new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Sep 9

Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications

Segment anything model (SAM) is a prompt-guided vision foundation model for cutting out the object of interest from its background. Since Meta research team released the SA project, SAM has attracted significant attention due to its impressive zero-shot transfer performance and high versatility of being compatible with other models for advanced vision applications like image editing with fine-grained control. Many of such use cases need to be run on resource-constraint edge devices, like mobile Apps. In this work, we aim to make SAM mobile-friendly by replacing the heavyweight image encoder with a lightweight one. A naive way to train such a new SAM as in the original SAM paper leads to unsatisfactory performance, especially when limited training sources are available. We find that this is mainly caused by the coupled optimization of the image encoder and mask decoder, motivated by which we propose decoupled distillation. Concretely, we distill the knowledge from the image encoder ViT-H in the original SAM to a lightweight image encoder, which can be automatically compatible with the mask decoder in the original SAM. The training can be completed on a single GPU within less than one day, and the resulting lightweight SAM is termed MobileSAM which is more than 60 times smaller yet performs on par with the original SAM. For inference speed, MobileSAM runs around 10ms per image: 8ms on the image encoder and 2ms on the mask decoder. With superior performance and a higher versatility, our MobileSAM is 7 times smaller and 4 times faster than the concurrent FastSAM, making it more suitable for mobile applications. The code for MobileSAM project is provided at https://github.com/ChaoningZhang/MobileSAM

CAS-ViT: Convolutional Additive Self-attention Vision Transformers for Efficient Mobile Applications

Vision Transformers (ViTs) mark a revolutionary advance in neural networks with their token mixer's powerful global context capability. However, the pairwise token affinity and complex matrix operations limit its deployment on resource-constrained scenarios and real-time applications, such as mobile devices, although considerable efforts have been made in previous works. In this paper, we introduce CAS-ViT: Convolutional Additive Self-attention Vision Transformers, to achieve a balance between efficiency and performance in mobile applications. Firstly, we argue that the capability of token mixers to obtain global contextual information hinges on multiple information interactions, such as spatial and channel domains. Subsequently, we construct a novel additive similarity function following this paradigm and present an efficient implementation named Convolutional Additive Token Mixer (CATM). This simplification leads to a significant reduction in computational overhead. We evaluate CAS-ViT across a variety of vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our experiments, conducted on GPUs, ONNX, and iPhones, demonstrate that CAS-ViT achieves a competitive performance when compared to other state-of-the-art backbones, establishing it as a viable option for efficient mobile vision applications. Our code and model are available at: https://github.com/Tianfang-Zhang/CAS-ViT

AuthentiSense: A Scalable Behavioral Biometrics Authentication Scheme using Few-Shot Learning for Mobile Platforms

Mobile applications are widely used for online services sharing a large amount of personal data online. One-time authentication techniques such as passwords and physiological biometrics (e.g., fingerprint, face, and iris) have their own advantages but also disadvantages since they can be stolen or emulated, and do not prevent access to the underlying device, once it is unlocked. To address these challenges, complementary authentication systems based on behavioural biometrics have emerged. The goal is to continuously profile users based on their interaction with the mobile device. However, existing behavioural authentication schemes are not (i) user-agnostic meaning that they cannot dynamically handle changes in the user-base without model re-training, or (ii) do not scale well to authenticate millions of users. In this paper, we present AuthentiSense, a user-agnostic, scalable, and efficient behavioural biometrics authentication system that enables continuous authentication and utilizes only motion patterns (i.e., accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer data) while users interact with mobile apps. Our approach requires neither manually engineered features nor a significant amount of data for model training. We leverage a few-shot learning technique, called Siamese network, to authenticate users at a large scale. We perform a systematic measurement study and report the impact of the parameters such as interaction time needed for authentication and n-shot verification (comparison with enrollment samples) at the recognition stage. Remarkably, AuthentiSense achieves high accuracy of up to 97% in terms of F1-score even when evaluated in a few-shot fashion that requires only a few behaviour samples per user (3 shots). Our approach accurately authenticates users only after 1 second of user interaction. For AuthentiSense, we report a FAR and FRR of 0.023 and 0.057, respectively.

