While recent Vision-Language (VL) models excel at open-vocabulary tasks, it is unclear how to use them with specific or uncommon concepts. Personalized Text-to-Image Retrieval (TIR) or Generation (TIG) are recently introduced tasks that represent this challenge, where the VL model has to learn a concept from few images and respectively discriminate or generate images of the target concept in arbitrary contexts. We identify the ability to learn new meanings and their compositionality with known ones as two key properties of a personalized system. We show that the available benchmarks offer a limited validation of personalized textual concept learning from images with respect to the above properties and introduce ConCon-Chi as a benchmark for both personalized TIR and TIG, designed to fill this gap. We modelled the new-meaning concepts by crafting chimeric objects and formulating a large, varied set of contexts where we photographed each object. To promote the compositionality assessment of the learned concepts with known contexts, we combined different contexts with the same concept, and vice-versa. We carry out a thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art methods on the resulting dataset. Our study suggests that future work on personalized TIR and TIG methods should focus on the above key properties, and we propose principles and a dataset for their performance assessment. Dataset: https://doi.org/10.48557/QJ1166 and code: https://github.com/hsp-iit/concon-chi_benchmark.

In this paper, we outline an interleaved acting and planning technique to rapidly reduce the uncertainty of the estimated robot's pose by perceiving relevant information from the environment, as recognizing an object or asking someone for a direction. Generally, existing localization approaches rely on low-level geometric features such as points, lines, and planes. While these approaches provide the desired accuracy, they may require time to converge, especially with incorrect initial guesses. In our approach, a task planner computes a sequence of action and perception tasks to actively obtain relevant information from the robot's perception system. We validate our approach in large state spaces, to show how the approach scales, and in real environments, to show the applicability of our method on real robots. We prove that our approach is sound, probabilistically complete, and tractable in practical cases.

Effective assisted living environments must be able to perform inferences on how their occupants interact with one another as well as with surrounding objects. To accomplish this goal using a vision-based automated approach, multiple tasks such as pose estimation, object segmentation and gaze estimation must be addressed. Gaze direction provides some of the strongest indications of how a person interacts with the environment. In this paper, we propose a simple neural network regressor that estimates the gaze direction of individuals in a multi-camera assisted living scenario, relying only on the relative positions of facial keypoints collected from a single pose estimation model. To handle cases of keypoint occlusion, our model exploits a novel confidence gated unit in its input layer. In addition to the gaze direction, our model also outputs an estimation of its own prediction uncertainty. Experimental results on a public benchmark demonstrate that our approach performs on par with a complex, dataset-specific baseline, while its uncertainty predictions are highly correlated to the actual angular error of corresponding estimations. Finally, experiments on images from a real assisted living environment demonstrate that our model has a higher suitability for its final application.