective coding of medical text. We present a framework for developing natural language processing (NLP) technologies for automated coding of under-studied types of medical information, and demonstrate its applicability via a case study on physical mobility function. Mobility is a component of many health measures, from post-acute care and surgical outcomes to chronic frailty and disability, and is coded in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). However, mobility and other types of functional activity remain under-studied in medical informatics, and neither the ICF nor commonly-used medical terminologies capture functional status terminology in practice. We investigated two data-driven paradigms, classification and candidate selection, to link narrative observations of mobility to standardized ICF codes, using a dataset of clinical narratives from physical therapy encounters. Recent advances in language modeling and word embedding were used as features for established machine learning models and a novel deep learning approach, achieving a macro F-1 score of 84% on linking mobility activity reports to ICF codes. Both classification and candidate selection approaches present distinct strengths for automated coding in under-studied domains, and we highlight that the combination of (i) a small annotated data set; (ii) expert definitions of codes of interest; and (iii) a representative text corpus is sufficient to produce high-performing automated coding systems. This study has implications for the ongoing growth of NLP tools for a variety of specialized applications in clinical care and research.

Automated Chronotyping from a Daily Calendar using Machine Learning

Chronotype compares individuals' circadian phase to others. It contextualizes mental health risk assessments and detection of social jet lag, which can hamper mental health and cognitive performance. Existing ways of determining chronotypes, such as Dim Light Melatonin Onset (DLMO) or the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ), are limited by being discrete in time and time-intensive to update, meaning they rarely capture real-world variability across time. Chronotyping users based on a daily planner app might augment existing methods to enable assessment continuously and at scale. This paper reports the construction of a supervised binary classifier that attempts to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. 1,460 registered users from the Owaves app opted in by filling out the MEQ survey between July 14, 2022, and May 1, 2023. 142 met the eligibility criteria. We used multimodal app data from individuals identified as morning and evening types from MEQ data, basing the classifier on app time series data. This included daily timing for 8 main lifestyle activity types: exercise, sleep, social interactions, meal times, relaxation, work, play, and miscellaneous, as defined in the app. The timing of activities showed substantial change across time, as well as heterogeneity by activity type. Our novel chronotyping classifier was able to predict the morningness and eveningness of its users with an ROC AUC of 0.70. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of chronotype classification from multimodal, real-world app data, while highlighting fundamental challenges to applying discrete and fixed labels to complex, dynamic, multimodal behaviors. Our findings suggest a potential for real-time monitoring of shifts in chronotype specific to different causes (i.e. types of activity), which could feasibly be used to support future, prospective mental health support research.

Incremental Semi-supervised Federated Learning for Health Inference via Mobile Sensing

Mobile sensing appears as a promising solution for health inference problem (e.g., influenza-like symptom recognition) by leveraging diverse smart sensors to capture fine-grained information about human behaviors and ambient contexts. Centralized training of machine learning models can place mobile users' sensitive information under privacy risks due to data breach and misexploitation. Federated Learning (FL) enables mobile devices to collaboratively learn global models without the exposure of local private data. However, there are challenges of on-device FL deployment using mobile sensing: 1) long-term and continuously collected mobile sensing data may exhibit domain shifts as sensing objects (e.g. humans) have varying behaviors as a result of internal and/or external stimulus; 2) model retraining using all available data may increase computation and memory burden; and 3) the sparsity of annotated crowd-sourced data causes supervised FL to lack robustness. In this work, we propose FedMobile, an incremental semi-supervised federated learning algorithm, to train models semi-supervisedly and incrementally in a decentralized online fashion. We evaluate FedMobile using a real-world mobile sensing dataset for influenza-like symptom recognition. Our empirical results show that FedMobile-trained models achieve the best results in comparison to the selected baseline methods.

