We start by exploring strategies for eliciting explicit, coherent numerical predictive distributions from LLMs.

We start by exploring strategies for eliciting explicit, coherent numerical predictive distributions from LLMs.

--Incorporating an autonomous auxiliary camera into robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) enhances spatial awareness and eliminates manual viewpoint control. Existing path planning methods for auxiliary cameras track two-dimensional surgical features but do not simultaneously account for camera orientation, workspace constraints, and robot joint limits. This study presents AutoCam: an automatic auxiliary camera placement method to improve visualization in RAMIS. Implemented on the da Vinci Research Kit, the system uses a priority-based, workspace-constrained control algorithm that combines heuristic geometric placement with nonlinear optimization to ensure robust camera tracking. A user study (N=6) demonstrated that the system maintained 99.84% visibility of a salient feature and achieved a pose error of 4.36 2.11 degrees and 1.95 5.66 mm. The controller was computationally efficient, with a loop time of 6.8 12.8 ms. An additional pilot study (N=6), where novices completed a Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery training task, suggests that users can teleoperate just as effectively from AutoCam's viewpoint as from the endoscope's while still benefiting from AutoCam's improved visual coverage of the scene. These results indicate that an auxiliary camera can be autonomously controlled using the da Vinci patient-side manipulators to track a salient feature, laying the groundwork for new multi-camera visualization methods in RAMIS. OBOT assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) has been adopted in over 60 countries [1] and is shown to reduce postoperative blood loss, shorten hospitalization times, and enable tremor filtering and enhanced dexterity [2], [3]. Most surgical robots, including the da Vinci (Intuitive Surgical, Inc.) and Hugo (Medtronic, Inc.) systems, have a single endoscopic camera (ECM) restricted to rotate about the remote center of motion (RCM) at the incision site [4]. Having only one viewpoint with limited maneuverability compromises global awareness of the surgical scene [5] and impedes surgical workflow when the endoscope is occluded [4], [6], [7]. This work was supported by the NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarships, the NSERC Discovery Grant, and the C.A. Laszlo Biomedical Engineering Chair held by Professor Salcudean. A. Banks and R. Moore contributed equally to this work. Salcudean are with the University of British Columbia, V ancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada. A. E. Abdelaal is with Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, United States.

Augmented reality (AR) is an effective tool in robotic surgery education as it combines exploratory learning with three-dimensional guidance. However, existing AR systems require expert supervision and do not account for differences in the mentor and mentee robot configurations. To enable novices to train outside the operating room while receiving expert-informed guidance, we present dV-STEAR: an open-source system that plays back task-aligned expert demonstrations without assuming identical setup joint positions between expert and novice. Pose estimation was rigorously quantified, showing a registration error of 3.86 (SD=2.01)mm. In a user study (N=24), dV-STEAR significantly improved novice performance on tasks from the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery. In a single-handed ring-over-wire task, dV-STEAR increased completion speed (p=0.03) and reduced collision time (p=0.01) compared to dry-lab training alone. During a pick-and-place task, it improved success rates (p=0.004). Across both tasks, participants using dV-STEAR exhibited significantly more balanced hand use and reported lower frustration levels. This work presents a novel educational tool implemented on the da Vinci Research Kit, demonstrates its effectiveness in teaching novices, and builds the foundation for further AR integration into robot-assisted surgery.

While guide dogs offer essential mobility assistance, their high cost, limited availability, and care requirements make them inaccessible to most blind or low vision (BLV) individuals. Recent advances in quadruped robots provide a scalable solution for mobility assistance, but many current designs fail to meet real-world needs due to a lack of understanding of handler and guide dog interactions. In this paper, we share lessons learned from developing a human-centered guide dog robot, addressing challenges such as optimal hardware design, robust navigation, and informative scene description for user adoption. By conducting semi-structured interviews and human experiments with BLV individuals, guide-dog handlers, and trainers, we identified key design principles to improve safety, trust, and usability in robotic mobility aids. Our findings lay the building blocks for future development of guide dog robots, ultimately enhancing independence and quality of life for BLV individuals.

