Yoichi Sato

Zecheng Yu, Yifei Huang, Ryosuke Furuta et al.

Object affordance is an important concept in hand-object interaction, providing information on action possibilities based on human motor capacity and objects' physical property thus benefiting tasks such as action anticipation and robot imitation learning. However, the definition of affordance in existing datasets often: 1) mix up affordance with object functionality; 2) confuse affordance with goal-related action; and 3) ignore human motor capacity. This paper proposes an efficient annotation scheme to address these issues by combining goal-irrelevant motor actions and grasp types as affordance labels and introducing the concept of mechanical action to represent the action possibilities between two objects. We provide new annotations by applying this scheme to the EPIC-KITCHENS dataset and test our annotation with tasks such as affordance recognition, hand-object interaction hotspots prediction, and cross-domain evaluation of affordance. The results show that models trained with our annotation can distinguish affordance from other concepts, predict fine-grained interaction possibilities on objects, and generalize through different domains.

Nie Lin, Yansen Wang, Dongqi Han et al. · cmu, tsinghua

The integration of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), in particular electroencephalography (EEG), with artificial intelligence (AI) has shown tremendous promise in decoding human cognition and behavior from neural signals. In particular, the rise of multimodal AI models have brought new possibilities that have never been imagined before. Here, we present EgoBrain --the world's first large-scale, temporally aligned multimodal dataset that synchronizes egocentric vision and EEG of human brain over extended periods of time, establishing a new paradigm for human-centered behavior analysis. This dataset comprises 61 hours of synchronized 32-channel EEG recordings and first-person video from 40 participants engaged in 29 categories of daily activities. We then developed a muiltimodal learning framework to fuse EEG and vision for action understanding, validated across both cross-subject and cross-environment challenges, achieving an action recognition accuracy of 66.70%. EgoBrain paves the way for a unified framework for brain-computer interface with multiple modalities. All data, tools, and acquisition protocols are openly shared to foster open science in cognitive computing.

Mingfang Zhang, Ryo Yonetani, Yifei Huang et al.

This paper presents a novel inertial localization framework named Egocentric Action-aware Inertial Localization (EAIL), which leverages egocentric action cues from head-mounted IMU signals to localize the target individual within a 3D point cloud. Human inertial localization is challenging due to IMU sensor noise that causes trajectory drift over time. The diversity of human actions further complicates IMU signal processing by introducing various motion patterns. Nevertheless, we observe that some actions captured by the head-mounted IMU correlate with spatial environmental structures (e.g., bending down to look inside an oven, washing dishes next to a sink), thereby serving as spatial anchors to compensate for the localization drift. The proposed EAIL framework learns such correlations via hierarchical multi-modal alignment with vision-language guidance. By assuming that the 3D point cloud of the environment is available, it contrastively learns modality encoders that align short-term egocentric action cues in IMU signals with local environmental features in the point cloud. The learning process is enhanced using concurrently collected vision and language signals to improve multimodal alignment. The learned encoders are then used in reasoning the IMU data and the point cloud over time and space to perform inertial localization. Interestingly, these encoders can further be utilized to recognize the corresponding sequence of actions as a by-product. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art inertial localization and inertial action recognition baselines.