Pūioio: On-device Real-Time Smartphone-Based Automated Exercise Repetition Counting System

Automated exercise repetition counting has applications across the physical fitness realm, from personal health to rehabilitation. Motivated by the ubiquity of mobile phones and the benefits of tracking physical activity, this study explored the feasibility of counting exercise repetitions in real-time, using only on-device inference, on smartphones. In this work, after providing an extensive overview of the state-of-the-art automatic exercise repetition counting methods, we introduce a deep learning based exercise repetition counting system for smartphones consisting of five components: (1) Pose estimation, (2) Thresholding, (3) Optical flow, (4) State machine, and (5) Counter. The system is then implemented via a cross-platform mobile application named P\=uioio that uses only the smartphone camera to track repetitions in real time for three standard exercises: Squats, Push-ups, and Pull-ups. The proposed system was evaluated via a dataset of pre-recorded videos of individuals exercising as well as testing by subjects exercising in real time. Evaluation results indicated the system was 98.89% accurate in real-world tests and up to 98.85% when evaluated via the pre-recorded dataset. This makes it an effective, low-cost, and convenient alternative to existing solutions since the proposed system has minimal hardware requirements without requiring any wearable or specific sensors or network connectivity.

MultiMed: Massively Multimodal and Multitask Medical Understanding

Biomedical data is inherently multimodal, consisting of electronic health records, medical imaging, digital pathology, genome sequencing, wearable sensors, and more. The application of artificial intelligence tools to these multifaceted sensing technologies has the potential to revolutionize the prognosis, diagnosis, and management of human health and disease. However, current approaches to biomedical AI typically only train and evaluate with one or a small set of medical modalities and tasks. This limitation hampers the development of comprehensive tools that can leverage the rich interconnected information across many heterogeneous biomedical sensors. To address this challenge, we present MultiMed, a benchmark designed to evaluate and enable large-scale learning across a wide spectrum of medical modalities and tasks. MultiMed consists of 2.56 million samples across ten medical modalities such as medical reports, pathology, genomics, and protein data, and is structured into eleven challenging tasks, including disease prognosis, protein structure prediction, and medical question answering. Using MultiMed, we conduct comprehensive experiments benchmarking state-of-the-art unimodal, multimodal, and multitask models. Our analysis highlights the advantages of training large-scale medical models across many related modalities and tasks. Moreover, MultiMed enables studies of generalization across related medical concepts, robustness to real-world noisy data and distribution shifts, and novel modality combinations to improve prediction performance. MultiMed will be publicly available and regularly updated and welcomes inputs from the community.

Under the Surface: Tracking the Artifactuality of LLM-Generated Data

This work delves into the expanding role of large language models (LLMs) in generating artificial data. LLMs are increasingly employed to create a variety of outputs, including annotations, preferences, instruction prompts, simulated dialogues, and free text. As these forms of LLM-generated data often intersect in their application, they exert mutual influence on each other and raise significant concerns about the quality and diversity of the artificial data incorporated into training cycles, leading to an artificial data ecosystem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to aggregate various types of LLM-generated text data, from more tightly constrained data like "task labels" to more lightly constrained "free-form text". We then stress test the quality and implications of LLM-generated artificial data, comparing it with human data across various existing benchmarks. Despite artificial data's capability to match human performance, this paper reveals significant hidden disparities, especially in complex tasks where LLMs often miss the nuanced understanding of intrinsic human-generated content. This study critically examines diverse LLM-generated data and emphasizes the need for ethical practices in data creation and when using LLMs. It highlights the LLMs' shortcomings in replicating human traits and behaviors, underscoring the importance of addressing biases and artifacts produced in LLM-generated content for future research and development. All data and code are available on our project page.

SEWA DB: A Rich Database for Audio-Visual Emotion and Sentiment Research in the Wild

Natural human-computer interaction and audio-visual human behaviour sensing systems, which would achieve robust performance in-the-wild are more needed than ever as digital devices are increasingly becoming an indispensable part of our life. Accurately annotated real-world data are the crux in devising such systems. However, existing databases usually consider controlled settings, low demographic variability, and a single task. In this paper, we introduce the SEWA database of more than 2000 minutes of audio-visual data of 398 people coming from six cultures, 50% female, and uniformly spanning the age range of 18 to 65 years old. Subjects were recorded in two different contexts: while watching adverts and while discussing adverts in a video chat. The database includes rich annotations of the recordings in terms of facial landmarks, facial action units (FAU), various vocalisations, mirroring, and continuously valued valence, arousal, liking, agreement, and prototypic examples of (dis)liking. This database aims to be an extremely valuable resource for researchers in affective computing and automatic human sensing and is expected to push forward the research in human behaviour analysis, including cultural studies. Along with the database, we provide extensive baseline experiments for automatic FAU detection and automatic valence, arousal and (dis)liking intensity estimation.

FAIR Jupyter: a knowledge graph approach to semantic sharing and granular exploration of a computational notebook reproducibility dataset

The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.