MapAgent: Trajectory-Constructed Memory-Augmented Planning for Mobile Task Automation

The recent advancement of autonomous agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant potential for automating tasks on mobile devices through graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Despite initial progress, these agents still face challenges when handling complex real-world tasks. These challenges arise from a lack of knowledge about real-life mobile applications in LLM-based agents, which may lead to ineffective task planning and even cause hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel LLM-based agent framework called MapAgent that leverages memory constructed from historical trajectories to augment current task planning. Specifically, we first propose a trajectory-based memory mechanism that transforms task execution trajectories into a reusable and structured page-memory database. Each page within a trajectory is extracted as a compact yet comprehensive snapshot, capturing both its UI layout and functional context. Secondly, we introduce a coarse-to-fine task planning approach that retrieves relevant pages from the memory database based on similarity and injects them into the LLM planner to compensate for potential deficiencies in understanding real-world app scenarios, thereby achieving more informed and context-aware task planning. Finally, planned tasks are transformed into executable actions through a task executor supported by a dual-LLM architecture, ensuring effective tracking of task progress. Experimental results in real-world scenarios demonstrate that MapAgent achieves superior performance to existing methods. The code will be open-sourced to support further research.

MobileSafetyBench: Evaluating Safety of Autonomous Agents in Mobile Device Control

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show promising potential in assistive tasks across various domains, including mobile device control. As these agents interact directly with personal information and device settings, ensuring their safe and reliable behavior is crucial to prevent undesirable outcomes. However, no benchmark exists for standardized evaluation of the safety of mobile device-control agents. In this work, we introduce MobileSafetyBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of device-control agents within a realistic mobile environment based on Android emulators. We develop a diverse set of tasks involving interactions with various mobile applications, including messaging and banking applications. To clearly evaluate safety apart from general capabilities, we design separate tasks measuring safety and tasks evaluating helpfulness. The safety tasks challenge agents with managing potential risks prevalent in daily life and include tests to evaluate robustness against indirect prompt injections. Our experiments demonstrate that while baseline agents, based on state-of-the-art LLMs, perform well in executing helpful tasks, they show poor performance in safety tasks. To mitigate these safety concerns, we propose a prompting method that encourages agents to prioritize safety considerations. While this method shows promise in promoting safer behaviors, there is still considerable room for improvement to fully earn user trust. This highlights the urgent need for continued research to develop more robust safety mechanisms in mobile environments. We open-source our benchmark at: https://mobilesafetybench.github.io/.

LearnAct: Few-Shot Mobile GUI Agent with a Unified Demonstration Benchmark

Mobile GUI agents show promise in automating tasks but face generalization challenges in diverse real-world scenarios. Traditional approaches using pre-training or fine-tuning with massive datasets struggle with the diversity of mobile applications and user-specific tasks. We propose enhancing mobile GUI agent capabilities through human demonstrations, focusing on improving performance in unseen scenarios rather than pursuing universal generalization through larger datasets. To realize this paradigm, we introduce LearnGUI, the first comprehensive dataset specifically designed for studying demonstration-based learning in mobile GUI agents, comprising 2,252 offline tasks and 101 online tasks with high-quality human demonstrations. We further develop LearnAct, a sophisticated multi-agent framework that automatically extracts knowledge from demonstrations to enhance task completion. This framework integrates three specialized agents: DemoParser for knowledge extraction, KnowSeeker for relevant knowledge retrieval, and ActExecutor for demonstration-enhanced task execution. Our experimental results show significant performance gains in both offline and online evaluations. In offline assessments, a single demonstration improves model performance, increasing Gemini-1.5-Pro's accuracy from 19.3% to 51.7%. In online evaluations, our framework enhances UI-TARS-7B-SFT's task success rate from 18.1% to 32.8%. LearnAct framework and LearnGUI benchmark establish demonstration-based learning as a promising direction for more adaptable, personalized, and deployable mobile GUI agents.

