arXiv subjects

Yuanchun Shi

Publications and source records attributed to Yuanchun Shi.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

PACEE: Parent-Centered AI Scaffolding for Emotion Education in Early Childhood Conversations

Emotion education is critical for children aged 3 to 6. However, existing technologies largely focus on children's direct interaction with AI, overlooking the central role of parents in guiding early emotional development at home. To address this gap, we conducted co-design sessions with five kindergarten teachers and five parents to identify key parental challenges and opportunities for AI support in family emotion education. Based on these insights, we developed PACEE, an LLM-based assistant designed to support parents in guiding children's emotional development through conversations, rather than directly interacting with children. PACEE provides parent-centered AI scaffolding that supports parents in real-time conversation through personalized guidance, post-hoc reflection through trackable feedback, and understanding children's emotional states through modeling. We evaluated PACEE with 16 families. Results show that PACEE enhances parent-child engagement, fosters deeper emotional communication, and improves parents' expertise and overall experience in guiding their children. Our findings extend emotion coaching practices to the context of generative AI and offer design insights for building AI systems that support parent-centered family education.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Routine Computing: A Systematic Review of Sensing Daily Life Dimensions Towards Human-Centered Goals

Human routines structure daily life, yet remain challenging for computational systems to understand. This paper presents the first systematic review of routine computing, a previously implicit but increasingly recognized field that focuses on computationally sensing and modeling human behaviors. It synthesizes 203 studies published up to August 2025. The paper presents a new taxonomy of the literature, focusing on temporal structures, behavioral interactions, cognitive aspects, and how variability and deviations are addressed. The common goals of routine computing extend across four major application domains, including accessibility care, the promotion of healthy habits, adaptive and context-aware support, and large-scale population insights. Persistent challenges that limit the design of truly human-centered systems are identified, including the gap between low-level activity recognition and high-level intent, the tension between personalization and generalization, unresolved privacy concerns, and data-related limitations. By consolidating these findings, this paper provides a foundational framework for HCI researchers, outlining principles for designing ethical, adaptive, and human-centered routine-aware systems.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

HiSync: Spatio-Temporally Aligning Hand Motion from Wearable IMU and On-Robot Camera for Command Source Identification in Long-Range HRI

Long-range Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) remains underexplored. Within it, Command Source Identification (CSI) - determining who issued a command - is especially challenging due to multi-user and distance-induced sensor ambiguity. We introduce HiSync, an optical-inertial fusion framework that treats hand motion as binding cues by aligning robot-mounted camera optical flow with hand-worn IMU signals. We first elicit a user-defined (N=12) gesture set and collect a multimodal command gesture dataset (N=38) in long-range multi-user HRI scenarios. Next, HiSync extracts frequency-domain hand motion features from both camera and IMU data, and a learned CSINet denoises IMU readings, temporally aligns modalities, and performs distance-aware multi-window fusion to compute cross-modal similarity of subtle, natural gestures, enabling robust CSI. In three-person scenes up to 34m, HiSync achieves 92.32% CSI accuracy, outperforming the prior SOTA by 48.44%. HiSync is also validated on real-robot deployment. By making CSI reliable and natural, HiSync provides a practical primitive and design guidance for public-space HRI. https://github.com/OctopusWen/HiSync

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

GTR-Turbo: Merged Checkpoint is Secretly a Free Teacher for Agentic VLM Training

Multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) for multi-modal agents built upon vision-language models (VLMs) is hampered by sparse rewards and long-horizon credit assignment. Recent methods densify the reward by querying a teacher that provides step-level feedback, e.g., Guided Thought Reinforcement (GTR) and On-Policy Distillation, but rely on costly, often privileged models as the teacher, limiting practicality and reproducibility. We introduce GTR-Turbo, a highly efficient upgrade to GTR that matches its performance without training on or querying an expensive teacher model. Specifically, GTR-Turbo merges the weights of checkpoints produced during ongoing RL training and then uses the resulting merged model as a "free" teacher to guide subsequent RL via supervised fine-tuning or soft logit distillation. This design removes dependence on privileged VLMs (e.g., GPT or Gemini), mitigates the "entropy collapse" observed in prior work, and maintains stable training. Across diverse visual agentic tasks, GTR-Turbo improves the accuracy of the baseline model by 10-30% while reducing wall-clock training time by 50% and compute cost by 60% relative to GTR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

