Papers for

human-computer interaction designers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Transformer model generates diverse 3D hand and body shapes

MHE-Former: Multi-Hypothesis Transformers via Entropy Maximization for 3D Mesh Recovery

Abstract: Monocular 3D hand and body mesh recovery often suffers from severe occlusion and ambiguity. Traditional deterministic methods typically regress a single optimal solution, leading to overconfident predictions. In this paper, we introduce an exploration--exploitation paradigm for ambiguous mesh recovery with multi-hypothesis learning and selection. Specifically, during exploration, based on our probabilistic formulation and entropy maximization, we propose a novel multi-hypothesis method referred to as MHE-Former. It is a Transformer-based multi-hypothesis framework, ensuring high training efficiency and label friendliness while generating plausible and diverse hypotheses. During exploitation, we propose Hypothesis Selection, a context-aware process for multiple predictions. Especially leveraging VLM's powerful visual understanding and reasoning capabilities, it allows users to choose the most plausible and desired estimate with additional evidence and natural language intent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in accuracy and diversity across multiple datasets. The user preference study further shows the practicality of our hypothesis selection process.

Wed 9 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
3D hand and body shapes are hard to guess from a single photo because of hidden parts and unclear views. The authors present a new model that creates many possible shapes instead of one, helping to cover uncertainty. They also added a way to pick the best shape based on extra information or user questions, improving accuracy and usefulness. Their model works well on several tests and lets users choose the best guess more easily.
Open 2609.10743v1

Vision language models directly control robots via semantic interface

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

Abstract: Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit broad intelligence about the world, yet translating this intelligence into robot control remains challenging. We present Show-Harness, an Embodied Harness that enables VLMs to "play" robots through a compact semantic interface linking intent to action. Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs can naturally reason over, while embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically ground them into local robot actions, keeping the VLM directly responsible for fine-grained physical decisions. Through the same interface, Show-Harness demonstrates the feasibility of (1) directly unlocking closed-source frontier VLMs for zero-shot robot control, and (2) adapting small-scale open-source VLMs for low-cost deployment with just a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. We further develop GUMI (GUI Manipulation Interface), which extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection, allowing humans and agents to "play" robots across embodiments without specialized teleoperation hardware. Extensive experiments show that Show-Harness-equipped VLM agents generalize robustly across tasks, embodiments, and environments, outperforming representative agentic and VLA paradigms. These results suggest that the right interface can unlock substantial embodied capability from foundation VLMs, without requiring additional model capacity or costly embodiment-specific pretraining.

Wed 9 SeptRoboticsArtificial IntelligenceComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Controlling robots using large vision-language AI models is hard because the AI's understanding needs to be turned into robot actions. The researchers created Show-Harness, a simple system that connects what the AI understands with actions the robot can perform. It uses clear, understandable steps so the AI can decide detailed movements, and a special part translates these steps into actual robot commands. They also made a way for humans and AI to teach robots by manipulating computer interfaces without needing special hardware. Their tests show this helps robots perform well in many tasks and settings without extra complicated training.
Open 2609.10522v1