assistive technology designers

Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has improved speech representations, yet performance degrades in pathological domains such as electrolaryngeal (EL) speech, and the computational footprint of SSL models limits their applicability in real-time, on-device deployment. We propose a multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework to train a lightweight, streaming content encoder that generalizes across healthy (HE) and EL speech. Two teachers are distilled progressively: a frozen SSL model providing discrete phonetic cluster targets from HE speech, and an EL-fine-tuned speech recognition model supplying continuous bottleneck feature targets. Evaluated via downstream speech recognition, our approach reduces the EL word error rate to 21.2%, compared to 39.3% for the strongest zero-shot SSL baseline. Among causal convolutional, Transformer, Conformer, and Mamba-based student architectures, a Mel-Conformer achieves the best combination of EL accuracy and computational efficiency. The final encoder contains 21.9,M parameters and runs at a real-time factor of 0.30 under ONNX Runtime on a single CPU core.

Abstract: A walking robotic hand must use the same fingers to move its body, support its weight, and interact with the environment. We show how an anthropomorphic hand can learn these skills while retaining its finger design and position controller. Onboard power and computation make the platform self-contained. Our reinforcement learning approach accounts for the hand's unequal fingers, with training in a simulator calibrated from hardware measurements. In simulation, the hand moves faster with our reward formulation than with tuned rewards originally designed for quadrupeds. On hardware, task-specific policies enable untethered crawling, steering, and fall recovery. While supporting its own weight, the hand also executes successive keyboard commands without vision and pushes an object to targets using overhead visual feedback. These results demonstrate a compact mobile manipulator that reuses its fingers for locomotion and interaction, without a separate locomotion mechanism.

Abstract: Virtual worlds now host classrooms, meetings, conferences, shops, and social venues, and nearly every interaction they expose assumes a user who can scan a three-dimensional scene, follow avatars, and read floating panels. Blind and visually impaired (BVI) users are left with assistive tools that each solve one task in isolation: naming an object, reading text, describing a scene, or planning a route. A live virtual room defeats that model: obstacles, speakers, gestures, chat, slides, and notifications arrive together, and a tool that narrates all of them trades a visual barrier for an auditory one. This paper presents MetaBlind, an architecture that distributes nonvisual access across eight specialized agents, spanning perception, navigation, social and object interaction, communication, safety and trust, memory, and personalization, and that places an Accessibility Orchestrator between those agents and the user. Agents publish candidate information into a shared accessibility context instead of speaking to the user directly. The orchestrator scores each candidate on safety relevance, goal relevance, urgency, confidence, user relevance, and estimated listening load, then releases only the items it judges relevant at that moment through speech, structured audio, or haptic output. We give the selection step a formal statement, specify the orchestration cycle as an algorithm, and define an evaluation protocol against a single-agent assistant. MetaBlind is reported at the design stage, with no prototype measurement or user study, and the protocol states which outcomes would support the design and which would refute it.

Abstract: We propose to finetune vision-language models to generate more pragmatically optimal referring expressions by transforming observations of incremental listener comprehension, in the form of gaze scanpaths, into learning signals. During training, referring expressions are sampled from the speaker policy being optimized, conditioned on images and target referents; then, a neural listener estimating human gaze behavior maps from images and sampled referring expressions to scanpaths, each represented by a sequence of fixations, with each fixation corresponding to a word in the referring expression. We experiment with several approaches to convert fixation sequences and target referents into token- and sequence-level rewards, which are used to optimize policy parameters. Through evaluation with human listeners, we find that speaker policies trained with gaze-estimating listeners result in significantly more pragmatically-optimal references than base models, reducing sequence length from 15.4 down to 4.0 words while increasing referential success from 75.2 up to 80.0%. Our work demonstrates a promising opportunity for learning to generate utterances through language-based interaction, not only from the explicit signal of communicative success, but also from implicitly-available observations of a listener's process of comprehension.