Jason Wu

HC
h-index60
28papers
1,651citations
Novelty41%
AI Score56

28 Papers

HCNov 26, 2025
STAR: Smartphone-analogous Typing in Augmented Reality

Taejun Kim, Amy Karlson, Aakar Gupta et al.

While text entry is an essential and frequent task in Augmented Reality (AR) applications, devising an efficient and easy-to-use text entry method for AR remains an open challenge. This research presents STAR, a smartphone-analogous AR text entry technique that leverages a user's familiarity with smartphone two-thumb typing. With STAR, a user performs thumb typing on a virtual QWERTY keyboard that is overlain on the skin of their hands. During an evaluation study of STAR, participants achieved a mean typing speed of 21.9 WPM (i.e., 56% of their smartphone typing speed), and a mean error rate of 0.3% after 30 minutes of practice. We further analyze the major factors implicated in the performance gap between STAR and smartphone typing, and discuss ways this gap could be narrowed.

MAMay 5
FlowEval: Reference-based Evaluation of Generated User Interfaces

Jason Wu, Priyan Vaithilingam, Eldon Schoop et al.

While large language models (LLMs) and coding agents are often applied to user interface (UI) development, developers find it difficult to reliably assess their proficiency in visual and interaction design. Existing evaluations either rely on human experts, who can accurately assess usability by testing critical flows but are slow and costly, or on automated judges, which are scalable but less accurate and opaque. We present FlowEval, a reference-based framework that measures whether a generated UI supports realistic interaction flows by comparing navigation traces from real websites to traces from generated analogs using reference-based similarity metrics (e.g., dynamic time warping). In a small-scale study with expert UI evaluators, we show that reference-based metrics strongly correlate with human judgments, suggesting that they can provide scalable yet trustworthy evaluation for UI generation systems.

CLMay 23
TS-Skill: A Benchmark for Evaluating Analytical Skills in Time-Series Question Answering

Liying Han, Kang Yang, Oliver Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) and time-series language models (TSLMs) are increasingly applied to time-series question answering (TSQA). Unlike text-only QA, TSQA requires models to ground answers in temporal signals whose patterns may occur at different scales, specific time locations, or across separated intervals. However, existing benchmarks are typically organized by task types or high-level reasoning categories, making it difficult to diagnose the underlying signal-level capabilities driving model performance. We introduce TS-Skill, a controlled benchmark for evaluating three composable analytical skills in TSQA: temporal scale selection (SK1), temporal localization (SK2), and cross-interval integration (SK3). TS-Skill provides timestamp-aware questions, broad domain coverage, and human-validated QA quality. To construct the benchmark at scale, we develop SKEvol, a skill-guided agentic framework that combines domain-aware time-series seed generation, skill-controlled question generation, metadata- and code-assisted answer construction, multi-phase signal-grounded verification, and human-in-the-loop curation. Experiments on ten state-of-the-art LLMs and TSLMs reveal substantial and uneven capability gaps across SK1-SK3. In particular, SK3 remains consistently challenging for non-agent models, whereas tool-augmented agents show a selective advantage on standalone SK3. These findings demonstrate that skill-level evaluation can uncover temporal reasoning failures that are obscured by aggregate TSQA scores.

CVSep 30, 2024
DreamStruct: Understanding Slides and User Interfaces via Synthetic Data Generation

Yi-Hao Peng, Faria Huq, Yue Jiang et al.

Enabling machines to understand structured visuals like slides and user interfaces is essential for making them accessible to people with disabilities. However, achieving such understanding computationally has required manual data collection and annotation, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To overcome this challenge, we present a method to generate synthetic, structured visuals with target labels using code generation. Our method allows people to create datasets with built-in labels and train models with a small number of human-annotated examples. We demonstrate performance improvements in three tasks for understanding slides and UIs: recognizing visual elements, describing visual content, and classifying visual content types.

