Taeyeong Kim

Unggi Lee, Jahyun Jeong, Sunyoung Shin et al.

Science demonstrations are important for effective STEM education, yet teachers face challenges in conducting them safely and consistently across multiple occasions, where robotics can be helpful. However, current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models require substantial computational resources and sacrifice language generation capabilities to maximize efficiency, making them unsuitable for resource-constrained educational settings that require interpretable, explanation-generating systems. We present \textit{Pedagogical VLA Framework}, a framework that applies pedagogical alignment to lightweight VLA models through four components: text healing to restore language generation capabilities, large language model (LLM) distillation to transfer pedagogical knowledge, safety training for educational environments, and pedagogical evaluation adjusted to science education contexts. We evaluate Pedagogical VLA Framework across five science demonstrations spanning physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science, using an evaluation framework developed in collaboration with science education experts. Our evaluation assesses both task performance (success rate, protocol compliance, efficiency, safety) and pedagogical quality through teacher surveys and LLM-as-Judge assessment. We additionally provide qualitative analysis of generated texts. Experimental results demonstrate that Pedagogical VLA Framework achieves comparable task performance to baseline models while producing contextually appropriate educational explanations.

Taeyeong Kim, SeungJoon Lee, Jung Uk Kim et al.

Domain generalization in semantic segmentation faces challenges from domain shifts, particularly under adverse conditions. While diffusion-based data generation methods show promise, they introduce inherent misalignment between generated images and semantic masks. This paper presents FLEX-Seg (FLexible Edge eXploitation for Segmentation), a framework that transforms this limitation into an opportunity for robust learning. FLEX-Seg comprises three key components: (1) Granular Adaptive Prototypes that captures boundary characteristics across multiple scales, (2) Uncertainty Boundary Emphasis that dynamically adjusts learning emphasis based on prediction entropy, and (3) Hardness-Aware Sampling that progressively focuses on challenging examples. By leveraging inherent misalignment rather than enforcing strict alignment, FLEX-Seg learns robust representations while capturing rich stylistic variations. Experiments across five real-world datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving 2.44% and 2.63% mIoU gains on ACDC and Dark Zurich. Our findings validate that adaptive strategies for handling imperfect synthetic data lead to superior domain generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/VisualScienceLab-KHU/FLEX-Seg.