International audience

International audience

Personalization in social robotics is critical for fostering effective human-robot interactions, yet systems often face the cold start problem, where initial user preferences or characteristics are unavailable. This paper proposes a novel framework called USER-LLM R1 for a user-aware conversational agent that addresses this challenge through dynamic user profiling and model initiation. Our approach integrates chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning models to iteratively infer user preferences and vision-language models (VLMs) to initialize user profiles from multimodal inputs, enabling personalized interactions from the first encounter. Leveraging a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, the system dynamically refines user representations within an inherent CoT process, ensuring contextually relevant and adaptive responses. Evaluations on the ElderlyTech-Vqa Bench demonstrate significant improvements in ROUGE-1 (+23.2%) ROUGE-2 (+0.6%) and ROUGE-L (+8%) F1 scores over state-of-the-art baselines, with ablation studies underscoring the impact of reasoning model size on performance. Human evaluations further validate the framework’s efficacy, particularly for elderly users, where tailored responses enhance engagement and trust. Ethical considerations, including privacy preservation and bias mitigation, are rigorously discussed and addressed to ensure responsible deployment.

Edge Computing in 5G and Beyond is a promising solution for ultra-low latency applications (e.g., Autonomous Vehicle, Augmented Reality, and Remote Surgery), which have an extraordinarily low tolerance for delay and require fast data processing for a very high volume of data. The requirements of delay-sensitive applications (e.g., Low latency, proximity, and Location/Context-awareness) cannot be satisfied by Cloud Computing due to the high latency between User Equipment and Cloud. Nevertheless, Edge Computing in 5G and beyond can promise ultra-high-speed data processing thanks to the placement of computation capabilities closer to endpoint devices, where 5G encourages the speed rate that is 10 times faster than 4G LTE-Advanced. This paper deeply investigates Edge Computing in 5G and characterizes it based on the requirements of ultra-low latency applications. As a contribution, we propose a hybrid architecture that takes advantage of novel and sustainable technologies (e.g., D2D communication, Massive MIMO, SDN, and NFV) and has major features such as scalability, reliability, and ultra-low latency support. The proposed architecture is evaluated based on agent-based simulations demonstrating that our proposal can satisfy requirements and has the ability to respond to high volume demands with low latency.