Yuzhi Lai

Yuzhi Lai, Shenghai Yuan, Peizheng Li et al.

ffective Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is crucial for enhancing accessibility and usability in real-world robotics applications. However, existing solutions often rely on gesture- only or language-only commands, making interaction inefficient and ambiguous, particularly for users with physical impairments. In this paper, we introduce FAM-HRI, an efficient multimodal framework for HRI that integrates language and gaze inputs via foundation models. By leveraging lightweight Meta ARIA glasses, our system captures real-time multimodal signals and utilizes large language models (LLMs) to fuse user intention with scene context, enabling intuitive and precise robot manipulation. Our method accurately determines the gaze fixation time interval, reducing noise caused by the gaze dynamic nature. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that FAM-HRI achieves a high success rate in task execution while maintaining a low interaction time, providing a practical solution for individuals with limited physical mobility or motor impairments. To support the community, we have released our system design, algorithms, and solutions at https://github.com/laiyuzhi/FAM-HRI.

Yuzhi Lai, Shenghai Yuan, Youssef Nassar et al.

Effective Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is crucial for future service robots in aging societies. Existing solutions are biased toward only well-trained objects, creating a gap when dealing with new objects. Currently, HRI systems using predefined gestures or language tokens for pretrained objects pose challenges for all individuals, especially elderly ones. These challenges include difficulties in recalling commands, memorizing hand gestures, and learning new names. This paper introduces NVP-HRI, an intuitive multi-modal HRI paradigm that combines voice commands and deictic posture. NVP-HRI utilizes the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to analyze visual cues and depth data, enabling precise structural object representation. Through a pre-trained SAM network, NVP-HRI allows interaction with new objects via zero-shot prediction, even without prior knowledge. NVP-HRI also integrates with a large language model (LLM) for multimodal commands, coordinating them with object selection and scene distribution in real time for collision-free trajectory solutions. We also regulate the action sequence with the essential control syntax to reduce LLM hallucination risks. The evaluation of diverse real-world tasks using a Universal Robot showcased up to 59.2\% efficiency improvement over traditional gesture control, as illustrated in the video https://youtu.be/EbC7al2wiAc. Our code and design will be openly available at https://github.com/laiyuzhi/NVP-HRI.git.

Yuzhi Lai, Shenghai Yuan, Peizheng Li et al.

We present SEER-VAR, a novel framework for egocentric vehicle-based augmented reality (AR) that unifies semantic decomposition, Context-Aware SLAM Branches (CASB), and LLM-driven recommendation. Unlike existing systems that assume static or single-view settings, SEER-VAR dynamically separates cabin and road scenes via depth-guided vision-language grounding. Two SLAM branches track egocentric motion in each context, while a GPT-based module generates context-aware overlays such as dashboard cues and hazard alerts. To support evaluation, we introduce EgoSLAM-Drive, a real-world dataset featuring synchronized egocentric views, 6DoF ground-truth poses, and AR annotations across diverse driving scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that SEER-VAR achieves robust spatial alignment and perceptually coherent AR rendering across varied environments. As one of the first to explore LLM-based AR recommendation in egocentric driving, we address the lack of comparable systems through structured prompting and detailed user studies. Results show that SEER-VAR enhances perceived scene understanding, overlay relevance, and driver ease, providing an effective foundation for future research in this direction. Code and dataset will be made open source.

Peizheng Li, Zhenghao Zhang, David Holtz et al.

End-to-end autonomous driving methods built on vision language models (VLMs) have undergone rapid development driven by their universal visual understanding and strong reasoning capabilities obtained from the large-scale pretraining. However, we find that current VLMs struggle to understand fine-grained 3D spatial relationships which is a fundamental requirement for systems interacting with the physical world. To address this issue, we propose SpaceDrive, a spatial-aware VLM-based driving framework that treats spatial information as explicit positional encodings (PEs) instead of textual digit tokens, enabling joint reasoning over semantic and spatial representations. SpaceDrive employs a universal positional encoder to all 3D coordinates derived from multi-view depth estimation, historical ego-states, and text prompts. These 3D PEs are first superimposed to augment the corresponding 2D visual tokens. Meanwhile, they serve as a task-agnostic coordinate representation, replacing the digit-wise numerical tokens as both inputs and outputs for the VLM. This mechanism enables the model to better index specific visual semantics in spatial reasoning and directly regress trajectory coordinates rather than generating digit-by-digit, thereby enhancing planning accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that SpaceDrive achieves state-of-the-art open-loop performance on the nuScenes dataset and the second-best Driving Score of 78.02 on the Bench2Drive closed-loop benchmark over existing VLM-based methods.

Yuzhi Lai, Shenghai Yuan, Peizheng Li et al.

Gaze is a valuable means of communication for impaired people with extremely limited motor capabilities. However, robust gaze-based intent recognition in multi-object environments is challenging due to gaze noise, micro-saccades, viewpoint changes, and dynamic objects. To address this, we propose an object-centric gaze grounding framework that stabilizes intent through a sticky-glance algorithm, jointly modeling geometric distance and direction trends. The inferred intent remains anchored to the object even under short glances with minimal 3 gaze samples, achieving a tracking rate of 0.94 for dynamic targets and selection accuracy of 0.98 for static targets. We further introduce a continuous shared control and multi-modal interaction paradigm, enabling high-readiness control and human-in-loop feedback, thereby reducing task duration for nearly 10 \%. Experiments across dynamic tracking, multi-perspective alignment, a baseline comparison, user studies, and ablation studies demonstrate improved robustness, efficiency, and reduced workload compared to representative baselines.