MAFeb 23, 2024Code
AgentLite: A Lightweight Library for Building and Advancing Task-Oriented LLM Agent System

Zhiwei Liu, Weiran Yao, Jianguo Zhang et al. · salesforce

The booming success of LLMs initiates rapid development in LLM agents. Though the foundation of an LLM agent is the generative model, it is critical to devise the optimal reasoning strategies and agent architectures. Accordingly, LLM agent research advances from the simple chain-of-thought prompting to more complex ReAct and Reflection reasoning strategy; agent architecture also evolves from single agent generation to multi-agent conversation, as well as multi-LLM multi-agent group chat. However, with the existing intricate frameworks and libraries, creating and evaluating new reasoning strategies and agent architectures has become a complex challenge, which hinders research investigation into LLM agents. Thus, we open-source a new AI agent library, AgentLite, which simplifies this process by offering a lightweight, user-friendly platform for innovating LLM agent reasoning, architectures, and applications with ease. AgentLite is a task-oriented framework designed to enhance the ability of agents to break down tasks and facilitate the development of multi-agent systems. Furthermore, we introduce multiple practical applications developed with AgentLite to demonstrate its convenience and flexibility. Get started now at: \url{https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/AgentLite}.

LGApr 10
Efficient Personalization of Generative User Interfaces

Yi-Hao Peng, Samarth Das, Jeffrey P. Bigham et al.

Generative user interfaces (UIs) create new opportunities to adapt interfaces to individual users on demand, but personalization remains difficult because desirable UI properties are subjective, hard to articulate, and costly to infer from sparse feedback. We study this problem through a new dataset in which 20 trained designers each provide pairwise judgments over the same 600 generated UIs, enabling direct analysis of preference divergence. We find substantial disagreement across designers (average kappa = 0.25), and written rationales reveal that even when designers appeal to similar concepts such as hierarchy or cleanliness, designers differ in how they define, prioritize, and apply those concepts. Motivated by these findings, we develop a sample-efficient personalization method that represents a new user in terms of prior designers rather than a fixed rubric of design concepts. In a technical evaluation, our preference model outperforms both a pretrained UI evaluator and a larger multimodal model, and scales better with additional feedback. When used to personalize generation, it also produces interfaces preferred by 12 new designers over baseline approaches, including direct user prompting. Our findings suggest that lightweight preference elicitation can serve as a practical foundation for personalized generative UI systems.

LGNov 18, 2024Code
MMBind: Unleashing the Potential of Distributed and Heterogeneous Data for Multimodal Learning in IoT

Xiaomin Ouyang, Jason Wu, Tomoyoshi Kimura et al.

Multimodal sensing systems are increasingly prevalent in various real-world applications. Most existing multimodal learning approaches heavily rely on training with a large amount of synchronized, complete multimodal data. However, such a setting is impractical in real-world IoT sensing applications where data is typically collected by distributed nodes with heterogeneous data modalities, and is also rarely labeled. In this paper, we propose MMBind, a new data binding approach for multimodal learning on distributed and heterogeneous IoT data. The key idea of MMBind is to construct a pseudo-paired multimodal dataset for model training by binding data from disparate sources and incomplete modalities through a sufficiently descriptive shared modality. We also propose a weighted contrastive learning approach to handle domain shifts among disparate data, coupled with an adaptive multimodal learning architecture capable of training models with heterogeneous modality combinations. Evaluations on ten real-world multimodal datasets highlight that MMBind outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under varying degrees of data incompleteness and domain shift, and holds promise for advancing multimodal foundation model training in IoT applications\footnote (The source code is available via https://github.com/nesl/multimodal-bind).

ROFeb 21, 2024Code
GDTM: An Indoor Geospatial Tracking Dataset with Distributed Multimodal Sensors

Ho Lyun Jeong, Ziqi Wang, Colin Samplawski et al.

Constantly locating moving objects, i.e., geospatial tracking, is essential for autonomous building infrastructure. Accurate and robust geospatial tracking often leverages multimodal sensor fusion algorithms, which require large datasets with time-aligned, synchronized data from various sensor types. However, such datasets are not readily available. Hence, we propose GDTM, a nine-hour dataset for multimodal object tracking with distributed multimodal sensors and reconfigurable sensor node placements. Our dataset enables the exploration of several research problems, such as optimizing architectures for processing multimodal data, and investigating models' robustness to adverse sensing conditions and sensor placement variances. A GitHub repository containing the code, sample data, and checkpoints of this work is available at https://github.com/nesl/GDTM.