LlamaTouch: A Faithful and Scalable Testbed for Mobile UI Task Automation

The emergent large language/multimodal models facilitate the evolution of mobile agents, especially in mobile UI task automation. However, existing evaluation approaches, which rely on human validation or established datasets to compare agent-predicted actions with predefined action sequences, are unscalable and unfaithful. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents LlamaTouch, a testbed for on-device mobile UI task execution and faithful, scalable task evaluation. By observing that the task execution process only transfers UI states, LlamaTouch employs a novel evaluation approach that only assesses whether an agent traverses all manually annotated, essential application/system states. LlamaTouch comprises three key techniques: (1) On-device task execution that enables mobile agents to interact with realistic mobile environments for task execution. (2) Fine-grained UI component annotation that merges pixel-level screenshots and textual screen hierarchies to explicitly identify and precisely annotate essential UI components with a rich set of designed annotation primitives. (3) A multi-level application state matching algorithm that utilizes exact and fuzzy matching to accurately detect critical information in each screen, even with unpredictable UI layout/content dynamics. LlamaTouch currently incorporates four mobile agents and 496 tasks, encompassing both tasks in the widely-used datasets and our self-constructed ones to cover more diverse mobile applications. Evaluation results demonstrate LlamaTouch's high faithfulness of evaluation in real-world mobile environments and its better scalability than human validation. LlamaTouch also enables easy task annotation and integration of new mobile agents. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/LlamaTouch/LlamaTouch.

Empowering 1000 tokens/second on-device LLM prefilling with mllm-NPU

On-device large language models (LLMs) are catalyzing novel mobile applications such as UI task automation and personalized email auto-reply, without giving away users' private data. However, on-device LLMs still suffer from unacceptably long inference latency, especially the time to first token (prefill stage) due to the need of long context for accurate, personalized content generation, as well as the lack of parallel computing capacity of mobile CPU/GPU. To enable practical on-device LLM, we present mllm-NPU, the first-of-its-kind LLM inference system that efficiently leverages on-device Neural Processing Unit (NPU) offloading. Essentially, mllm-NPU is an algorithm-system co-design that tackles a few semantic gaps between the LLM architecture and contemporary NPU design. Specifically, it re-constructs the prompt and model in three levels: (1) At prompt level, it divides variable-length prompts into multiple fixed-sized chunks while maintaining data dependencies; (2) At tensor level, it identifies and extracts significant outliers to run on the CPU/GPU in parallel with minimal overhead; (3) At block level, it schedules Transformer blocks in an out-of-order manner to the CPU/GPU and NPU based on their hardware affinity and sensitivity to accuracy. Compared to competitive baselines, mllm-NPU achieves 22.4x faster prefill speed and 30.7x energy savings on average, and up to 32.8x speedup in an end-to-end real-world application. For the first time, mllm-NPU achieves more than 1,000 tokens/sec prefilling for a billion-sized model (Qwen1.5-1.8B), paving the way towards practical on-device LLM.

GUI Testing Arena: A Unified Benchmark for Advancing Autonomous GUI Testing Agent