Machine learning practitioners often face significant challenges in formally integrating their prior knowledge and beliefs into predictive models, limiting the potential for nuanced and context-aware analyses. Moreover, the expertise needed to integrate this prior knowledge into probabilistic modeling typically limits the application of these models to specialists. Our goal is to build a regression model that can process numerical data and make probabilistic predictions at arbitrary locations, guided by natural language text which describes a user's prior knowledge. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a useful starting point for designing such a tool since they 1) provide an interface where users can incorporate expert insights in natural language and 2) provide an opportunity for leveraging latent problem-relevant knowledge encoded in LLMs that users may not have themselves. We start by exploring strategies for eliciting explicit, coherent numerical predictive distributions from LLMs. We examine these joint predictive distributions, which we call LLM Processes, over arbitrarily-many quantities in settings such as forecasting, multi-dimensional regression, black-box optimization, and image modeling. We investigate the practical details of prompting to elicit coherent predictive distributions, and demonstrate their effectiveness at regression. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to usefully incorporate text into numerical predictions, improving predictive performance and giving quantitative structure that reflects qualitative descriptions. This lets us begin to explore the rich, grounded hypothesis space that LLMs implicitly encode.

Non-flat surfaces pose difficulties for robots operating in unstructured environments. Reconstructions of uneven surfaces may only be partially possible due to non-compliant end-effectors and limitations on vision systems such as transparency, reflections, and occlusions. This study achieves blind surface reconstruction by harnessing the robotic manipulator's kinematic data and a compliant tactile sensing module, which incorporates inertial, magnetic, and pressure sensors. The module's flexibility enables us to estimate contact positions and surface normals by analyzing its deformation during interactions with unknown objects. While previous works collect only positional information, we include the local normals in a geometrical approach to estimate curvatures between adjacent contact points. These parameters then guide a spline-based patch generation, which allows us to recreate larger surfaces without an increase in complexity while reducing the time-consuming step of probing the surface. Experimental validation demonstrates that this approach outperforms an off-the-shelf vision system in estimation accuracy. Moreover, this compliant haptic method works effectively even when the manipulator's approach angle is not aligned with the surface normals, which is ideal for unknown non-flat surfaces.

Spider-Man 2 was even better than the original. Not knowing who the antagonists were going to be was truly exciting, and that feeling of swooping through the streets of New York City was even more exhilarating! The side missions were full adventures with their own cutscenes and unique objectives. The performers were all superb and the twists and turns of the plot were exciting. It has to be Tears of the Kingdom. I was never a Nintendo kid – always Sega – and I bounced off of Breath of the Wild in 2017 and haven't touched my Switch since.

We introduce a method for training exactly conservative physics-informed neural networks and physics-informed deep operator networks for dynamical systems. The method employs a projection-based technique that maps a candidate solution learned by the neural network solver for any given dynamical system possessing at least one first integral onto an invariant manifold. We illustrate that exactly conservative physics-informed neural network solvers and physics-informed deep operator networks for dynamical systems vastly outperform their non-conservative counterparts for several real-world problems from the mathematical sciences.

Domain decomposition methods are widely used and effective in the approximation of solutions to partial differential equations. Yet the optimal construction of these methods requires tedious analysis and is often available only in simplified, structured-grid settings, limiting their use for more complex problems. In this work, we generalize optimized Schwarz domain decomposition methods to unstructured-grid problems, using Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNNs) and unsupervised learning to learn optimal modifications at subdomain interfaces. A key ingredient in our approach is an improved loss function, enabling effective training on relatively small problems, but robust performance on arbitrarily large problems, with computational cost linear in problem size. The performance of the learned linear solvers is compared with both classical and optimized domain decomposition algorithms, for both structured- and unstructured-grid problems.