CLJun 12, 2024Code
MobileAIBench: Benchmarking LLMs and LMMs for On-Device Use Cases

Rithesh Murthy, Liangwei Yang, Juntao Tan et al.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on mobile devices has gained significant attention due to the benefits of enhanced privacy, stability, and personalization. However, the hardware constraints of mobile devices necessitate the use of models with fewer parameters and model compression techniques like quantization. Currently, there is limited understanding of quantization's impact on various task performances, including LLM tasks, LMM tasks, and, critically, trust and safety. There is a lack of adequate tools for systematically testing these models on mobile devices. To address these gaps, we introduce MobileAIBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for evaluating mobile-optimized LLMs and LMMs. MobileAIBench assesses models across different sizes, quantization levels, and tasks, measuring latency and resource consumption on real devices. Our two-part open-source framework includes a library for running evaluations on desktops and an iOS app for on-device latency and hardware utilization measurements. Our thorough analysis aims to accelerate mobile AI research and deployment by providing insights into the performance and feasibility of deploying LLMs and LMMs on mobile platforms.

CLJun 11, 2024Code
UICoder: Finetuning Large Language Models to Generate User Interface Code through Automated Feedback

Jason Wu, Eldon Schoop, Alan Leung et al.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to consistently generate UI code that compiles and produces visually relevant designs. Existing approaches to improve generation rely on expensive human feedback or distilling a proprietary model. In this paper, we explore the use of automated feedback (compilers and multi-modal models) to guide LLMs to generate high-quality UI code. Our method starts with an existing LLM and iteratively produces improved models by self-generating a large synthetic dataset using an original model, applying automated tools to aggressively filter, score, and de-duplicate the data into a refined higher quality dataset. The original LLM is improved by finetuning on this refined dataset. We applied our approach to several open-source LLMs and compared the resulting performance to baseline models with both automated metrics and human preferences. Our evaluation shows the resulting models outperform all other downloadable baselines and approach the performance of larger proprietary models.

CVJun 10, 2024Code
FlexLoc: Conditional Neural Networks for Zero-Shot Sensor Perspective Invariance in Object Localization with Distributed Multimodal Sensors

Jason Wu, Ziqi Wang, Xiaomin Ouyang et al.

Localization is a critical technology for various applications ranging from navigation and surveillance to assisted living. Localization systems typically fuse information from sensors viewing the scene from different perspectives to estimate the target location while also employing multiple modalities for enhanced robustness and accuracy. Recently, such systems have employed end-to-end deep neural models trained on large datasets due to their superior performance and ability to handle data from diverse sensor modalities. However, such neural models are often trained on data collected from a particular set of sensor poses (i.e., locations and orientations). During real-world deployments, slight deviations from these sensor poses can result in extreme inaccuracies. To address this challenge, we introduce FlexLoc, which employs conditional neural networks to inject node perspective information to adapt the localization pipeline. Specifically, a small subset of model weights are derived from node poses at run time, enabling accurate generalization to unseen perspectives with minimal additional overhead. Our evaluations on a multimodal, multiview indoor tracking dataset showcase that FlexLoc improves the localization accuracy by almost 50% in the zero-shot case (no calibration data available) compared to the baselines. The source code of FlexLoc is available at https://github.com/nesl/FlexLoc.

CVFeb 23
Decoupling Vision and Language: Codebook Anchored Visual Adaptation

Jason Wu, Tianchen Zhao, Chang Liu et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) use their vision encoders to translate images into representations for downstream reasoning, but the encoders often underperform in domain-specific visual tasks such as medical image diagnosis or fine-grained classification, where representation errors can cascade through the language model, leading to incorrect responses. Existing adaptation methods modify the continuous feature interface between encoder and language model through projector tuning or other parameter-efficient updates, which still couples the two components and requires re-alignment whenever the encoder changes. We introduce CRAFT (Codebook RegulAted Fine-Tuning), a lightweight method that fine-tunes the encoder using a discrete codebook that anchors visual representations to a stable token space, achieving domain adaptation without modifying other parts of the model. This decoupled design allows the adapted encoder to seamlessly boost the performance of LVLMs with different language architectures, as long as they share the same codebook. Empirically, CRAFT achieves an average gain of 13.51% across 10 domain-specific benchmarks such as VQARAD and PlantVillage, while preserving the LLM's linguistic capabilities and outperforming peer methods that operate on continuous tokens.

