Mohammadhossein Khojasteh

Luca Vogelgesang, Ahmed Mehdi Soltani, Mohammadhossein Khojasteh et al.

Assistive robots have growing potential to support physical wellbeing in home and healthcare settings, for example, by guiding users through stretching or rehabilitation routines. However, existing systems remain largely scripted, which limits their ability to adapt to user state, environmental context, and interaction dynamics. In this work, we present StretchBot, a hybrid neuro-symbolic robotic coach for adaptive assistive guidance. The system combines multimodal perception with knowledge-graph-grounded large language model reasoning to support context-aware adjustments during short stretching sessions while maintaining a structured routine. To complement the system description, we report an exploratory pilot comparison between scripted and adaptive guidance with three participants. The pilot findings suggest that the adaptive condition improved perceived adaptability and contextual relevance, while scripted guidance remained competitive in smoothness and predictability. These results provide preliminary evidence that structured actionable knowledge can help ground language-model-based adaptation in embodied assistive interaction, while also highlighting the need for larger, longitudinal studies to evaluate robustness, generalizability, and long-term user experience.

Abhishek Kolari, Mohammadhossein Khojasteh, Yifan Jiang et al.

While vision-language models (VLMs) have made remarkable progress on many popular visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks, it remains unclear whether they abstract and reason over depicted objects. Inspired by human object categorisation, object property reasoning involves identifying and recognising low-level details and higher-level abstractions. While current VQA benchmarks consider a limited set of object property attributes like size, they typically blend perception and reasoning, and lack representativeness in terms of reasoning and image categories. To this end, we introduce a systematic evaluation framework with images of three representative types, three reasoning levels of increasing complexity, and four object property dimensions driven by prior work on commonsense reasoning. We develop a procedure to instantiate this benchmark into ORBIT, a multi-level reasoning VQA benchmark for object properties comprising 360 images paired with a total of 1,080 count-based questions. Experiments with 12 state-of-the-art VLMs in zero-shot settings reveal significant limitations compared to humans, with the best-performing model only reaching 40\% accuracy. VLMs struggle particularly with realistic (photographic) images, counterfactual reasoning about physical and functional properties, and higher counts. ORBIT points to the need to develop methods for scalable benchmarking, generalize annotation guidelines, and explore additional reasoning VLMs. We make the ORBIT benchmark and the experimental code available to support such endeavors.

Mohammadhossein Khojasteh, Yifan Jiang, Stefano De Giorgis et al.

Analogical reasoning is a key driver of human generalization in problem-solving and argumentation. Yet, analogies between narrative structures remain challenging for machines. Cognitive engines for structural mapping are not directly applicable, as they assume pre-extracted entities, whereas LLMs' performance is sensitive to prompt format and the degree of surface similarity between narratives. This gap motivates a key question: What is the impact of enhancing structural mapping with LLM-derived abstractions on their analogical reasoning ability in narratives? To that end, we propose a modular framework named YARN (Yielding Abstractions for Reasoning in Narratives), which uses LLMs to decompose narratives into units, abstract these units, and then passes them to a mapping component that aligns elements across stories to perform analogical reasoning. We define and operationalize four levels of abstraction that capture both the general meaning of units and their roles in the story, grounded in prior work on framing. Our experiments reveal that abstractions consistently improve model performance, resulting in competitive or better performance than end-to-end LLM baselines. Closer error analysis reveals the remaining challenges in abstraction at the right level, in incorporating implicit causality, and an emerging categorization of analogical patterns in narratives. YARN enables systematic variation of experimental settings to analyze component contributions, and to support future work, we make the code for YARN openly available.