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Not There Yet: Evaluating Vision Language Models in Simulating the Visual Perception of People with Low Vision

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Advances in vision language models (VLMs) have enabled the simulation of general human behavior through their reasoning and problem solving capabilities. However, prior research has not investigated such simulation capabilities in the accessibility domain. In this paper, we evaluate the extent to which VLMs can simulate the vision perception of low vision individuals when interpreting images. We first compile a benchmark dataset through a survey study with 40 low vision participants, collecting their brief and detailed vision information and both open-ended and multiple-choice image perception and recognition responses to up to 25 images. Using these responses, we construct prompts for VLMs (GPT - 4o) to create simulated agents of each participant, varying the included information on vision information and example image responses. We evaluate the agreement between VLM-generated responses and participants' original answers. Our results indicate that VLMs tend to infer beyond the specified vision ability when given minimal prompts, resulting in low agreement (0.59). The agreement between the agent' and participants' responses remains low when only either the vision information (0.59) or example image responses (0.59) are provided, whereas a combination of both significantly increase the agreement (0.70, p < 0.0001). Notably, a single example combining both open-ended and multiple-choice responses, offers significant performance improvements over either alone (p < 0.0001), while additional examples provided minimal benefits (p > 0.05).


Human-AI collaboration or obedient and often clueless AI in instruct, serve, repeat dynamics?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While research on human-AI collaboration exists, it mainly examined language learning and used traditional counting methods with little attention to evolution and dynamics of collaboration on cognitively demanding tasks. This study examines human-AI interactions while solving a complex problem. Student-AI interactions were qualitatively coded and analyzed with transition network analysis, sequence analysis and partial correlation networks as well as comparison of frequencies using chi-square and Person-residual shaded Mosaic plots to map interaction patterns, their evolution, and their relationship to problem complexity and student performance. Findings reveal a dominant Instructive pattern with interactions characterized by iterative ordering rather than collaborative negotiation. Oftentimes, students engaged in long threads that showed misalignment between their prompts and AI output that exemplified a lack of synergy that challenges the prevailing assumptions about LLMs as collaborative partners. We also found no significant correlations between assignment complexity, prompt length, and student grades suggesting a lack of cognitive depth, or effect of problem difficulty. Our study indicates that the current LLMs, optimized for instruction-following rather than cognitive partnership, compound their capability to act as cognitively stimulating or aligned collaborators. Implications for designing AI systems that prioritize cognitive alignment and collaboration are discussed.


MVISU-Bench: Benchmarking Mobile Agents for Real-World Tasks by Multi-App, Vague, Interactive, Single-App and Unethical Instructions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Given the significant advances in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) in reasoning and visual understanding, mobile agents are rapidly emerging to meet users' automation needs. However, existing evaluation benchmarks are disconnected from the real world and fail to adequately address the diverse and complex requirements of users. From our extensive collection of user questionnaire, we identified five tasks: Multi-App, Vague, Interactive, Single-App, and Unethical Instructions. Around these tasks, we present \textbf{MVISU-Bench}, a bilingual benchmark that includes 404 tasks across 137 mobile applications. Furthermore, we propose Aider, a plug-and-play module that acts as a dynamic prompt prompter to mitigate risks and clarify user intent for mobile agents. Our Aider is easy to integrate into several frameworks and has successfully improved overall success rates by 19.55\% compared to the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) on MVISU-Bench. Specifically, it achieves success rate improvements of 53.52\% and 29.41\% for unethical and interactive instructions, respectively. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we highlight the gap between existing mobile agents and real-world user expectations.


StoryEnsemble: Enabling Dynamic Exploration & Iteration in the Design Process with AI and Forward-Backward Propagation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Design processes involve exploration, iteration, and movement across interconnected stages such as persona creation, problem framing, solution ideation, and prototyping. However, time and resource constraints often hinder designers from exploring broadly, collecting feedback, and revisiting earlier assumptions-making it difficult to uphold core design principles in practice. To better understand these challenges, we conducted a formative study with 15 participants-comprised of UX practitioners, students, and instructors. Based on the findings, we developed StoryEnsemble, a tool that integrates AI into a node-link interface and leverages forward and backward propagation to support dynamic exploration and iteration across the design process. A user study with 10 participants showed that StoryEnsemble enables rapid, multi-directional iteration and flexible navigation across design stages. This work advances our understanding of how AI can foster more iterative design practices by introducing novel interactions that make exploration and iteration more fluid, accessible, and engaging.


JELAI: Integrating AI and Learning Analytics in Jupyter Notebooks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI offers potential for educational support, but often lacks pedagogical grounding and awareness of the student's learning context. Furthermore, researching student interactions with these tools within authentic learning environments remains challenging. To address this, we present JELAI, an open-source platform architecture designed to integrate fine-grained Learning Analytics (LA) with Large Language Model (LLM)-based tutoring directly within a Jupyter Notebook environment. JELAI employs a modular, containerized design featuring JupyterLab extensions for telemetry and chat, alongside a central mid-dleware handling LA processing and context-aware LLM prompt enrichment. This architecture enables the capture of integrated code interaction and chat data, facilitating real-time, context-sensitive AI scaffolding and research into student behaviour. We describe the system's design, implementation, and demonstrate its feasibility through system performance benchmarks and two proof-of-concept use cases illustrating its capabilities for logging multi-modal data, analysing help-seeking patterns, and supporting A/B testing of AI configurations. JELAI's primary contribution is its technical framework, providing a flexible tool for researchers and educators to develop, deploy, and study LA-informed AI tutoring within the widely used Jupyter ecosystem.


EmbodiedAgent: A Scalable Hierarchical Approach to Overcome Practical Challenge in Multi-Robot Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In response to these limitations, this work introduces a hierarchical Embodied system with an Agent-based planner, named EmbodiedAgent. EmbodiedAgent leverages a next-action prediction paradigm to establish a heterogeneous multi-robot control system. The core agent generates a single action and its corresponding arguments per inference, terminating upon receiving an end-of-planning signal, thus ensuring a controlled and concise execution process. To address the aforementioned challenges, we enhance the planner's robustness and generalizability through supervised fine-tuning. Extended from previous work MultiPlan [4], we present MultiPlan+, a large-scale dataset comprising 100 scenarios with over 18,000 tasks, enriched with a subset of impractical cases to mitigate hallucinations. Additionally, we develop an agent based on a fine-tuned language model equipped with function calling capabilities and structured memory. Specifically, robot skills, termination signals, and error signals related to impractical cases are encapsulated as tools, while planning history is organized within the structured memory. For low-level execution, we employ specialized policies trained on individual basic tasks to ensure reliable and robust performance. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive R obot Planning A ssessment S chema ( RPAS), which moves beyond error-type diagnostics to emphasize stratified success rates assessed through both human evaluation and automated grading.




Minimax Optimal Quantile and Semi-Adversarial Regret via Root-Logarithmic Regularizers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Quantile (and, more generally, KL) regret bounds, such as those achieved by NormalHedge (Chaudhuri, Freund, and Hsu 2009) and its variants, relax the goal of competing against the best individual expert to only competing against a majority of experts on adversarial data.


A Additional prompt data details

Neural Information Processing Systems

Desination will be a red barn on the right 1. Continued on next page 18 Use Case Example rewrite Rewrite the following text to be more light-hearted: -- {very formal text} -- chat The following is a conversation with an AI assistant.