Vision-language-action (VLA) models represent a promising direction for developing general-purpose robotic systems, demonstrating the ability to combine visual understanding, language comprehension, and action generation. However, systematic evaluation of these models across diverse robotic tasks remains limited. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation framework and benchmark suite for assessing VLA models. We profile three state-of-the-art VLM and VLAs - GPT-4o, OpenVLA, and JAT - across 20 diverse datasets from the Open-X-Embodiment collection, evaluating their performance on various manipulation tasks. Our analysis reveals several key insights: 1. current VLA models show significant variation in performance across different tasks and robot platforms, with GPT-4o demonstrating the most consistent performance through sophisticated prompt engineering, 2. all models struggle with complex manipulation tasks requiring multi-step planning, and 3. model performance is notably sensitive to action space characteristics and environmental factors. We release our evaluation framework and findings to facilitate systematic assessment of future VLA models and identify critical areas for improvement in the development of general purpose robotic systems.

Intent discovery is crucial for both building new conversational agents and improving existing ones. While several approaches have been proposed for intent discovery, most rely on clustering to group similar utterances together. Traditional evaluation of these utterance clusters requires intent labels for each utterance, limiting scalability. Although some clustering quality metrics exist that do not require labeled data, they focus solely on cluster geometry while ignoring the linguistic nuances present in conversational transcripts. In this paper, we introduce Keyword-based Utterance Level Clustering Quality (KULCQ), an unsupervised metric that leverages keyword analysis to evaluate clustering quality. We demonstrate KULCQ's effectiveness by comparing it with existing unsupervised clustering metrics and validate its performance through comprehensive ablation studies. Our results show that KULCQ better captures semantic relationships in conversational data while maintaining consistency with geometric clustering principles.

Conversational AI agents often require extensive datasets for training that are not publicly released, are limited to social chit-chat or handling a specific domain, and may not be easily extended to accommodate the latest advances in AI technologies. This paper introduces Jill Watson, a conversational Virtual Teaching Assistant (VTA) leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT. Jill Watson based on ChatGPT requires no prior training and uses a modular design to allow the integration of new APIs using a skill-based architecture inspired by XiaoIce. Jill Watson is also well-suited for intelligent textbooks as it can process and converse using multiple large documents. We exclusively utilize publicly available resources for reproducibility and extensibility. Comparative analysis shows that our system outperforms the legacy knowledge-based Jill Watson as well as the OpenAI Assistants service. We employ many safety measures that reduce instances of hallucinations and toxicity. The paper also includes real-world examples from a classroom setting that demonstrate different features of Jill Watson and its effectiveness.

With the surging inclination towards carrying out tasks on computational devices and digital mediums, any method that converts a task that was previously carried out manually, to a digitized version, is always welcome. Irrespective of the various documentation tasks that can be done online today, there are still many applications and domains where handwritten text is inevitable, which makes the digitization of handwritten documents a very essential task. Over the past decades, there has been extensive research on offline handwritten text recognition. In the recent past, most of these attempts have shifted to Machine learning and Deep learning based approaches. In order to design more complex and deeper networks, and ensure stellar performances, it is essential to have larger quantities of annotated data. Most of the databases present for offline handwritten text recognition today, have either been manually annotated or semi automatically annotated with a lot of manual involvement. These processes are very time consuming and prone to human errors. To tackle this problem, we present an innovative, complete end-to-end pipeline, that annotates offline handwritten manuscripts written in both print and cursive English, using Deep Learning and User Interaction techniques. This novel method, which involves an architectural combination of a detection system built upon a state-of-the-art text detection model, and a custom made Deep Learning model for the recognition system, is combined with an easy-to-use interactive interface, aiming to improve the accuracy of the detection, segmentation, serialization and recognition phases, in order to ensure high quality annotated data with minimal human interaction.