Nowadays, research on GUI agents is a hot topic in the AI community. However, current research focuses on GUI task automation, limiting the scope of applications in various GUI scenarios. In this paper, we propose a formalized and comprehensive environment to evaluate the entire process of automated GUI Testing (GTArena), offering a fair, standardized environment for consistent operation of diverse multimodal large language models. We divide the testing process into three key subtasks: test intention generation, test task execution, and GUI defect detection, and construct a benchmark dataset based on these to conduct a comprehensive evaluation. It evaluates the performance of different models using three data types: real mobile applications, mobile applications with artificially injected defects, and synthetic data, thoroughly assessing their capabilities in this relevant task. Additionally, we propose a method that helps researchers explore the correlation between the performance of multimodal language large models in specific scenarios and their general capabilities in standard benchmark tests. Experimental results indicate that even the most advanced models struggle to perform well across all sub-tasks of automated GUI Testing, highlighting a significant gap between the current capabilities of Autonomous GUI Testing and its practical, real-world applicability. This gap provides guidance for the future direction of GUI Agent development. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-ACES-ISE/ChatUITest.

Creating A Neural Pedagogical Agent by Jointly Learning to Review and Assess

Machine learning plays an increasing role in intelligent tutoring systems as both the amount of data available and specialization among students grow. Nowadays, these systems are frequently deployed on mobile applications. Users on such mobile education platforms are dynamic, frequently being added, accessing the application with varying levels of focus, and changing while using the service. The education material itself, on the other hand, is often static and is an exhaustible resource whose use in tasks such as problem recommendation must be optimized. The ability to update user models with respect to educational material in real-time is thus essential; however, existing approaches require time-consuming re-training of user features whenever new data is added. In this paper, we introduce a neural pedagogical agent for real-time user modeling in the task of predicting user response correctness, a central task for mobile education applications. Our model, inspired by work in natural language processing on sequence modeling and machine translation, updates user features in real-time via bidirectional recurrent neural networks with an attention mechanism over embedded question-response pairs. We experiment on the mobile education application SantaTOEIC, which has 559k users, 66M response data points as well as a set of 10k study problems each expert-annotated with topic tags and gathered since 2016. Our model outperforms existing approaches over several metrics in predicting user response correctness, notably out-performing other methods on new users without large question-response histories. Additionally, our attention mechanism and annotated tag set allow us to create an interpretable education platform, with a smart review system that addresses the aforementioned issue of varied user attention and problem exhaustion.

HaSPeR: An Image Repository for Hand Shadow Puppet Recognition

Hand shadow puppetry, also known as shadowgraphy or ombromanie, is a form of theatrical art and storytelling where hand shadows are projected onto flat surfaces to create illusions of living creatures. The skilled performers create these silhouettes by hand positioning, finger movements, and dexterous gestures to resemble shadows of animals and objects. Due to the lack of practitioners and a seismic shift in people's entertainment standards, this art form is on the verge of extinction. To facilitate its preservation and proliferate it to a wider audience, we introduce {rm H{small A}SP{small E}R}, a novel dataset consisting of 15,000 images of hand shadow puppets across 15 classes extracted from both professional and amateur hand shadow puppeteer clips. We provide a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset and employ a range of pretrained image classification models to establish baselines. Our findings show a substantial performance superiority of skip-connected convolutional models over attention-based transformer architectures. We also find that lightweight models, such as MobileNetV2, suited for mobile applications and embedded devices, perform comparatively well. We surmise that such low-latency architectures can be useful in developing ombromanie teaching tools, and we create a prototype application to explore this surmission. Keeping the best-performing model ResNet34 under the limelight, we conduct comprehensive feature-spatial, explainability, and error analyses to gain insights into its decision-making process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first documented dataset and research endeavor to preserve this dying art for future generations, with computer vision approaches. Our code and data will be publicly available.

