Franziska Herbert

Franziska Herbert, Vignesh Prasad, Han Liu et al.

Learning structured task representations from human demonstrations is essential for understanding long-horizon manipulation behaviors, particularly in bimanual settings where action ordering, object involvement, and interaction geometry can vary significantly. A key challenge lies in jointly capturing the discrete semantic structure of tasks and the temporal evolution of object-centric geometric relations in a form that supports reasoning over task progression. In this work, we introduce a semantic-geometric task graph-representation that encodes object identities, inter-object relations, and their temporal geometric evolution from human demonstrations. Building on this formulation, we propose a learning framework that combines a Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN) encoder with a Transformer-based decoder, decoupling scene representation learning from action-conditioned reasoning about task progression. The encoder operates solely on temporal scene graphs to learn structured representations, while the decoder conditions on action-context to predict future action sequences, associated objects, and object motions over extended time horizons. Through extensive evaluation on human demonstration datasets, we show that semantic-geometric task graph-representations are particularly beneficial for tasks with high action and object variability, where simpler sequence-based models struggle to capture task progression. Finally, we demonstrate that task graph representations can be transferred to a physical bimanual robot and used for online action selection, highlighting their potential as reusable task abstractions for downstream decision-making in manipulation systems.

Joel Frank, Franziska Herbert, Jonas Ricker et al.

AI-generated media has become a threat to our digital society as we know it. These forgeries can be created automatically and on a large scale based on publicly available technology. Recognizing this challenge, academics and practitioners have proposed a multitude of automatic detection strategies to detect such artificial media. However, in contrast to these technical advances, the human perception of generated media has not been thoroughly studied yet. In this paper, we aim at closing this research gap. We perform the first comprehensive survey into people's ability to detect generated media, spanning three countries (USA, Germany, and China) with 3,002 participants across audio, image, and text media. Our results indicate that state-of-the-art forgeries are almost indistinguishable from "real" media, with the majority of participants simply guessing when asked to rate them as human- or machine-generated. In addition, AI-generated media receive is voted more human like across all media types and all countries. To further understand which factors influence people's ability to detect generated media, we include personal variables, chosen based on a literature review in the domains of deepfake and fake news research. In a regression analysis, we found that generalized trust, cognitive reflection, and self-reported familiarity with deepfakes significantly influence participant's decision across all media categories.

Marvin Kowalewski, Franziska Herbert, Theodor Schnitzler et al.

Digital tools play an important role in fighting the current global COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted a representative online study in Germany on a sample of 599 participants to evaluate the user perception of vaccination certificates. We investigated five different variants of vaccination certificates, based on deployed and planned designs in a between-group design, including paper-based and app-based variants. Our main results show that the willingness to use and adopt vaccination certificates is generally high. Overall, paper-based vaccination certificates were favored over app-based solutions. The willingness to use digital apps decreased significantly by a higher disposition to privacy, and increased by higher worries about the pandemic and acceptance of the coronavirus vaccination. Vaccination certificates resemble an interesting use case for studying privacy perceptions for health related data. We hope that our work will be able to educate the currently ongoing design of vaccination certificates, will give us deeper insights into privacy of health-related data and apps, and prepare us for future potential applications of vaccination certificates and health apps in general.

Christine Utz, Steffen Becker, Theodor Schnitzler et al.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the development of smartphone applications to assist disease management. Many "corona apps" require widespread adoption to be effective, which has sparked public debates about the privacy, security, and societal implications of government-backed health applications. We conducted a representative online study in Germany (n = 1,003), the US (n = 1,003), and China (n = 1,019) to investigate user acceptance of corona apps, using a vignette design based on the contextual integrity framework. We explored apps for contact tracing, symptom checks, quarantine enforcement, health certificates, and mere information. Our results provide insights into data processing practices that foster adoption and reveal significant differences between countries, with user acceptance being highest in China and lowest in the US. Chinese participants prefer the collection of personalized data, while German and US participants favor anonymity. Across countries, contact tracing is viewed more positively than quarantine enforcement, and technical malfunctions negatively impact user acceptance.