Mingyang Mao

Mingyang Mao, Bhargav Rishi Medisetti, Utkarsh Grover et al.

Food-as-Medicine requires models to reason beyond what a dish is or what nutrition it contains: they must decide whether a concrete food choice is appropriate for a specific health condition. Existing food AI benchmarks primarily evaluate dish recognition, recipe understanding, nutrient estimation, or general nutrition question answering, leaving this health-aware decision layer largely untested. We introduce FAM-Bench, a multi-modal Food-as-Medicine benchmark with 2500 nutrition-expert-verified instances across 13 diet-related health conditions. The benchmark contains two complementary tasks: dish-level suitability assessment, where models judge whether a dish is suitable for a condition from its image and ingredient list, and comparative dish analysis, where models rank four candidate dishes by condition-specific suitability. Both tasks require integrating ingredient evidence, visual preparation cues, and clinical nutrition constraints, providing a standardized testbed for grounded health-aware reasoning in language and vision-language models.

Utkarsh Grover, Ravi Ranjan, Mingyang Mao et al.

Deploying foundation models in embodied edge systems is fundamentally a systems problem, not just a problem of model compression. Real-time control must operate within strict size, weight, and power constraints, where memory traffic, compute latency, timing variability, and safety margins interact directly. The Deployment Gauntlet organizes these constraints into eight coupled barriers that determine whether embodied foundation models can run reliably in practice. Across representative edge workloads, autoregressive Vision-Language-Action policies are constrained primarily by memory bandwidth, whereas diffusion-based controllers are limited more by compute latency and sustained execution cost. Reliable deployment therefore depends on system-level co-design across memory, scheduling, communication, and model architecture, including decompositions that separate fast control from slower semantic reasoning.

Aadi Palnitkar, Mingyang Mao, Nicholas Waytowich et al.

As large language models (LLMs) are applied to increasingly longer and more complex tasks, there is a growing need for realistic long-context benchmarks that require selective reading and integration of heterogeneous, multi-modal information sources. This need is especially acute for geospatial planning problems, such as those found in planning for large-scale military operations, which demand fast and accurate reasoning over maps, orders, intelligence reports, and other distributed data. To address this gap, we present MilSCORE (Military Scenario Contextual Reasoning), to our knowledge the first scenario-level dataset of expert-authored, multi-hop questions grounded in a complex, simulated military planning scenario used for training. MilSCORE is designed to evaluate high-stakes decision-making and planning, probing LLMs' ability to combine tactical and spatial reasoning across multiple sources and to reason over long-horizon, geospatially rich context. The benchmark includes a diverse set of question types across seven categories targeting both factual recall and multi-step reasoning about constraints, strategy, and spatial analysis. We provide an evaluation protocol and report baseline results for a range of contemporary vision-language models. Our findings highlight substantial headroom on MilSCORE, indicating that current systems struggle with realistic, scenario-level long-context planning, and positioning MilSCORE as a challenging testbed for future work.

Mingyang Mao, Mariela M. Perez-Cabarcas, Utteja Kallakuri et al.

To effectively engage in human society, the ability to adapt, filter information, and make informed decisions in ever-changing situations is critical. As robots and intelligent agents become more integrated into human life, there is a growing opportunity-and need-to offload the cognitive burden on humans to these systems, particularly in dynamic, information-rich scenarios. To fill this critical need, we present Multi-RAG, a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation system designed to provide adaptive assistance to humans in information-intensive circumstances. Our system aims to improve situational understanding and reduce cognitive load by integrating and reasoning over multi-source information streams, including video, audio, and text. As an enabling step toward long-term human-robot partnerships, Multi-RAG explores how multimodal information understanding can serve as a foundation for adaptive robotic assistance in dynamic, human-centered situations. To evaluate its capability in a realistic human-assistance proxy task, we benchmarked Multi-RAG on the MMBench-Video dataset, a challenging multimodal video understanding benchmark. Our system achieves superior performance compared to existing open-source video large language models (Video-LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs), while utilizing fewer resources and less input data. The results demonstrate Multi- RAG's potential as a practical and efficient foundation for future human-robot adaptive assistance systems in dynamic, real-world contexts.