TrackRAD2025 challenge dataset: Real-time tumor tracking for MRI-guided radiotherapy

Purpose: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to visualize anatomical motion is becoming increasingly important when treating cancer patients with radiotherapy. Hybrid MRI-linear accelerator (MRI-linac) systems allow real-time motion management during irradiation. This paper presents a multi-institutional real-time MRI time series dataset from different MRI-linac vendors. The dataset is designed to support developing and evaluating real-time tumor localization (tracking) algorithms for MRI-guided radiotherapy within the TrackRAD2025 challenge (https://trackrad2025.grand-challenge.org/). Acquisition and validation methods: The dataset consists of sagittal 2D cine MRIs in 585 patients from six centers (3 Dutch, 1 German, 1 Australian, and 1 Chinese). Tumors in the thorax, abdomen, and pelvis acquired on two commercially available MRI-linacs (0.35 T and 1.5 T) were included. For 108 cases, irradiation targets or tracking surrogates were manually segmented on each temporal frame. The dataset was randomly split into a public training set of 527 cases (477 unlabeled and 50 labeled) and a private testing set of 58 cases (all labeled). Data Format and Usage Notes: The data is publicly available under the TrackRAD2025 collection: https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/4539. Both the images and segmentations for each patient are available in metadata format. Potential Applications: This novel clinical dataset will enable the development and evaluation of real-time tumor localization algorithms for MRI-guided radiotherapy. By enabling more accurate motion management and adaptive treatment strategies, this dataset has the potential to advance the field of radiotherapy significantly.

The P-DESTRE: A Fully Annotated Dataset for Pedestrian Detection, Tracking, Re-Identification and Search from Aerial Devices

Over the last decades, the world has been witnessing growing threats to the security in urban spaces, which has augmented the relevance given to visual surveillance solutions able to detect, track and identify persons of interest in crowds. In particular, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a potential tool for this kind of analysis, as they provide a cheap way for data collection, cover large and difficult-to-reach areas, while reducing human staff demands. In this context, all the available datasets are exclusively suitable for the pedestrian re-identification problem, in which the multi-camera views per ID are taken on a single day, and allows the use of clothing appearance features for identification purposes. Accordingly, the main contributions of this paper are two-fold: 1) we announce the UAV-based P-DESTRE dataset, which is the first of its kind to provide consistent ID annotations across multiple days, making it suitable for the extremely challenging problem of person search, i.e., where no clothing information can be reliably used. Apart this feature, the P-DESTRE annotations enable the research on UAV-based pedestrian detection, tracking, re-identification and soft biometric solutions; and 2) we compare the results attained by state-of-the-art pedestrian detection, tracking, reidentification and search techniques in well-known surveillance datasets, to the effectiveness obtained by the same techniques in the P-DESTRE data. Such comparison enables to identify the most problematic data degradation factors of UAV-based data for each task, and can be used as baselines for subsequent advances in this kind of technology. The dataset and the full details of the empirical evaluation carried out are freely available at http://p-destre.di.ubi.pt/.

SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Navigation

Machine learning provides a powerful tool for building socially compliant robotic systems that go beyond simple predictive models of human behavior. By observing and understanding human interactions from past experiences, learning can enable effective social navigation behaviors directly from data. In this paper, our goal is to develop methods for training policies for socially unobtrusive navigation, such that robots can navigate among humans in ways that don't disturb human behavior. We introduce a definition for such behavior based on the counterfactual perturbation of the human: if the robot had not intruded into the space, would the human have acted in the same way? By minimizing this counterfactual perturbation, we can induce robots to behave in ways that do not alter the natural behavior of humans in the shared space. Instantiating this principle requires training policies to minimize their effect on human behavior, and this in turn requires data that allows us to model the behavior of humans in the presence of robots. Therefore, our approach is based on two key contributions. First, we collect a large dataset where an indoor mobile robot interacts with human bystanders. Second, we utilize this dataset to train policies that minimize counterfactual perturbation. We provide supplementary videos and make publicly available the largest-of-its-kind visual navigation dataset on our project page.