ActionBert: Leveraging User Actions for Semantic Understanding of User Interfaces

As mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, regularly interacting with a variety of user interfaces (UIs) is a common aspect of daily life for many people. To improve the accessibility of these devices and to enable their usage in a variety of settings, building models that can assist users and accomplish tasks through the UI is vitally important. However, there are several challenges to achieve this. First, UI components of similar appearance can have different functionalities, making understanding their function more important than just analyzing their appearance. Second, domain-specific features like Document Object Model (DOM) in web pages and View Hierarchy (VH) in mobile applications provide important signals about the semantics of UI elements, but these features are not in a natural language format. Third, owing to a large diversity in UIs and absence of standard DOM or VH representations, building a UI understanding model with high coverage requires large amounts of training data. Inspired by the success of pre-training based approaches in NLP for tackling a variety of problems in a data-efficient way, we introduce a new pre-trained UI representation model called ActionBert. Our methodology is designed to leverage visual, linguistic and domain-specific features in user interaction traces to pre-train generic feature representations of UIs and their components. Our key intuition is that user actions, e.g., a sequence of clicks on different UI components, reveals important information about their functionality. We evaluate the proposed model on a wide variety of downstream tasks, ranging from icon classification to UI component retrieval based on its natural language description. Experiments show that the proposed ActionBert model outperforms multi-modal baselines across all downstream tasks by up to 15.5%.

LLMCad: Fast and Scalable On-device Large Language Model Inference

Generative tasks, such as text generation and question answering, hold a crucial position in the realm of mobile applications. Due to their sensitivity to privacy concerns, there is a growing demand for their execution directly on mobile devices. Currently, the execution of these generative tasks heavily depends on Large Language Models (LLMs). Nevertheless, the limited memory capacity of these devices presents a formidable challenge to the scalability of such models. In our research, we introduce LLMCad, an innovative on-device inference engine specifically designed for efficient generative Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The core idea behind LLMCad revolves around model collaboration: a compact LLM, residing in memory, takes charge of generating the most straightforward tokens, while a high-precision LLM steps in to validate these tokens and rectify any identified errors. LLMCad incorporates three novel techniques: (1) Instead of generating candidate tokens in a sequential manner, LLMCad employs the smaller LLM to construct a token tree, encompassing a wider range of plausible token pathways. Subsequently, the larger LLM can efficiently validate all of these pathways simultaneously. (2) It employs a self-adjusting fallback strategy, swiftly initiating the verification process whenever the smaller LLM generates an erroneous token. (3) To ensure a continuous flow of token generation, LLMCad speculatively generates tokens during the verification process by implementing a compute-IO pipeline. Through an extensive series of experiments, LLMCad showcases an impressive token generation speed, achieving rates up to 9.3x faster than existing inference engines.

GhostNetV2: Enhance Cheap Operation with Long-Range Attention

Light-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are specially designed for applications on mobile devices with faster inference speed. The convolutional operation can only capture local information in a window region, which prevents performance from being further improved. Introducing self-attention into convolution can capture global information well, but it will largely encumber the actual speed. In this paper, we propose a hardware-friendly attention mechanism (dubbed DFC attention) and then present a new GhostNetV2 architecture for mobile applications. The proposed DFC attention is constructed based on fully-connected layers, which can not only execute fast on common hardware but also capture the dependence between long-range pixels. We further revisit the expressiveness bottleneck in previous GhostNet and propose to enhance expanded features produced by cheap operations with DFC attention, so that a GhostNetV2 block can aggregate local and long-range information simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of GhostNetV2 over existing architectures. For example, it achieves 75.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with 167M FLOPs, significantly suppressing GhostNetV1 (74.5%) with a similar computational cost. The source code will be available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-AI-Backbones/tree/master/ghostnetv2_pytorch and https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/ghostnetv2.

LightM-UNet: Mamba Assists in Lightweight UNet for Medical Image Segmentation

UNet and its variants have been widely used in medical image segmentation. However, these models, especially those based on Transformer architectures, pose challenges due to their large number of parameters and computational loads, making them unsuitable for mobile health applications. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), exemplified by Mamba, have emerged as competitive alternatives to CNN and Transformer architectures. Building upon this, we employ Mamba as a lightweight substitute for CNN and Transformer within UNet, aiming at tackling challenges stemming from computational resource limitations in real medical settings. To this end, we introduce the Lightweight Mamba UNet (LightM-UNet) that integrates Mamba and UNet in a lightweight framework. Specifically, LightM-UNet leverages the Residual Vision Mamba Layer in a pure Mamba fashion to extract deep semantic features and model long-range spatial dependencies, with linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world 2D/3D datasets demonstrate that LightM-UNet surpasses existing state-of-the-art literature. Notably, when compared to the renowned nnU-Net, LightM-UNet achieves superior segmentation performance while drastically reducing parameter and computation costs by 116x and 21x, respectively. This highlights the potential of Mamba in facilitating model lightweighting. Our code implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/MrBlankness/LightM-UNet.