K^2-Agent: Co-Evolving Know-What and Know-How for Hierarchical Mobile Device Control

Existing mobile device control agents often perform poorly when solving complex tasks requiring long-horizon planning and precise operations, typically due to a lack of relevant task experience or unfamiliarity with skill execution. We propose K2-Agent, a hierarchical framework that models human-like cognition by separating and co-evolving declarative (knowing what) and procedural (knowing how) knowledge for planning and execution. K2-Agent's high level reasoner is bootstrapped from a single demonstration per task and runs a Summarize-Reflect-Locate-Revise (SRLR) loop to distill and iteratively refine task-level declarative knowledge through self-evolution. The low-level executor is trained with our curriculum-guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (C-GRPO), which (i) constructs a balanced sample pool using decoupled reward signals and (ii) employs dynamic demonstration injection to guide the model in autonomously generating successful trajectories for training. On the challenging AndroidWorld benchmark, K2-Agent achieves a 76.1% success rate using only raw screenshots and open-source backbones. Furthermore, K2-Agent shows powerful dual generalization: its high-level declarative knowledge transfers across diverse base models, while its low-level procedural skills achieve competitive performance on unseen tasks in ScreenSpot-v2 and Android-in-the-Wild (AitW).

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Does Personalized Nudging Wear Off? A Longitudinal Study of AI Self-Modeling for Behavioral Engagement

Sustaining the effectiveness of behavior change technologies remains a key challenge. AI self-modeling, which generates personalized portrayals of one's ideal self, has shown promise for motivating behavior change, yet prior work largely examines short-term effects. We present one of the first longitudinal evaluations of AI self-modeling in fitness engagement through a two-stage empirical study. A 1-week, three-arm experiment (visual self-modeling (VSM), auditory self-modeling (ASM), Control; N=28) revealed that VSM drove initial performance gains, while ASM showed no significant effects. A subsequent 4-week study (VSM vs. Control; N=31) demonstrated that VSM sustained higher performance levels but exhibited diminishing improvement rates after two weeks. Interviews uncovered a catalyst effect that fostered early motivation through clear, attainable goals, followed by habituation and internalization which stabilized performance. These findings highlight the temporal dynamics of personalized nudging and inform the design of behavior change technologies for long-term engagement.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

PPG as a Bridge: Cross-Device Authentication for Smart Wearables with Photoplethysmography

As smart wearable devices become increasingly powerful and pervasive, protecting user privacy on these devices has emerged as a critical challenge. While existing authentication mechanisms are available for interaction-rich devices such as smartwatches, enabling on-device authentication (ODA) on interaction-limited wearables including rings, earphones, glasses, and wristbands remains difficult. Moreover, as users increasingly own multiple smart devices, relying on device-specific authentication methods becomes redundant and burdensome. To address these challenges, we present PPGTransID, a ubiquitous and unobtrusive cross-device authentication (CDA) approach that leverages the real-time physiological consistency of photoplethysmography (PPG) signals across the human body. PPGTransID utilizes widely available PPG sensors on wearable devices to capture users' physiological signals and compares them with remote PPG (rPPG) signals extracted from a smartphone camera, where robust face-based authentication is already established. In doing so, PPGTransID securely transfers the reliable authentication status of the smartphone to nearby wearable devices without requiring additional user interaction. An evaluation with 33 participants shows that PPGTransID achieves a balanced accuracy of 95.5 percent and generalizes across multiple wearable form factors. Robustness experiments with 10 participants demonstrate resilience to variations in lighting, camera placement, and user behavior, while a real-time usability study with 14 participants confirms reliable performance with minimal interaction burden.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Hi-Agent: Hierarchical Vision-Language Agents for Mobile Device Control