MVHumanNet: A Large-scale Dataset of Multi-view Daily Dressing Human Captures

In this era, the success of large language models and text-to-image models can be attributed to the driving force of large-scale datasets. However, in the realm of 3D vision, while remarkable progress has been made with models trained on large-scale synthetic and real-captured object data like Objaverse and MVImgNet, a similar level of progress has not been observed in the domain of human-centric tasks partially due to the lack of a large-scale human dataset. Existing datasets of high-fidelity 3D human capture continue to be mid-sized due to the significant challenges in acquiring large-scale high-quality 3D human data. To bridge this gap, we present MVHumanNet, a dataset that comprises multi-view human action sequences of 4,500 human identities. The primary focus of our work is on collecting human data that features a large number of diverse identities and everyday clothing using a multi-view human capture system, which facilitates easily scalable data collection. Our dataset contains 9,000 daily outfits, 60,000 motion sequences and 645 million frames with extensive annotations, including human masks, camera parameters, 2D and 3D keypoints, SMPL/SMPLX parameters, and corresponding textual descriptions. To explore the potential of MVHumanNet in various 2D and 3D visual tasks, we conducted pilot studies on view-consistent action recognition, human NeRF reconstruction, text-driven view-unconstrained human image generation, as well as 2D view-unconstrained human image and 3D avatar generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the performance improvements and effective applications enabled by the scale provided by MVHumanNet. As the current largest-scale 3D human dataset, we hope that the release of MVHumanNet data with annotations will foster further innovations in the domain of 3D human-centric tasks at scale.

Large-scale Training of Foundation Models for Wearable Biosignals

Tracking biosignals is crucial for monitoring wellness and preempting the development of severe medical conditions. Today, wearable devices can conveniently record various biosignals, creating the opportunity to monitor health status without disruption to one's daily routine. Despite widespread use of wearable devices and existing digital biomarkers, the absence of curated data with annotated medical labels hinders the development of new biomarkers to measure common health conditions. In fact, medical datasets are usually small in comparison to other domains, which is an obstacle for developing neural network models for biosignals. To address this challenge, we have employed self-supervised learning using the unlabeled sensor data collected under informed consent from the large longitudinal Apple Heart and Movement Study (AHMS) to train foundation models for two common biosignals: photoplethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recorded on Apple Watch. We curated PPG and ECG datasets from AHMS that include data from ~141K participants spanning ~3 years. Our self-supervised learning framework includes participant level positive pair selection, stochastic augmentation module and a regularized contrastive loss optimized with momentum training, and generalizes well to both PPG and ECG modalities. We show that the pre-trained foundation models readily encode information regarding participants' demographics and health conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that builds foundation models using large-scale PPG and ECG data collected via wearable consumer devices x2013 prior works have commonly used smaller-size datasets collected in clinical and experimental settings. We believe PPG and ECG foundation models can enhance future wearable devices by reducing the reliance on labeled data and hold the potential to help the users improve their health.

MVHumanNet++: A Large-scale Dataset of Multi-view Daily Dressing Human Captures with Richer Annotations for 3D Human Digitization

In this era, the success of large language models and text-to-image models can be attributed to the driving force of large-scale datasets. However, in the realm of 3D vision, while significant progress has been achieved in object-centric tasks through large-scale datasets like Objaverse and MVImgNet, human-centric tasks have seen limited advancement, largely due to the absence of a comparable large-scale human dataset. To bridge this gap, we present MVHumanNet++, a dataset that comprises multi-view human action sequences of 4,500 human identities. The primary focus of our work is on collecting human data that features a large number of diverse identities and everyday clothing using multi-view human capture systems, which facilitates easily scalable data collection. Our dataset contains 9,000 daily outfits, 60,000 motion sequences and 645 million frames with extensive annotations, including human masks, camera parameters, 2D and 3D keypoints, SMPL/SMPLX parameters, and corresponding textual descriptions. Additionally, the proposed MVHumanNet++ dataset is enhanced with newly processed normal maps and depth maps, significantly expanding its applicability and utility for advanced human-centric research. To explore the potential of our proposed MVHumanNet++ dataset in various 2D and 3D visual tasks, we conducted several pilot studies to demonstrate the performance improvements and effective applications enabled by the scale provided by MVHumanNet++. As the current largest-scale 3D human dataset, we hope that the release of MVHumanNet++ dataset with annotations will foster further innovations in the domain of 3D human-centric tasks at scale. MVHumanNet++ is publicly available at https://kevinlee09.github.io/research/MVHumanNet++/.

Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development

Data is a crucial component of machine learning. The field is reliant on data to train, validate, and test models. With increased technical capabilities, machine learning research has boomed in both academic and industry settings, and one major focus has been on computer vision. Computer vision is a popular domain of machine learning increasingly pertinent to real-world applications, from facial recognition in policing to object detection for autonomous vehicles. Given computer vision's propensity to shape machine learning research and impact human life, we seek to understand disciplinary practices around dataset documentation - how data is collected, curated, annotated, and packaged into datasets for computer vision researchers and practitioners to use for model tuning and development. Specifically, we examine what dataset documentation communicates about the underlying values of vision data and the larger practices and goals of computer vision as a field. To conduct this study, we collected a corpus of about 500 computer vision datasets, from which we sampled 114 dataset publications across different vision tasks. Through both a structured and thematic content analysis, we document a number of values around accepted data practices, what makes desirable data, and the treatment of humans in the dataset construction process. We discuss how computer vision datasets authors value efficiency at the expense of care; universality at the expense of contextuality; impartiality at the expense of positionality; and model work at the expense of data work. Many of the silenced values we identify sit in opposition with social computing practices. We conclude with suggestions on how to better incorporate silenced values into the dataset creation and curation process.

SustainBench: Benchmarks for Monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals with Machine Learning

Progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been hindered by a lack of data on key environmental and socioeconomic indicators, which historically have come from ground surveys with sparse temporal and spatial coverage. Recent advances in machine learning have made it possible to utilize abundant, frequently-updated, and globally available data, such as from satellites or social media, to provide insights into progress toward SDGs. Despite promising early results, approaches to using such data for SDG measurement thus far have largely evaluated on different datasets or used inconsistent evaluation metrics, making it hard to understand whether performance is improving and where additional research would be most fruitful. Furthermore, processing satellite and ground survey data requires domain knowledge that many in the machine learning community lack. In this paper, we introduce SustainBench, a collection of 15 benchmark tasks across 7 SDGs, including tasks related to economic development, agriculture, health, education, water and sanitation, climate action, and life on land. Datasets for 11 of the 15 tasks are released publicly for the first time. Our goals for SustainBench are to (1) lower the barriers to entry for the machine learning community to contribute to measuring and achieving the SDGs; (2) provide standard benchmarks for evaluating machine learning models on tasks across a variety of SDGs; and (3) encourage the development of novel machine learning methods where improved model performance facilitates progress towards the SDGs.

SC2EGSet: StarCraft II Esport Replay and Game-state Dataset

As a relatively new form of sport, esports offers unparalleled data availability. Despite the vast amounts of data that are generated by game engines, it can be challenging to extract them and verify their integrity for the purposes of practical and scientific use. Our work aims to open esports to a broader scientific community by supplying raw and pre-processed files from StarCraft II esports tournaments. These files can be used in statistical and machine learning modeling tasks and related to various laboratory-based measurements (e.g., behavioral tests, brain imaging). We have gathered publicly available game-engine generated "replays" of tournament matches and performed data extraction and cleanup using a low-level application programming interface (API) parser library. Additionally, we open-sourced and published all the custom tools that were developed in the process of creating our dataset. These tools include PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning API abstractions to load and model the data. Our dataset contains replays from major and premiere StarCraft II tournaments since 2016. To prepare the dataset, we processed 55 tournament "replaypacks" that contained 17930 files with game-state information. Based on initial investigation of available StarCraft II datasets, we observed that our dataset is the largest publicly available source of StarCraft II esports data upon its publication. Analysis of the extracted data holds promise for further Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), psychological, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and sports-related studies in a variety of supervised and self-supervised tasks.

Exploring the Potential of AI-Generated Synthetic Datasets: A Case Study on Telematics Data with ChatGPT

This research delves into the construction and utilization of synthetic datasets, specifically within the telematics sphere, leveraging OpenAI's powerful language model, ChatGPT. Synthetic datasets present an effective solution to challenges pertaining to data privacy, scarcity, and control over variables - characteristics that make them particularly valuable for research pursuits. The utility of these datasets, however, largely depends on their quality, measured through the lenses of diversity, relevance, and coherence. To illustrate this data creation process, a hands-on case study is conducted, focusing on the generation of a synthetic telematics dataset. The experiment involved an iterative guidance of ChatGPT, progressively refining prompts and culminating in the creation of a comprehensive dataset for a hypothetical urban planning scenario in Columbus, Ohio. Upon generation, the synthetic dataset was subjected to an evaluation, focusing on the previously identified quality parameters and employing descriptive statistics and visualization techniques for a thorough analysis. Despite synthetic datasets not serving as perfect replacements for actual world data, their potential in specific use-cases, when executed with precision, is significant. This research underscores the potential of AI models like ChatGPT in enhancing data availability for complex sectors like telematics, thus paving the way for a myriad of new research opportunities.

