As robots enter human workspaces, there is a crucial need for them to comprehend embodied human instructions, enabling intuitive and fluent human-robot interaction (HRI). However, accurate comprehension is challenging due to a lack of large-scale datasets that capture natural embodied interactions in diverse HRI settings. Existing datasets suffer from perspective bias, single-view data collection, inadequate coverage of nonverbal gestures, and a predominant focus on indoor environments. To address these issues, we present the Refer360 dataset, a large-scale dataset of embodied verbal and nonverbal interactions collected across diverse viewpoints in both indoor and outdoor settings. Additionally, we introduce MuRes, a multimodal guided residual module designed to improve embodied referring expression comprehension. MuRes acts as an information bottleneck, extracting salient modality-specific signals and reinforcing them into pre-trained representations to form complementary features for downstream tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets, including our Refer360 dataset, and demonstrate that current multimodal models fail to capture embodied interactions comprehensively; however, augmenting them with MuRes consistently improves performance. These findings establish Refer360 as a valuable benchmark and exhibit the potential of guided residual learning to advance embodied referring expression comprehension in robots operating within human environments.

In a mobile crowdsourcing system (MCS), a platform outsources sensing tasks to numerous mobile worker devices. The collected data are analyzed and the processed information is shared among many other interested users. The platform pays the workers for the sensing data and earns money from the users receiving processed information services. Distributing the sensing workloads among the potential workers so as to maintain the required data quality and to make a reasonable amount of profit is a challenging problem for such a platform. In this paper, we develop a workload allocation policy that makes a reasonable tradeoff between worker utilities and platform profit. It quantifies the utility (i.e., the quality of sensed data) of a worker as a function of worker mobility, current location, and past sensing records. The workload allocation problem is formulated as a multiobjective nonlinear programming (MONLP) problem which aims to make the desired tradeoff between worker utilities and platform profit. The allocation problem is shown to be NP-hard and thus we develop two greedy algorithms with relaxed constraints to achieve polynomial time solutions. Performance of the proposed workload allocation policy is evaluated in a distributed computation environment using MATLAB. The results show its effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of platform profit, quality of sensing data, and request service satisfaction.