HCApr 18, 2024
UIClip: A Data-driven Model for Assessing User Interface Design

Jason Wu, Yi-Hao Peng, Amanda Li et al.

User interface (UI) design is a difficult yet important task for ensuring the usability, accessibility, and aesthetic qualities of applications. In our paper, we develop a machine-learned model, UIClip, for assessing the design quality and visual relevance of a UI given its screenshot and natural language description. To train UIClip, we used a combination of automated crawling, synthetic augmentation, and human ratings to construct a large-scale dataset of UIs, collated by description and ranked by design quality. Through training on the dataset, UIClip implicitly learns properties of good and bad designs by i) assigning a numerical score that represents a UI design's relevance and quality and ii) providing design suggestions. In an evaluation that compared the outputs of UIClip and other baselines to UIs rated by 12 human designers, we found that UIClip achieved the highest agreement with ground-truth rankings. Finally, we present three example applications that demonstrate how UIClip can facilitate downstream applications that rely on instantaneous assessment of UI design quality: i) UI code generation, ii) UI design tips generation, and iii) quality-aware UI example search.

LGApr 28
SWAN: World-Aware Adaptive Multimodal Networks for Runtime Variations

Jason Wu, Shir-Kang Scott Jinn, Yuyang Yuan et al.

Multimodal deep neural networks deployed in realistic environments must contend with runtime variations: changes in modality quality, overall input complexity, and available platform resources. Current networks struggle with such fluctuations -- adaptive networks cannot adhere to a strict compute budget, controller-based networks neglect to consider input complexity, and statically provisioned networks fail at all the above. Consequently, they do not extract maximum utility from the expended computational resources. We present SWAN (Sample and World-Aware Multimodal Network), the first adaptive multimodal network that accomplishes all three goals. SWAN employs a quality-aware controller to assign resources among modalities according to a variable user-specified maximum budget. Within this budget, an adaptive gating module further optimizes efficiency by scaling layer utilization according to sample complexity. For further gains, SWAN also employs a token dropping module that masks semantically irrelevant multimodal features before performing detections. We evaluate SWAN in the domain of autonomous driving with complex multi-object 3D detection, reducing FLOPs by up to 49% with minimal degradation.

CLApr 28
Training Computer Use Agents to Assess the Usability of Graphical User Interfaces

Alice Gao, Weixi Tong, Rishab Vempati et al.

Usability testing with experts and potential users can assess the effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) but doing so remains a costly and time-intensive process. Prior work has used computer use agents (CUAs) and other generative agents that can simulate user interactions and preference, but we show that agents still struggle to provide accurate usability assessments. In this work, we present a novel machine learning method that operationalizes a computational definition of usability to train CUAs to assess GUI usability by i) prioritizing important interaction flows, ii) executing them through human-like interactions, and iii) predicting a learned numerical usability score. We train a computer use agent, uxCUA, with our algorithm on a large-scale dataset of fully interactive user interfaces (UIs) paired with usability labels and human preferences. We show that uxCUA outperforms larger models in accurate usability assessments and produces realistic critiques of both synthetic and real UIs. More broadly, our work aims to build a principled, data-driven foundation for automated usability assessment in HCI.

HCAug 14, 2025
Facilitating Longitudinal Interaction Studies of AI Systems

Tao Long, Sitong Wang, Émilie Fabre et al.

UIST researchers develop tools to address user challenges. However, user interactions with AI evolve over time through learning, adaptation, and repurposing, making one time evaluations insufficient. Capturing these dynamics requires longer-term studies, but challenges in deployment, evaluation design, and data collection have made such longitudinal research difficult to implement. Our workshop aims to tackle these challenges and prepare researchers with practical strategies for longitudinal studies. The workshop includes a keynote, panel discussions, and interactive breakout groups for discussion and hands-on protocol design and tool prototyping sessions. We seek to foster a community around longitudinal system research and promote it as a more embraced method for designing, building, and evaluating UIST tools.