Holistic Understanding of 3D Scenes as Universal Scene Description

3D scene understanding is a long-standing challenge in computer vision and a key component in enabling mixed reality, wearable computing, and embodied AI. Providing a solution to these applications requires a multifaceted approach that covers scene-centric, object-centric, as well as interaction-centric capabilities. While there exist numerous datasets approaching the former two problems, the task of understanding interactable and articulated objects is underrepresented and only partly covered by current works. In this work, we address this shortcoming and introduce (1) an expertly curated dataset in the Universal Scene Description (USD) format, featuring high-quality manual annotations, for instance, segmentation and articulation on 280 indoor scenes; (2) a learning-based model together with a novel baseline capable of predicting part segmentation along with a full specification of motion attributes, including motion type, articulated and interactable parts, and motion parameters; (3) a benchmark serving to compare upcoming methods for the task at hand. Overall, our dataset provides 8 types of annotations - object and part segmentations, motion types, movable and interactable parts, motion parameters, connectivity, and object mass annotations. With its broad and high-quality annotations, the data provides the basis for holistic 3D scene understanding models. All data is provided in the USD format, allowing interoperability and easy integration with downstream tasks. We provide open access to our dataset, benchmark, and method's source code.

Skills Made to Order: Efficient Acquisition of Robot Cooking Skills Guided by Multiple Forms of Internet Data

This study explores the utility of various internet data sources to select among a set of template robot behaviors to perform skills. Learning contact-rich skills involving tool use from internet data sources has typically been challenging due to the lack of physical information such as contact existence, location, areas, and force in this data. Prior works have generally used internet data and foundation models trained on this data to generate low-level robot behavior. We hypothesize that these data and models may be better suited to selecting among a set of basic robot behaviors to perform these contact-rich skills. We explore three methods of template selection: querying large language models, comparing video of robot execution to retrieved human video using features from a pretrained video encoder common in prior work, and performing the same comparison using features from an optic flow encoder trained on internet data. Our results show that LLMs are surprisingly capable template selectors despite their lack of visual information, optical flow encoding significantly outperforms video encoders trained with an order of magnitude more data, and important synergies exist between various forms of internet data for template selection. By exploiting these synergies, we create a template selector using multiple forms of internet data that achieves a 79\% success rate on a set of 16 different cooking skills involving tool-use.

SemiPFL: Personalized Semi-Supervised Federated Learning Framework for Edge Intelligence

Recent advances in wearable devices and Internet-of-Things (IoT) have led to massive growth in sensor data generated in edge devices. Labeling such massive data for classification tasks has proven to be challenging. In addition, data generated by different users bear various personal attributes and edge heterogeneity, rendering it impractical to develop a global model that adapts well to all users. Concerns over data privacy and communication costs also prohibit centralized data accumulation and training. We propose SemiPFL that supports edge users having no label or limited labeled datasets and a sizable amount of unlabeled data that is insufficient to train a well-performing model. In this work, edge users collaborate to train a Hyper-network in the server, generating personalized autoencoders for each user. After receiving updates from edge users, the server produces a set of base models for each user, which the users locally aggregate them using their own labeled dataset. We comprehensively evaluate our proposed framework on various public datasets from a wide range of application scenarios, from wearable health to IoT, and demonstrate that SemiPFL outperforms state-of-art federated learning frameworks under the same assumptions regarding user performance, network footprint, and computational consumption. We also show that the solution performs well for users without label or having limited labeled datasets and increasing performance for increased labeled data and number of users, signifying the effectiveness of SemiPFL for handling data heterogeneity and limited annotation. We also demonstrate the stability of SemiPFL for handling user hardware resource heterogeneity in three real-time scenarios.