Building agents that autonomously operate mobile devices has attracted increasing attention. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise, most existing approaches rely on direct state-to-action mappings, which lack structured reasoning and planning, and thus generalize poorly to novel tasks or unseen UI layouts. We introduce Hi-Agent, a trainable hierarchical vision-language agent for mobile control, featuring a high-level reasoning model and a low-level action model that are jointly optimized. For efficient training, we reformulate multi-step decision-making as a sequence of single-step subgoals and propose a foresight advantage function, which leverages execution feedback from the low-level model to guide high-level optimization. This design alleviates the path explosion issue encountered by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in long-horizon tasks and enables stable, critic-free joint training. Hi-Agent achieves a new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) 87.9% task success rate on the Android-in-the-Wild (AitW) benchmark, significantly outperforming prior methods across three paradigms: prompt-based (AppAgent: 17.7%), supervised (Filtered BC: 54.5%), and reinforcement learning-based (DigiRL: 71.9%). It also demonstrates competitive zero-shot generalization on the ScreenSpot-v2 benchmark. On the more challenging AndroidWorld benchmark, Hi-Agent also scales effectively with larger backbones, showing strong adaptability in high-complexity mobile control scenarios.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SituFont: A Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention System for Enhancing Mobile Readability in Situational Visual Impairments

Situational visual impairments (SVIs) hinder mobile readability, causing discomfort and limiting information access. Building on prior work in adaptive typography and accessibility, this paper presents SituFont, a context-aware and human-in-the-loop adaptive typography adjustment approach that enhances smartphone mobile readability by dynamically adjusting font parameters based on real-time contextual changes. Using smartphone sensors and a human-in-the-loop approach, SituFont personalizes text presentation to accommodate personal factors (e.g., fatigue, distraction) and environmental conditions (e.g., lighting, motion, location). To inform its design, we conducted formative interviews (N=15) to identify key SVI factors and controlled experiments (N=18) to quantify their impact on optimal text parameters. A comparative user study (N=12) across eight simulated SVI scenarios demonstrated SituFont's effectiveness in improving smartphone mobile readability in terms of improved efficiency and reduced workload compared with a non-trivial manual adjustment baseline.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Toward Stable Semi-Supervised Remote Sensing Segmentation via Co-Guidance and Co-Fusion

Semi-supervised remote sensing (RS) image semantic segmentation offers a promising solution to alleviate the burden of exhaustive annotation, yet it fundamentally struggles with pseudo-label drift, a phenomenon where confirmation bias leads to the accumulation of errors during training. In this work, we propose Co2S, a stable semi-supervised RS segmentation framework that synergistically fuses priors from vision-language models and self-supervised models. Specifically, we construct a heterogeneous dual-student architecture comprising two distinct ViT-based vision foundation models initialized with pretrained CLIP and DINOv3 to mitigate error accumulation and pseudo-label drift. To effectively incorporate these distinct priors, an explicit-implicit semantic co-guidance mechanism is introduced that utilizes text embeddings and learnable queries to provide explicit and implicit class-level guidance, respectively, thereby jointly enhancing semantic consistency. Furthermore, a global-local feature collaborative fusion strategy is developed to effectively fuse the global contextual information captured by CLIP with the local details produced by DINOv3, enabling the model to generate highly precise segmentation results. Extensive experiments on six popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, which consistently achieves leading performance across various partition protocols and diverse scenarios. Project page is available at https://xavierjiezou.github.io/Co2S/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

MOAT: Evaluating LMMs for Capability Integration and Instruction Grounding

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated significant potential as generalists in vision-language (VL) tasks. However, adoption of LMMs in real-world tasks is hindered by their poor performance in tasks that require a combination of VL capabilities, as well as in tasks that involve the grounding of complex text or visual instructions. To thoroughly investigate this gap and its underlying causes, we propose MOAT, a diverse benchmark with 1005 complex real-world vision questions that are straightforward for humans but challenging for LMMs. Specifically, the tasks in MOAT require LMMs to engage in generalist problem solving by integrating VL capabilities such as reading text, counting, understanding spatial relations, grounding textual and visual instructions, etc. All these abilities fit into a taxonomy proposed by us that contains 9 VL capabilities, enabling MOAT to provide a fine-grained view of LMMs' strengths and weaknesses. Besides, MOAT is the first benchmark to explicitly evaluate LMMs' ability to ground complex text and visual instructions, which is essential for many real-world applications. We evaluated 17 proprietary and open source LMMs, finding that the best performing LMM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) achieved only 44% accuracy, far below what would be acceptable in real-world applications. To guide future model development, we analyze common trends in our results and discuss the underlying causes of poor performance, focusing on the impact of text-centric reasoning, which VL capabilities form bottlenecks in complex tasks, and the potential harmful effects of tiling. Code and data are available at https://cambrian-yzt.github.io/MOAT/.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