CVNov 25, 2025
DesignPref: Capturing Personal Preferences in Visual Design Generation

Yi-Hao Peng, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jason Wu

Generative models, such as large language models and text-to-image diffusion models, are increasingly used to create visual designs like user interfaces (UIs) and presentation slides. Finetuning and benchmarking these generative models have often relied on datasets of human-annotated design preferences. Yet, due to the subjective and highly personalized nature of visual design, preference varies widely among individuals. In this paper, we study this problem by introducing DesignPref, a dataset of 12k pairwise comparisons of UI design generation annotated by 20 professional designers with multi-level preference ratings. We found that among trained designers, substantial levels of disagreement exist (Krippendorff's alpha = 0.25 for binary preferences). Natural language rationales provided by these designers indicate that disagreements stem from differing perceptions of various design aspect importance and individual preferences. With DesignPref, we demonstrate that traditional majority-voting methods for training aggregated judge models often do not accurately reflect individual preferences. To address this challenge, we investigate multiple personalization strategies, particularly fine-tuning or incorporating designer-specific annotations into RAG pipelines. Our results show that personalized models consistently outperform aggregated baseline models in predicting individual designers' preferences, even when using 20 times fewer examples. Our work provides the first dataset to study personalized visual design evaluation and support future research into modeling individual design taste.

LGOct 24, 2025
Leveraging Classical Algorithms for Graph Neural Networks

Jason Wu, Petar Veličković

Neural networks excel at processing unstructured data but often fail to generalise out-of-distribution, whereas classical algorithms guarantee correctness but lack flexibility. We explore whether pretraining Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on classical algorithms can improve their performance on molecular property prediction tasks from the Open Graph Benchmark: ogbg-molhiv (HIV inhibition) and ogbg-molclintox (clinical toxicity). GNNs trained on 24 classical algorithms from the CLRS Algorithmic Reasoning Benchmark are used to initialise and freeze selected layers of a second GNN for molecular prediction. Compared to a randomly initialised baseline, the pretrained models achieve consistent wins or ties, with the Segments Intersect algorithm pretraining yielding a 6% absolute gain on ogbg-molhiv and Dijkstra pretraining achieving a 3% gain on ogbg-molclintox. These results demonstrate embedding classical algorithmic priors into GNNs provides useful inductive biases, boosting performance on complex, real-world graph data.

HCSep 20, 2025
Improving User Interface Generation Models from Designer Feedback

Jason Wu, Amanda Swearngin, Arun Krishna Vajjala et al.

Despite being trained on vast amounts of data, most LLMs are unable to reliably generate well-designed UIs. Designer feedback is essential to improving performance on UI generation; however, we find that existing RLHF methods based on ratings or rankings are not well-aligned with designers' workflows and ignore the rich rationale used to critique and improve UI designs. In this paper, we investigate several approaches for designers to give feedback to UI generation models, using familiar interactions such as commenting, sketching and direct manipulation. We first perform a study with 21 designers where they gave feedback using these interactions, which resulted in ~1500 design annotations. We then use this data to finetune a series of LLMs to generate higher quality UIs. Finally, we evaluate these models with human judges, and we find that our designer-aligned approaches outperform models trained with traditional ranking feedback and all tested baselines, including GPT-5.

LGFeb 11, 2025
ADMN: A Layer-Wise Adaptive Multimodal Network for Dynamic Input Noise and Compute Resources

Jason Wu, Yuyang Yuan, Kang Yang et al.

Multimodal deep learning systems are deployed in dynamic scenarios due to the robustness afforded by multiple sensing modalities. Nevertheless, they struggle with varying compute resource availability (due to multi-tenancy, device heterogeneity, etc.) and fluctuating quality of inputs (from sensor feed corruption, environmental noise, etc.). Statically provisioned multimodal systems cannot adapt when compute resources change over time, while existing dynamic networks struggle with strict compute budgets. Additionally, both systems often neglect the impact of variations in modality quality. Consequently, modalities suffering substantial corruption may needlessly consume resources better allocated towards other modalities. We propose ADMN, a layer-wise Adaptive Depth Multimodal Network capable of tackling both challenges: it adjusts the total number of active layers across all modalities to meet strict compute resource constraints and continually reallocates layers across input modalities according to their modality quality. Our evaluations showcase ADMN can match the accuracy of state-of-the-art networks while reducing up to 75% of their floating-point operations.