A Large-Scale Dataset of Search Interests Related to Disease X Originating from Different Geographic Regions

The World Health Organization added Disease X to their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic. During different virus outbreaks of the past, such as COVID-19, Influenza, Lyme Disease, and Zika virus, researchers from various disciplines utilized Google Trends to mine multimodal components of web behavior to study, investigate, and analyze the global awareness, preparedness, and response associated with these respective virus outbreaks. As the world prepares for Disease X, a dataset on web behavior related to Disease X would be crucial to contribute towards the timely advancement of research in this field. Furthermore, none of the prior works in this field have focused on the development of a dataset to compile relevant web behavior data, which would help to prepare for Disease X. To address these research challenges, this work presents a dataset of web behavior related to Disease X, which emerged from different geographic regions of the world, between February 2018 and August 2023. Specifically, this dataset presents the search interests related to Disease X from 94 geographic regions. The dataset was developed by collecting data using Google Trends. The relevant search interests for all these regions for each month in this time range are available in this dataset. This paper also discusses the compliance of this dataset with the FAIR principles of scientific data management. Finally, an analysis of this dataset is presented to uphold the applicability, relevance, and usefulness of this dataset for the investigation of different research questions in the interrelated fields of Big Data, Data Mining, Healthcare, Epidemiology, and Data Analysis with a specific focus on Disease X.

Carbon and Silicon, Coexist or Compete? A Survey on Human-AI Interactions in Agent-based Modeling and Simulation

Recent interest in human-AI interactions in agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) has grown rapidly due to the widespread utilization of large language models (LLMs). ABMS is an intelligent approach that simulates autonomous agents' behaviors within a defined environment to research emergent phenomena. Integrating LLMs into ABMS enables natural language interaction between humans and models. Meanwhile, it introduces new challenges that rely on human interaction to address. Human involvement can assist ABMS in adapting to flexible and complex research demands. However, systematic reviews of interactions that examine how humans and AI interact in ABMS are lacking. In this paper, we investigate existing works and propose a novel taxonomy to categorize the interactions derived from them. Specifically, human users refer to researchers who utilize ABMS tools to conduct their studies in our survey. We decompose interactions into five dimensions: the goals that users want to achieve (Why), the phases that users are involved (When), the components of the system (What), the roles of users (Who), and the means of interactions (How). Our analysis summarizes the findings that reveal existing interaction patterns. They provide researchers who develop interactions with comprehensive guidance on how humans and AI interact. We further discuss the unexplored interactions and suggest future research directions.

SINC: Spatial Composition of 3D Human Motions for Simultaneous Action Generation

Our goal is to synthesize 3D human motions given textual inputs describing simultaneous actions, for example 'waving hand' while 'walking' at the same time. We refer to generating such simultaneous movements as performing 'spatial compositions'. In contrast to temporal compositions that seek to transition from one action to another, spatial compositing requires understanding which body parts are involved in which action, to be able to move them simultaneously. Motivated by the observation that the correspondence between actions and body parts is encoded in powerful language models, we extract this knowledge by prompting GPT-3 with text such as "what are the body parts involved in the action <action name>?", while also providing the parts list and few-shot examples. Given this action-part mapping, we combine body parts from two motions together and establish the first automated method to spatially compose two actions. However, training data with compositional actions is always limited by the combinatorics. Hence, we further create synthetic data with this approach, and use it to train a new state-of-the-art text-to-motion generation model, called SINC ("SImultaneous actioN Compositions for 3D human motions"). In our experiments, that training with such GPT-guided synthetic data improves spatial composition generation over baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://sinc.is.tue.mpg.de/.

UAL-Bench: The First Comprehensive Unusual Activity Localization Benchmark

Localizing unusual activities, such as human errors or surveillance incidents, in videos holds practical significance. However, current video understanding models struggle with localizing these unusual events likely because of their insufficient representation in models' pretraining datasets. To explore foundation models' capability in localizing unusual activity, we introduce UAL-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for unusual activity localization, featuring three video datasets: UAG-OOPS, UAG-SSBD, UAG-FunQA, and an instruction-tune dataset: OOPS-UAG-Instruct, to improve model capabilities. UAL-Bench evaluates three approaches: Video-Language Models (Vid-LLMs), instruction-tuned Vid-LLMs, and a novel integration of Vision-Language Models and Large Language Models (VLM-LLM). Our results show the VLM-LLM approach excels in localizing short-span unusual events and predicting their onset (start time) more accurately than Vid-LLMs. We also propose a new metric, R@1, TD <= p, to address limitations in existing evaluation methods. Our findings highlight the challenges posed by long-duration videos, particularly in autism diagnosis scenarios, and the need for further advancements in localization techniques. Our work not only provides a benchmark for unusual activity localization but also outlines the key challenges for existing foundation models, suggesting future research directions on this important task.

