Table 2d summarizes the effect of hand pose condition in discriminator.

Advances in wearable robotics challenge the traditional definition of human motor systems, as wearable robots redefine body structure, movement capability, and perception of their own bodies. While these devices can empower the wearer's motor performance, there is limited understanding of how wearer s update their perception of body images, especially images in dynamic movements, while learning to use these modern devices. This study aimed to fill the gap by examining the changes of body image as individuals learned to walk with a robotic prosthetic l eg over multi - day training. We measured gait performance and perceived body images via Selected Coefficient of Perceived Motion (SCoMo) after each training session. Based on human motor learning theory extended to wearer - robot systems, w e hypothesized that learning the perceived body image when walking with a robotic leg co - evolves with the actual gait improvement and becomes more certain and more accurate to the actual motion. Our result confirmed that motor learning improved both physical and perceived ga it pattern towards normal, indicating that via practice the wearers incorporated the robotic leg into their sensorimotor systems to enable wearer - robot movement coordination. However, a persistent discrepancy between perceived and actual motion remained, l ikely due to the absence of direct sensation and control of the prosthesis from wearers. Additionally, the perceptual overestimation at the later training sessions might limit further motor improvement. These findings suggest that enhancing the human sense of wearable robots and frequent calibrating perception of body image are essential for effective training with lower limb wearable robots and for developing more embodied assistive technologies.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in representing individuals and communities, offering new ways to study complex social dynamics. However, effectively aligning LLMs with specific human groups and systematically assessing the fidelity of the alignment remains a challenge. This paper presents a robust framework for aligning LLMs with online communities via instruction-tuning and comprehensively evaluating alignment across various aspects of language, including authenticity, emotional tone, toxicity, and harm. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by applying it to online communities centered on dieting and body image. We administer an eating disorder psychometric test to the aligned LLMs to reveal unhealthy beliefs and successfully differentiate communities with varying levels of eating disorder risk. Our results highlight the potential of LLMs in automated moderation and broader applications in public health and social science research.

High-level visual brain regions contain subareas in which neurons appear to respond more strongly to examples of a particular semantic category, like faces or bodies, rather than objects. However, recent work has shown that while this finding holds on average, some out-of-category stimuli also activate neurons in these regions. This may be due to visual features common among the preferred class also being present in other images. Here, we propose a deep-learning-based approach for visualizing these features. For each neuron, we identify relevant visual features driving its selectivity by modelling responses to images based on latent activations of a deep neural network. Given an out-of-category image which strongly activates the neuron, our method first identifies a reference image from the preferred category yielding a similar feature activation pattern. We then backpropagate latent activations of both images to the pixel level, while enhancing the identified shared dimensions and attenuating non-shared features. The procedure highlights image regions containing shared features driving responses of the model neuron. We apply the algorithm to novel recordings from body-selective regions in macaque IT cortex in order to understand why some images of objects excite these neurons. Visualizations reveal object parts which resemble parts of a macaque body, shedding light on neural preference of these objects.

The rise in eating disorders, a dangerous mental health condition with high mortality and morbidity, has been linked to the proliferation of idealized body images on social media. However, the link between social media and eating disorders is far more complex. We argue that social media platforms create a feedback loop that amplifies the growth of content and communities that promote eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. Specifically, social media platforms make it easy for vulnerable individuals to find and connect to like-minded others, while group dynamic processes encourage them to stay engaged within communities that promote and glorify harmful behaviors linked to eating disorders. We characterize this dynamic empirically through a combination of network and language analysis. We describe a novel framework that leverages large language models to analyze the discourse within online communities and probe their attitudes on topics related to eating disorders to identify potentially harmful content. Our work emphasizes the need for better social media moderation to disrupt harmful feedback loops and protect vulnerable individuals.

Age and gender recognition in the wild is a highly challenging task: apart from the variability of conditions, pose complexities, and varying image quality, there are cases where the face is partially or completely occluded. We present MiVOLO (Multi Input VOLO), a straightforward approach for age and gender estimation using the latest vision transformer. Our method integrates both tasks into a unified dual input/output model, leveraging not only facial information but also person image data. This improves the generalization ability of our model and enables it to deliver satisfactory results even when the face is not visible in the image. To evaluate our proposed model, we conduct experiments on four popular benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance, while demonstrating real-time processing capabilities. Additionally, we introduce a novel benchmark based on images from the Open Images Dataset. The ground truth annotations for this benchmark have been meticulously generated by human annotators, resulting in high accuracy answers due to the smart aggregation of votes. Furthermore, we compare our model's age recognition performance with human-level accuracy and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms humans across a majority of age ranges. Finally, we grant public access to our models, along with the code for validation and inference. In addition, we provide extra annotations for used datasets and introduce our new benchmark.

Educational chatbots come with a promise of interactive and personalized learning experiences, yet their development has been limited by the restricted free interaction capabilities of available platforms and the difficulty of encoding knowledge in a suitable format. Recent advances in language learning models with zero-shot learning capabilities, such as ChatGPT, suggest a new possibility for developing educational chatbots using a prompt-based approach. We present a case study with a simple system that enables mixed-turn chatbot interactions and discuss the insights and preliminary guidelines obtained from initial tests. We examine ChatGPT's ability to pursue multiple interconnected learning objectives, adapt the educational activity to users' characteristics, such as culture, age, and level of education, and its ability to use diverse educational strategies and conversational styles. Although the results are encouraging, challenges are posed by the limited history maintained for the conversation and the highly structured form of responses by ChatGPT, as well as their variability, which can lead to an unexpected switch of the chatbot's role from a teacher to a therapist. We provide some initial guidelines to address these issues and to facilitate the development of effective educational chatbots.

Malnutrition poses a significant threat to global health, resulting from an inadequate intake of essential nutrients that adversely impacts vital organs and overall bodily functioning. Periodic examinations and mass screenings, incorporating both conventional and non-invasive techniques, have been employed to combat this challenge. However, these approaches suffer from critical limitations, such as the need for additional equipment, lack of comprehensive feature representation, absence of suitable health indicators, and the unavailability of smartphone implementations for precise estimations of Body Fat Percentage (BFP), Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), and Body Mass Index (BMI) to enable efficient smart-malnutrition monitoring. To address these constraints, this study presents a groundbreaking, scalable, and robust smart malnutrition-monitoring system that leverages a single full-body image of an individual to estimate height, weight, and other crucial health parameters within a multi-modal learning framework. Our proposed methodology involves the reconstruction of a highly precise 3D point cloud, from which 512-dimensional feature embeddings are extracted using a headless-3D classification network. Concurrently, facial and body embeddings are also extracted, and through the application of learnable parameters, these features are then utilized to estimate weight accurately. Furthermore, essential health metrics, including BMR, BFP, and BMI, are computed to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the subject's health, subsequently facilitating the provision of personalized nutrition plans. While being robust to a wide range of lighting conditions across multiple devices, our model achieves a low Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of $\pm$ 4.7 cm and $\pm$ 5.3 kg in estimating height and weight.