FacePhys: State of the Heart Learning

Vital sign measurement using cameras presents opportunities for comfortable, ubiquitous health monitoring. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG), a foundational technology, enables cardiac measurement through minute changes in light reflected from the skin. However, practical deployment is limited by the computational constraints of performing analysis on front-end devices and the accuracy degradation of transmitting data through compressive channels that reduce signal quality. We propose a memory efficient rPPG algorithm - \emph{FacePhys} - built on temporal-spatial state space duality, which resolves the trilemma of model scalability, cross-dataset generalization, and real-time operation. Leveraging a transferable heart state, FacePhys captures subtle periodic variations across video frames while maintaining a minimal computational overhead, enabling training on extended video sequences and supporting low-latency inference. FacePhys establishes a new state-of-the-art, with a substantial 49\% reduction in error. Our solution enables real-time inference with a memory footprint of 3.6 MB and per-frame latency of 9.46 ms -- surpassing existing methods by 83\% to 99\%. These results translate into reliable real-time performance in practical deployments, and a live demo is available at https://www.facephys.com/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

TaskSense: Cognitive Chain Modeling and Difficulty Estimation for GUI Tasks

Measuring GUI task difficulty is crucial for user behavior analysis and agent capability evaluation. Yet, existing benchmarks typically quantify difficulty based on motor actions (e.g., step counts), overlooking the cognitive demands underlying task completion. In this work, we propose Cognitive Chain, a novel framework that models task difficulty from a cognitive perspective. A cognitive chain decomposes the cognitive processes preceding a motor action into a sequence of cognitive steps (e.g., finding, deciding, computing), each with a difficulty index grounded in information theories. We develop an LLM-based method to automatically extract cognitive chains from task execution traces. Validation with linear regression shows that our estimated cognitive difficulty correlates well with user completion time (step-level R-square=0.46 after annotation). Assessment of state-of-the-art GUI agents shows reduced success on cognitively demanding tasks, revealing capability gaps and Human-AI consistency patterns. We conclude by discussing potential applications in agent training, capability assessment, and human-agent delegation optimization.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

M3PD Dataset: Dual-view Photoplethysmography (PPG) Using Front-and-rear Cameras of Smartphones in Lab and Clinical Settings

Portable physiological monitoring is essential for early detection and management of cardiovascular disease, but current methods often require specialized equipment that limits accessibility or impose impractical postures that patients cannot maintain. Video-based photoplethysmography on smartphones offers a convenient noninvasive alternative, yet it still faces reliability challenges caused by motion artifacts, lighting variations, and single-view constraints. Few studies have demonstrated reliable application to cardiovascular patients, and no widely used open datasets exist for cross-device accuracy. To address these limitations, we introduce the M3PD dataset, the first publicly available dual-view mobile photoplethysmography dataset, comprising synchronized facial and fingertip videos captured simultaneously via front and rear smartphone cameras from 60 participants (including 47 cardiovascular patients). Building on this dual-view setting, we further propose F3Mamba, which fuses the facial and fingertip views through Mamba-based temporal modeling. The model reduces heart-rate error by 21.9 to 30.2 percent over existing single-view baselines while improving robustness in challenging real-world scenarios. Data and code: https://github.com/Health-HCI-Group/F3Mamba.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Non-Contact Health Monitoring During Daily Personal Care Routines