NurViD: A Large Expert-Level Video Database for Nursing Procedure Activity Understanding

The application of deep learning to nursing procedure activity understanding has the potential to greatly enhance the quality and safety of nurse-patient interactions. By utilizing the technique, we can facilitate training and education, improve quality control, and enable operational compliance monitoring. However, the development of automatic recognition systems in this field is currently hindered by the scarcity of appropriately labeled datasets. The existing video datasets pose several limitations: 1) these datasets are small-scale in size to support comprehensive investigations of nursing activity; 2) they primarily focus on single procedures, lacking expert-level annotations for various nursing procedures and action steps; and 3) they lack temporally localized annotations, which prevents the effective localization of targeted actions within longer video sequences. To mitigate these limitations, we propose NurViD, a large video dataset with expert-level annotation for nursing procedure activity understanding. NurViD consists of over 1.5k videos totaling 144 hours, making it approximately four times longer than the existing largest nursing activity datasets. Notably, it encompasses 51 distinct nursing procedures and 177 action steps, providing a much more comprehensive coverage compared to existing datasets that primarily focus on limited procedures. To evaluate the efficacy of current deep learning methods on nursing activity understanding, we establish three benchmarks on NurViD: procedure recognition on untrimmed videos, procedure and action recognition on trimmed videos, and action detection. Our benchmark and code will be available at https://github.com/minghu0830/NurViD-benchmark.

The OPNV Data Collection: A Dataset for Infrastructure-Supported Perception Research with Focus on Public Transportation

This paper we present our vision and ongoing work for a novel dataset designed to advance research into the interoperability of intelligent vehicles and infrastructure, specifically aimed at enhancing cooperative perception and interaction in the realm of public transportation. Unlike conventional datasets centered on ego-vehicle data, this approach encompasses both a stationary sensor tower and a moving vehicle, each equipped with cameras, LiDARs, and GNSS, while the vehicle additionally includes an inertial navigation system. Our setup features comprehensive calibration and time synchronization, ensuring seamless and accurate sensor data fusion crucial for studying complex, dynamic scenes. Emphasizing public transportation, the dataset targets to include scenes like bus station maneuvers and driving on dedicated bus lanes, reflecting the specifics of small public buses. We introduce the open-source ".4mse" file format for the new dataset, accompanied by a research kit. This kit provides tools such as ego-motion compensation or LiDAR-to-camera projection enabling advanced research on intelligent vehicle-infrastructure integration. Our approach does not include annotations; however, we plan to implement automatically generated labels sourced from state-of-the-art public repositories. Several aspects are still up for discussion, and timely feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated. A sneak preview on one data frame will be available at a Google Colab Notebook. Moreover, we will use the related GitHub Repository to collect remarks and suggestions.

Data Cards: Purposeful and Transparent Dataset Documentation for Responsible AI

As research and industry moves towards large-scale models capable of numerous downstream tasks, the complexity of understanding multi-modal datasets that give nuance to models rapidly increases. A clear and thorough understanding of a dataset's origins, development, intent, ethical considerations and evolution becomes a necessary step for the responsible and informed deployment of models, especially those in people-facing contexts and high-risk domains. However, the burden of this understanding often falls on the intelligibility, conciseness, and comprehensiveness of the documentation. It requires consistency and comparability across the documentation of all datasets involved, and as such documentation must be treated as a user-centric product in and of itself. In this paper, we propose Data Cards for fostering transparent, purposeful and human-centered documentation of datasets within the practical contexts of industry and research. Data Cards are structured summaries of essential facts about various aspects of ML datasets needed by stakeholders across a dataset's lifecycle for responsible AI development. These summaries provide explanations of processes and rationales that shape the data and consequently the models, such as upstream sources, data collection and annotation methods; training and evaluation methods, intended use; or decisions affecting model performance. We also present frameworks that ground Data Cards in real-world utility and human-centricity. Using two case studies, we report on desirable characteristics that support adoption across domains, organizational structures, and audience groups. Finally, we present lessons learned from deploying over 20 Data Cards.