CLMay 22, 2024
Efficacy of ByT5 in Multilingual Translation of Biblical Texts for Underrepresented Languages

Corinne Aars, Lauren Adams, Xiaokan Tian et al.

This study presents the development and evaluation of a ByT5-based multilingual translation model tailored for translating the Bible into underrepresented languages. Utilizing the comprehensive Johns Hopkins University Bible Corpus, we trained the model to capture the intricate nuances of character-based and morphologically rich languages. Our results, measured by the BLEU score and supplemented with sample translations, suggest the model can improve accessibility to sacred texts. It effectively handles the distinctive biblical lexicon and structure, thus bridging the linguistic divide. The study also discusses the model's limitations and suggests pathways for future enhancements, focusing on expanding access to sacred literature across linguistic boundaries.

HCSep 17, 2021
Screen Parsing: Towards Reverse Engineering of UI Models from Screenshots

Jason Wu, Xiaoyi Zhang, Jeff Nichols et al.

Automated understanding of user interfaces (UIs) from their pixels can improve accessibility, enable task automation, and facilitate interface design without relying on developers to comprehensively provide metadata. A first step is to infer what UI elements exist on a screen, but current approaches are limited in how they infer how those elements are semantically grouped into structured interface definitions. In this paper, we motivate the problem of screen parsing, the task of predicting UI elements and their relationships from a screenshot. We describe our implementation of screen parsing and provide an effective training procedure that optimizes its performance. In an evaluation comparing the accuracy of the generated output, we find that our implementation significantly outperforms current systems (up to 23%). Finally, we show three example applications that are facilitated by screen parsing: (i) UI similarity search, (ii) accessibility enhancement, and (iii) code generation from UI screenshots.

LGJul 15, 2021
MultiBench: Multiscale Benchmarks for Multimodal Representation Learning

Paul Pu Liang, Yiwei Lyu, Xiang Fan et al.

Learning multimodal representations involves integrating information from multiple heterogeneous sources of data. It is a challenging yet crucial area with numerous real-world applications in multimedia, affective computing, robotics, finance, human-computer interaction, and healthcare. Unfortunately, multimodal research has seen limited resources to study (1) generalization across domains and modalities, (2) complexity during training and inference, and (3) robustness to noisy and missing modalities. In order to accelerate progress towards understudied modalities and tasks while ensuring real-world robustness, we release MultiBench, a systematic and unified large-scale benchmark spanning 15 datasets, 10 modalities, 20 prediction tasks, and 6 research areas. MultiBench provides an automated end-to-end machine learning pipeline that simplifies and standardizes data loading, experimental setup, and model evaluation. To enable holistic evaluation, MultiBench offers a comprehensive methodology to assess (1) generalization, (2) time and space complexity, and (3) modality robustness. MultiBench introduces impactful challenges for future research, including scalability to large-scale multimodal datasets and robustness to realistic imperfections. To accompany this benchmark, we also provide a standardized implementation of 20 core approaches in multimodal learning. Simply applying methods proposed in different research areas can improve the state-of-the-art performance on 9/15 datasets. Therefore, MultiBench presents a milestone in unifying disjoint efforts in multimodal research and paves the way towards a better understanding of the capabilities and limitations of multimodal models, all the while ensuring ease of use, accessibility, and reproducibility. MultiBench, our standardized code, and leaderboards are publicly available, will be regularly updated, and welcomes inputs from the community.

HCMay 4, 2021
When Can Accessibility Help?: An Exploration of Accessibility Feature Recommendation on Mobile Devices

Jason Wu, Gabriel Reyes, Sam C. White et al.

Numerous accessibility features have been developed and included in consumer operating systems to provide people with a variety of disabilities additional ways to access computing devices. Unfortunately, many users, especially older adults who are more likely to experience ability changes, are not aware of these features or do not know which combination to use. In this paper, we first quantify this problem via a survey with 100 participants, demonstrating that very few people are aware of built-in accessibility features on their phones. These observations led us to investigate accessibility recommendation as a way to increase awareness and adoption. We developed four prototype recommenders that span different accessibility categories, which we used to collect insights from 20 older adults. Our work demonstrates the need to increase awareness of existing accessibility features on mobile devices, and shows that automated recommendation could help people find beneficial accessibility features.