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact, continuous monitoring of physiological signals and offers a practical alternative to traditional health sensing methods. Although rPPG is promising for daily health monitoring, its application in long-term personal care scenarios, such as mirror-facing routines in high-altitude environments, remains challenging due to ambient lighting variations, frequent occlusions from hand movements, and dynamic facial postures. To address these challenges, we present LADH (Long-term Altitude Daily Health), the first long-term rPPG dataset containing 240 synchronized RGB and infrared (IR) facial videos from 21 participants across five common personal care scenarios, along with ground-truth PPG, respiration, and blood oxygen signals. Our experiments demonstrate that combining RGB and IR video inputs improves the accuracy and robustness of non-contact physiological monitoring, achieving a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.99 BPM in heart rate estimation. Furthermore, we find that multi-task learning enhances performance across multiple physiological indicators simultaneously. Dataset and code are open at https://github.com/McJackTang/FusionVitals.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

ECVL-ROUTER: Scenario-Aware Routing for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in diverse multimodal tasks. However, user requirements vary across scenarios, which can be categorized into fast response, high-quality output, and low energy consumption. Relying solely on large models deployed in the cloud for all queries often leads to high latency and energy cost, while small models deployed on edge devices are capable of handling simpler tasks with low latency and energy cost. To fully leverage the strengths of both large and small models, we propose ECVL-ROUTER, the first scenario-aware routing framework for VLMs. Our approach introduces a new routing strategy and evaluation metrics that dynamically select the appropriate model for each query based on user requirements, maximizing overall utility. We also construct a multimodal response-quality dataset tailored for router training and validate the approach through extensive experiments. Results show that our approach successfully routes over 80\% of queries to the small model while incurring less than 10\% drop in problem solving probability.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Resolving Ambiguity in Gaze-Facilitated Visual Assistant Interaction Paradigm

With the rise in popularity of smart glasses, users' attention has been integrated into Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to streamline multi-modal querying in daily scenarios. However, leveraging gaze data to model users' attention may introduce ambiguity challenges: (1) users' verbal questions become ambiguous by using pronouns or skipping context, (2) humans' gaze patterns can be noisy and exhibit complex spatiotemporal relationships with their spoken questions. Previous works only consider single image as visual modality input, failing to capture the dynamic nature of the user's attention. In this work, we introduce GLARIFY, a novel method to leverage spatiotemporal gaze information to enhance the model's effectiveness in real-world applications. Initially, we analyzed hundreds of querying samples with the gaze modality to demonstrate the noisy nature of users' gaze patterns. We then utilized GPT-4o to design an automatic data synthesis pipeline to generate the GLARIFY-Ambi dataset, which includes a dedicated chain-of-thought (CoT) process to handle noisy gaze patterns. Finally, we designed a heatmap module to incorporate gaze information into cutting-edge VLMs while preserving their pretrained knowledge. We evaluated GLARIFY using a hold-out test set. Experiments demonstrate that GLARIFY significantly outperforms baselines. By robustly aligning VLMs with human attention, GLARIFY paves the way for a usable and intuitive interaction paradigm with a visual assistant.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

TextOnly: A Unified Function Portal for Text-Related Functions on Smartphones

Text boxes serve as portals to diverse functionalities in today's smartphone applications. However, when it comes to specific functionalities, users always need to navigate through multiple steps to access particular text boxes for input. We propose TextOnly, a unified function portal that enables users to access text-related functions from various applications by simply inputting text into a sole text box. For instance, entering a restaurant name could trigger a Google Maps search, while a greeting could initiate a conversation in WhatsApp. Despite their brevity, TextOnly maximizes the utilization of these raw text inputs, which contain rich information, to interpret user intentions effectively. TextOnly integrates large language models(LLM) and a BERT model. The LLM consistently provides general knowledge, while the BERT model can continuously learn user-specific preferences and enable quicker predictions. Real-world user studies demonstrated TextOnly's effectiveness with a top-1 accuracy of 71.35%, and its ability to continuously improve both its accuracy and inference speed. Participants perceived TextOnly as having satisfactory usability and expressed a preference for TextOnly over manual executions. Compared with voice assistants, TextOnly supports a greater range of text-related functions and allows for more concise inputs.

cs.HC↗