People who are blind or have low vision regularly use their hands to interact with the physical world to gain access to objects’ shape, size, weight, and texture. However, many rich visual features remain inaccessible through touch alone, making it difficult to distinguish similar objects, interpret visual affordances, and form a complete understanding of objects. In this work, we present TouchScribe, a system that augments hand-object interactions with automated live visual descriptions. We trained a custom egocentric hand interaction model to recognize both common gestures (e.g., grab to inspect, hold side-by-side to compare) and unique ones by blind people (e.g., point to explore color, or swipe to read available texts). Furthermore, TouchScribe provides real-time and adaptive feedback based on hand movement, from hand interaction states, to object labels, and to visual details. Our user study and technical evaluations demonstrate that TouchScribe can provide rich and useful descriptions to support object understanding. Finally, we discuss the implications of making live visual descriptions responsive to users’ physical reach.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have sparked significant interest in developing GUI visual agents. We introduce MONDAY (Mobile OS Navigation Task Dataset for Agents from YouTube), a large-scale dataset of 313K annotated frames from 20K instructional videos capturing diverse real-world mobile OS navigation across multiple platforms. Models that include MONDAY in their pretraining phases demonstrate robust cross-platform generalization capabilities, consistently outperforming models trained on existing single OS datasets while achieving an average performance gain of 18.11%p on an unseen mobile OS platform. To enable continuous dataset expansion as mobile platforms evolve, we present an automated framework that leverages publicly available video content to create comprehensive task datasets without manual annotation. Our framework comprises robust OCR-based scene detection (95.04% F1-score), near-perfect UI element detection (99.87% hit ratio), and novel multi-step action identification to extract reliable action sequences across diverse interface configurations. We contribute both the MONDAY dataset and our automated collection framework to facilitate future research in mobile OS navigation, available at https://github.com/runamu/monday.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) may over-rely on visual language priors from their training data rather than true visual reasoning. To investigate this, we introduce ViLP, a benchmark featuring deliberately out-of-distribution images synthesized via image generation models and out-of-distribution Q\&A pairs. Each question in ViLP is coupled with three potential answers and three corresponding images: one that can be resolved by text priors alone and two that demand visual reasoning. Although humans achieve near-perfect accuracy, modern VLMs falter; for instance, GPT-4o achieves only 66.17\% on ViLP. To alleviate this, we propose a self-improving framework in which models generate new VQA data and then apply pixel-level and semantic corruptions to form ``good-bad" image pairs for self-training. Our proposed training objective, Image-DPO, compels VLMs to focus more on the actual visual inputs, and we demonstrate its effectiveness in LLaVA-v1.5 and Cambrian. Project Page: \href{https://vilp-team.github.io/}{ViLP}.

We introduce Cap3D, an automatic approach for generating descriptive text for 3D objects. This approach utilizes pretrained models from image captioning, image-text alignment, and LLM to consolidate captions from multiple views of a 3D asset, completely side-stepping the time-consuming and costly process of manual annotation. We apply Cap3D to the recently introduced large-scale 3D dataset, Objaverse, resulting in 660k 3D-text pairs. Our evaluation, conducted using 41k human annotations from the same dataset, demonstrates that Cap3D surpasses human-authored descriptions in terms of quality, cost, and speed. Through effective prompt engineering, Cap3D rivals human performance in generating geometric descriptions on 17k collected annotations from the ABO dataset. Finally, we finetune Text-to-3D models on Cap3D and human captions, and show Cap3D outperforms; and benchmark the SOTA including Point·E, Shape·E, and DreamFusion.

Recently, large-scale few-shot learning (FSL) becomes topical. It is discovered that, for a large-scale FSL problem with 1,000 classes in the source domain, a strong baseline emerges, that is, simply training a deep feature embedding model using the aggregated source classes and performing nearest neighbor (NN) search using the learned features on the target classes. The state-of-the-art large-scale FSL methods struggle to beat this baseline, indicating intrinsic limitations on scalability. To overcome the challenge, we propose a novel large-scale FSL model by learning transferable visual features with the class hierarchy which encodes the semantic relations between source and target classes. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model significantly outperforms not only the NN baseline but also the state-of-the-art alternatives. Furthermore, we show that the proposed model can be easily extended to the large-scale zero-shot learning (ZSL) problem and also achieves the state-of-the-art results.

In this paper, we propose to tackle the challenging few-shot learning (FSL) problem by learning global class representations using both base and novel class training samples. In each training episode, an episodic class mean computed from a support set is registered with the global representation via a registration module. This produces a registered global class representation for computing the classification loss using a query set. Though following a similar episodic training pipeline as existing meta learning based approaches, our method differs significantly in that novel class training samples are involved in the training from the beginning. To compensate for the lack of novel class training samples, an effective sample synthesis strategy is developed to avoid overfitting. Importantly, by joint base-novel class training, our approach can be easily extended to a more practical yet challenging FSL setting, i.e., generalized FSL, where the label space of test data is extended to both base and novel classes. Extensive experiments show that our approach is effective for both of the two FSL settings.