HCJan 13, 2021
Screen Recognition: Creating Accessibility Metadata for Mobile Applications from Pixels

Xiaoyi Zhang, Lilian de Greef, Amanda Swearngin et al.

Many accessibility features available on mobile platforms require applications (apps) to provide complete and accurate metadata describing user interface (UI) components. Unfortunately, many apps do not provide sufficient metadata for accessibility features to work as expected. In this paper, we explore inferring accessibility metadata for mobile apps from their pixels, as the visual interfaces often best reflect an app's full functionality. We trained a robust, fast, memory-efficient, on-device model to detect UI elements using a dataset of 77,637 screens (from 4,068 iPhone apps) that we collected and annotated. To further improve UI detections and add semantic information, we introduced heuristics (e.g., UI grouping and ordering) and additional models (e.g., recognize UI content, state, interactivity). We built Screen Recognition to generate accessibility metadata to augment iOS VoiceOver. In a study with 9 screen reader users, we validated that our approach improves the accessibility of existing mobile apps, enabling even previously inaccessible apps to be used.

CLJan 13, 2021
Robustness Gym: Unifying the NLP Evaluation Landscape

Karan Goel, Nazneen Rajani, Jesse Vig et al.

Despite impressive performance on standard benchmarks, deep neural networks are often brittle when deployed in real-world systems. Consequently, recent research has focused on testing the robustness of such models, resulting in a diverse set of evaluation methodologies ranging from adversarial attacks to rule-based data transformations. In this work, we identify challenges with evaluating NLP systems and propose a solution in the form of Robustness Gym (RG), a simple and extensible evaluation toolkit that unifies 4 standard evaluation paradigms: subpopulations, transformations, evaluation sets, and adversarial attacks. By providing a common platform for evaluation, Robustness Gym enables practitioners to compare results from all 4 evaluation paradigms with just a few clicks, and to easily develop and share novel evaluation methods using a built-in set of abstractions. To validate Robustness Gym's utility to practitioners, we conducted a real-world case study with a sentiment-modeling team, revealing performance degradations of 18%+. To verify that Robustness Gym can aid novel research analyses, we perform the first study of state-of-the-art commercial and academic named entity linking (NEL) systems, as well as a fine-grained analysis of state-of-the-art summarization models. For NEL, commercial systems struggle to link rare entities and lag their academic counterparts by 10%+, while state-of-the-art summarization models struggle on examples that require abstraction and distillation, degrading by 9%+. Robustness Gym can be found at https://robustnessgym.com/

HCOct 12, 2020
Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible

Jaylin Herskovitz, Jason Wu, Samuel White et al.

Augmented Reality (AR) technology creates new immersive experiences in entertainment, games, education, retail, and social media. AR content is often primarily visual and it is challenging to enable access to it non-visually due to the mix of virtual and real-world content. In this paper, we identify common constituent tasks in AR by analyzing existing mobile AR applications for iOS, and characterize the design space of tasks that require accessible alternatives. For each of the major task categories, we create prototype accessible alternatives that we evaluate in a study with 10 blind participants to explore their perceptions of accessible AR. Our study demonstrates that these prototypes make AR possible to use for blind users and reveals a number of insights to move forward. We believe our work sets forth not only exemplars for developers to create accessible AR applications, but also a roadmap for future research to make AR comprehensively accessible.

DCJul 7, 2020
KubeEdge.AI: AI Platform for Edge Devices

Sean Wang, Yuxiao Hu, Jason Wu

The demand for smartness in embedded systems has been mounting up drastically in the past few years. Embedded system today must address the fundamental challenges introduced by cloud computing and artificial intelligence. KubeEdge [1] is an edge computing framework build on top of Kubernetes [2]. It provides compute resource management, deployment, runtime and operation capabilities on geo-located edge computing resources, from the cloud, which is a natural fit for embedded systems. Here we propose KubeEdge.AI, an edge AI framework on top of KubeEdge. It provides a set of key modules and interfaces: a data handling and processing engine, a concise AI runtime, a decision engine, and a distributed data query interface. KubeEdge.AI will help reduce the burdens for developing specific edge/embedded AI systems and promote edge-cloud coordination and synergy.