Steven Wang

Penglei Gao, Kai Yao, Tiandi Ye et al.

In this paper, we tackle the recently popular topic of generating 360-degree images given the conventional narrow field of view (NFoV) images that could be taken from a single camera or cellphone. This task aims to predict the reasonable and consistent surroundings from the NFoV images. Existing methods for feature extraction and fusion, often built with transformer-based architectures, incur substantial memory usage and computational expense. They also have limitations in maintaining visual continuity across the entire 360-degree images, which could cause inconsistent texture and style generation. To solve the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel text-guided out-painting framework equipped with a State-Space Model called Mamba to utilize its long-sequence modelling and spatial continuity. Furthermore, incorporating textual information is an effective strategy for guiding image generation, enriching the process with detailed context and increasing diversity. Efficiently extracting textual features and integrating them with image attributes presents a significant challenge for 360-degree image out-painting. To address this, we develop two modules, Visual-textual Consistency Refiner (VCR) and Global-local Mamba Adapter (GMA). VCR enhances contextual richness by fusing the modified text features with the image features, while GMA provides adaptive state-selective conditions by capturing the information flow from global to local representations. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with extensive experiments on two broadly used 360-degree image datasets, including indoor and outdoor settings.

Steven Wang, Kyle Hunt, Shaojie Tang et al.

There is ongoing debate about whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as substitutes for human participants in survey and experimental research. While recent work in fields such as marketing and psychology has explored the potential of LLM-based simulation, a growing body of evidence cautions against this practice: LLMs often fail to align with real human behavior, exhibiting limited diversity, systematic misalignment for minority subgroups, insufficient within-group variance, and discrepancies between stated beliefs and actions. This study examines an important and distinct question in this domain: whether fine-tuning on a small subset of human survey data, such as that obtainable from a pilot study, can mitigate these issues and yield realistic simulated outcomes. Using a behavioral experiment on information disclosure, we compare human and LLM-generated responses across multiple dimensions, including distributional divergence, subgroup alignment, belief-action coherence, and the recovery of regression coefficients. We find that fine-tuning on small human samples substantially improves heterogeneity, alignment, and belief-action coherence relative to the base model. However, even the best-performing fine-tuned models fail to reproduce the regression coefficients of the original study, suggesting that LLM-generated data remain unsuitable for replacing human participants in formal inferential analyses.

Jaime F. Fisac, Andrea Bajcsy, Sylvia L. Herbert et al.

In order to safely operate around humans, robots can employ predictive models of human motion. Unfortunately, these models cannot capture the full complexity of human behavior and necessarily introduce simplifying assumptions. As a result, predictions may degrade whenever the observed human behavior departs from the assumed structure, which can have negative implications for safety. In this paper, we observe that how "rational" human actions appear under a particular model can be viewed as an indicator of that model's ability to describe the human's current motion. By reasoning about this model confidence in a real-time Bayesian framework, we show that the robot can very quickly modulate its predictions to become more uncertain when the model performs poorly. Building on recent work in provably-safe trajectory planning, we leverage these confidence-aware human motion predictions to generate assured autonomous robot motion. Our new analysis combines worst-case tracking error guarantees for the physical robot with probabilistic time-varying human predictions, yielding a quantitative, probabilistic safety certificate. We demonstrate our approach with a quadcopter navigating around a human.