Kaiwei Liu

Lilin Xu, Bufang Yang, Siyang Jiang et al.

Procedural tasks with multiple ordered steps are ubiquitous in daily life. Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled personal assistants that support daily activities. However, existing systems primarily provide reactive guidance triggered by user queries, or limited proactive assistance for isolated short-term events rather than long-horizon procedural tasks. In this work, we introduce Pro$^2$Assist, a step-aware proactive assistant that continuously tracks fine-grained task progress and reasons over the user's evolving state to provide timely assistance throughout tasks. Pro$^2$Assist leverages multimodal data from augmented reality (AR) glasses to achieve motion-based perception. It then extracts step-oriented procedural context from multi-scale temporal dynamics and task-specific expert knowledge. Based on both sensory input and procedural context, Pro$^2$Assist performs continuous reasoning to infer user needs and display timely assistance on AR glasses. We evaluate Pro$^2$Assist using a dataset curated from public sources and a real-world dataset collected on our testbed with AR glasses. Extensive evaluations show that Pro$^2$Assist outperforms the best-performing baselines by over 21% in procedural action understanding accuracy, and it achieves up to 2.29x the proactive timing accuracy of baselines. A user study with 20 participants further shows that 90% find Pro$^2$Assist useful, indicating its effectiveness for real-world procedural assistance.

Bufang Yang, Lilin Xu, Liekang Zeng et al.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled intelligent agents from reactive responses to proactive support. While promising, existing proactive agents either rely exclusively on observations from enclosed environments (e.g., desktop UIs) with direct LLM inference or employ rule-based proactive notifications, leading to suboptimal user intent understanding and limited functionality for proactive service. In this paper, we introduce ContextAgent, the first context-aware proactive agent that incorporates extensive sensory contexts surrounding humans to enhance the proactivity of LLM agents. ContextAgent first extracts multi-dimensional contexts from massive sensory perceptions on wearables (e.g., video and audio) to understand user intentions. ContextAgent then leverages the sensory contexts and personas from historical data to predict the necessity for proactive services. When proactive assistance is needed, ContextAgent further automatically calls the necessary tools to assist users unobtrusively. To evaluate this new task, we curate ContextAgentBench, the first benchmark for evaluating context-aware proactive LLM agents, covering 1,000 samples across nine daily scenarios and twenty tools. Experiments on ContextAgentBench show that ContextAgent outperforms baselines by achieving up to 8.5% and 6.0% higher accuracy in proactive predictions and tool calling, respectively. We hope our research can inspire the development of more advanced, human-centric, proactive AI assistants. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/openaiotlab/ContextAgent.

Bufang Yang, Siyang Jiang, Lilin Xu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to transform digital healthcare, as evidenced by recent advances in LLM-based virtual doctors. However, current approaches rely on patient's subjective descriptions of symptoms, causing increased misdiagnosis. Recognizing the value of daily data from smart devices, we introduce a novel LLM-based multi-turn consultation virtual doctor system, DrHouse, which incorporates three significant contributions: 1) It utilizes sensor data from smart devices in the diagnosis process, enhancing accuracy and reliability. 2) DrHouse leverages continuously updating medical databases such as Up-to-Date and PubMed to ensure our model remains at diagnostic standard's forefront. 3) DrHouse introduces a novel diagnostic algorithm that concurrently evaluates potential diseases and their likelihood, facilitating more nuanced and informed medical assessments. Through multi-turn interactions, DrHouse determines the next steps, such as accessing daily data from smart devices or requesting in-lab tests, and progressively refines its diagnoses. Evaluations on three public datasets and our self-collected datasets show that DrHouse can achieve up to an 18.8% increase in diagnosis accuracy over the state-of-the-art baselines. The results of a 32-participant user study show that 75% medical experts and 91.7% patients are willing to use DrHouse.

Bufang Yang, Lixing He, Kaiwei Liu et al.

Individuals with visual impairments, encompassing both partial and total difficulties in visual perception, are referred to as visually impaired (VI) people. An estimated 2.2 billion individuals worldwide are affected by visual impairments. Recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have showcased their extraordinary capabilities across various domains. It is desirable to help VI individuals with MLLMs' great capabilities of visual understanding and reasoning. However, it is challenging for VI people to use MLLMs due to the difficulties in capturing the desirable images to fulfill their daily requests. For example, the target object is not fully or partially placed in the image. This paper explores how to leverage MLLMs for VI individuals to provide visual-question answers. VIAssist can identify undesired images and provide detailed actions. Finally, VIAssist can provide reliable answers to users' queries based on the images. Our results show that VIAssist provides +0.21 and +0.31 higher BERTScore and ROUGE scores than the baseline, respectively.