Efficiently learning and executing long-horizon mobile manipulation (MoMa) tasks is crucial for advancing robotics in household and workplace settings. However, current MoMa models are data-inefficient, underscoring the need for improved models that require realistic-sized benchmarks to evaluate their efficiency, which do not exist. To address this, we introduce the LAMBDA ({\lambda}) benchmark (Long-horizon Actions for Mobile-manipulation Benchmarking of Directed Activities), which evaluates the data efficiency of models on language-conditioned, long-horizon, multi-room, multi-floor, pick-and-place tasks using a dataset of manageable size, more feasible for collection. The benchmark includes 571 human-collected demonstrations that provide realism and diversity in simulated and real-world settings. Unlike planner-generated data, these trajectories offer natural variability and replay-verifiability, ensuring robust learning and evaluation. We benchmark several models, including learning-based models and a neuro-symbolic modular approach combining foundation models with task and motion planning. Learning-based models show suboptimal success rates, even when leveraging pretrained weights, underscoring significant data inefficiencies. However, the neuro-symbolic approach performs significantly better while being more data efficient. Findings highlight the need for more data-efficient learning-based MoMa approaches. {\lambda} addresses this gap by serving as a key benchmark for evaluating the data efficiency of those future models in handling household robotics tasks.

Understanding people's social interactions in complex real-world scenarios often relies on intricate mental reasoning. To truly understand how and why people interact with one another, we must infer the underlying mental states that give rise to the social interactions, i.e., Theory of Mind reasoning in multi-agent interactions. Additionally, social interactions are often multi-modal -- we can watch people's actions, hear their conversations, and/or read about their past behaviors. For AI systems to successfully and safely interact with people in real-world environments, they also need to understand people's mental states as well as their inferences about each other's mental states based on multi-modal information about their interactions. For this, we introduce MuMA-ToM, a Multi-modal Multi-Agent Theory of Mind benchmark. MuMA-ToM is the first multi-modal Theory of Mind benchmark that evaluates mental reasoning in embodied multi-agent interactions. In MuMA-ToM, we provide video and text descriptions of people's multi-modal behavior in realistic household environments. Based on the context, we then ask questions about people's goals, beliefs, and beliefs about others' goals. We validated MuMA-ToM in a human experiment and provided a human baseline. We also proposed a novel multi-modal, multi-agent ToM model, LIMP (Language model-based Inverse Multi-agent Planning). Our experimental results show that LIMP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including large multi-modal models (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5 Pro) and a recent multi-modal ToM model, BIP-ALM.

Amazon is sacking employees in its Alexa division even as it prepares to upgrade Alexa to be as smart as modern AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT. The move will impact several hundred employees in the US, Canada, and India, according to an internal email sent on Friday. "As we continue to invent, we're shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers -- which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI," wrote Daniel Bausch, Amazon's vice president of Alexa and Fire TV in the email, first obtained by GeekWire. "These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated." An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that the company was, indeed, laying off "several hundred" people in the division and said that Amazon was trying to find roles for those impacted wherever possible.

Amid a barrage of Amazon-branded tablets and Alexa-powered tech, Dave Limp, SVP of Amazon Devices and Services, announced the company's digital assistant will soon tap into a purpose-built large language model (LLM) for almost every new Echo device. Amazon set out to design the LLM based on five foundational capabilities. One of these is ensuring interactions are "conversational," and the company claimed it "studied what it takes to make a great conversation. Still waiting on Amazon to add eyes and hand gestures to its Echo devices. Has anyone seen Astro recently?

Imagine this scenario in the not-too-distant future. You're awakened at 6:11 a.m. by the gentle sounds of tinkling bells and birdsong, even though you live in a 12th-floor apartment. Your alarm clock uses radar to track your breathing, and wakes you gently, with sound and light, when it detects you're in a lighter phase of sleep. Your transition to wakefulness triggers a cascade of changes in your apartment. In the kitchen, coffee starts brewing.

It's an ominous-looking disc that sits on a night table, resembling a tiny satellite dish. It uses radar to monitor your movements while you sleep, combining that data with information about your bedroom--temperature, humidity, and brightness--to measure the quality of your sleep. Around the time you've set the alarm--at the instant it senses your sleep has passed out of the deepest stages--it brightens its semicircle of soft LED light to ease you gently from your slumbers. And this most intimate companion is made by Amazon, one of the world's biggest--and to some scariest--companies. Meet Halo Rise, the latest contribution to Amazon's mission of creating a persistent yet almost undetectable computational cocoon that monitors, listens, and fulfills your every whim and need.

Amazon (AMZN) and iRobot (IRBT), the maker of the Roomba vacuum, announced that Amazon would purchase the consumer robotics company in a $1.7 billion deal, or $61 per share, on Friday. The purchase includes iRobot's net debt. It still needs to face approval from iRobot shareholders and has regulatory hurdles it also needs to go through. Amazon already makes similar products to that of iRobot. However, it is unclear what Amazon's plans are with the purchase of iRobot's technology.

What do you get when you mix Amazon's Alexa voice assistant with an Echo Show tablet, give it a hefty dose of artificial intelligence, integrate it all with Ring's home security system, and let it roll around your home autonomously? You get a robot for the sake of a robot. Actually, you get Astro, Amazon's long-rumored home robot. The company has been working on this for nearly four years, and it has plans for Astro. It's just not quite sure exactly what those are yet, so it's offering the robot by invitation only, hoping thousands of early customers can help define what it's for.

Amazon's new robot can hear, see and follow you around the home, but it's no Rosey the Robot. Amazon's version, called Astro, doesn't cook or clean like the animated character from "The Jetsons," but it can check if you left the stove on while you're out or send an alert if someone enters the house it doesn't recognize. It uses cameras, sensors and artificial technology to avoid walls or dogs, and Amazon said Astro will only get smarter as time goes on. It does do some housework: Snacks or a can of soda can be placed on its back to be carted to someone across the house. The $1,000 robot, which will be sent out to customers later this year, was one of a slew of gadgets Amazon unveiled Tuesday as part of its annual event ahead of the holidays.

Amazon is making Alexa smarter with natural turn-taking, having conversations with multiple people, natural language understanding, and the ability to be taught by customers. The first target is the smart home, but Alexa for Business is also likely to follow. Also: When is Prime Day 2020? The Alexa overhaul and artificial intelligence improvements were outlined as Amazon launched its latest batch of Echo devices. Amazon's new Echo devices are evolving to be more smart home edge computing devices.