For Minimally Invasive Surgical (MIS) robots, accurate haptic interaction force feedback is essential for ensuring the safety of interacting with soft tissue. However, most existing MIS robotic systems cannot facilitate direct measurement of the interaction force with hardware sensors due to space limitations. This letter introduces an effective vision-based scheme that utilizes a One-Shot structured light projection with a designed pattern on soft tissue coupled with haptic information processing through a trained image-to-force neural network. The images captured from the endoscopic stereo camera are analyzed to reconstruct high-resolution 3D point clouds for soft tissue deformation. Based on this, a modified PointNet-based force estimation method is proposed, which excels in representing the complex mechanical properties of soft tissue. Numerical force interaction experiments are conducted on three silicon materials with different stiffness. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

The explainability of recommender systems has attracted significant attention in academia and industry. Many efforts have been made for explainable recommendations, yet evaluating the quality of the explanations remains a challenging and unresolved issue. In recent years, leveraging LLMs as evaluators presents a promising avenue in Natural Language Processing tasks (e.g., sentiment classification, information extraction), as they perform strong capabilities in instruction following and common-sense reasoning. However, evaluating recommendation explanatory texts is different from these NLG tasks, as its criteria are related to human perceptions and are usually subjective. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs can serve as evaluators of recommendation explanations. To answer the question, we utilize real user feedback on explanations given from previous work and additionally collect third-party annotations and LLM evaluations. We design and apply a 3-level meta evaluation strategy to measure the correlation between evaluator labels and the ground truth provided by users. Our experiments reveal that LLMs, such as GPT4, can provide comparable evaluations with appropriate prompts and settings. We also provide further insights into combining human labels with the LLM evaluation process and utilizing ensembles of multiple heterogeneous LLM evaluators to enhance the accuracy and stability of evaluations. Our study verifies that utilizing LLMs as evaluators can be an accurate, reproducible and cost-effective solution for evaluating recommendation explanation texts. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-SZ/LLMasEvaluator.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are essential tools to collaborate with users on different tasks. Evaluating their performance to serve users' needs in real-world scenarios is important. While many benchmarks have been created, they mainly focus on specific predefined model abilities. Few have covered the intended utilization of LLMs by real users. To address this oversight, we propose benchmarking LLMs from a user perspective in both dataset construction and evaluation designs. We first collect 1846 real-world use cases with 15 LLMs from a user study with 712 participants from 23 countries. These self-reported cases form the User Reported Scenarios(URS) dataset with a categorization of 7 user intents. Secondly, on this authentic multi-cultural dataset, we benchmark 10 LLM services on their efficacy in satisfying user needs. Thirdly, we show that our benchmark scores align well with user-reported experience in LLM interactions across diverse intents, both of which emphasize the overlook of subjective scenarios. In conclusion, our study proposes to benchmark LLMs from a user-centric perspective, aiming to facilitate evaluations that better reflect real user needs. The benchmark dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Alice1998/URS.

Handwriting recognition is of crucial importance to both Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and paperwork digitization. In the general field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), handwritten Chinese character recognition faces tremendous challenges due to the enormously large character sets and the amazing diversity of writing styles. Learning an appropriate distance metric to measure the difference between data inputs is the foundation of accurate handwritten character recognition. Existing distance metric learning approaches either produce unacceptable error rates, or provide little interpretability in the results. In this paper, we propose an interpretable distance metric learning approach for handwritten Chinese character recognition. The learned metric is a linear combination of intelligible base metrics, and thus provides meaningful insights to ordinary users. Our experimental results on a benchmark dataset demonstrate the superior efficiency, accuracy and interpretability of our proposed approach.