A Little Bit Attention Is All You Need for Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification plays a key role in applications where a mobile robot needs to track its users over a long period of time, even if they are partially unobserved for some time, in order to follow them or be available on demand. In this context, deep-learning based real-time feature extraction on a mobile robot is often performed on special-purpose devices whose computational resources are shared for multiple tasks. Therefore, the inference speed has to be taken into account. In contrast, person re-identification is often improved by architectural changes that come at the cost of significantly slowing down inference. Attention blocks are one such example. We will show that some well-performing attention blocks used in the state of the art are subject to inference costs that are far too high to justify their use for mobile robotic applications. As a consequence, we propose an attention block that only slightly affects the inference speed while keeping up with much deeper networks or more complex attention blocks in terms of re-identification accuracy. We perform extensive neural architecture search to derive rules at which locations this attention block should be integrated into the architecture in order to achieve the best trade-off between speed and accuracy. Finally, we confirm that the best performing configuration on a re-identification benchmark also performs well on an indoor robotic dataset.

Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network for Mobile and Web Applications

Although deep models have greatly improved the accuracy and robustness of image segmentation, obtaining segmentation results with highly accurate boundaries and fine structures is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network (BASNet), which comprises a predict-refine architecture and a hybrid loss, for highly accurate image segmentation. The predict-refine architecture consists of a densely supervised encoder-decoder network and a residual refinement module, which are respectively used to predict and refine a segmentation probability map. The hybrid loss is a combination of the binary cross entropy, structural similarity and intersection-over-union losses, which guide the network to learn three-level (ie, pixel-, patch- and map- level) hierarchy representations. We evaluate our BASNet on two reverse tasks including salient object segmentation, camouflaged object segmentation, showing that it achieves very competitive performance with sharp segmentation boundaries. Importantly, BASNet runs at over 70 fps on a single GPU which benefits many potential real applications. Based on BASNet, we further developed two (close to) commercial applications: AR COPY & PASTE, in which BASNet is integrated with augmented reality for "COPYING" and "PASTING" real-world objects, and OBJECT CUT, which is a web-based tool for automatic object background removal. Both applications have already drawn huge amount of attention and have important real-world impacts. The code and two applications will be publicly available at: https://github.com/NathanUA/BASNet.

Are We There Yet? A Measurement Study of Efficiency for LLM Applications on Mobile Devices

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have prompted interest in deploying these models on mobile devices to enable new applications without relying on cloud connectivity. However, the efficiency constraints of deploying LLMs on resource-limited devices present significant challenges. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study to evaluate the efficiency tradeoffs between mobile-based, edge-based, and cloud-based deployments for LLM applications. We implement AutoLife-Lite, a simplified LLM-based application that analyzes smartphone sensor data to infer user location and activity contexts. Our experiments reveal that: (1) Only small-size LLMs (<4B parameters) can run successfully on powerful mobile devices, though they exhibit quality limitations compared to larger models; (2) Model compression is effective in lower the hardware requirement, but may lead to significant performance degradation; (3) The latency to run LLMs on mobile devices with meaningful output is significant (>30 seconds), while cloud services demonstrate better time efficiency (<10 seconds); (4) Edge deployments offer intermediate tradeoffs between latency and model capabilities, with different results on CPU-based and GPU-based settings. These findings provide valuable insights for system designers on the current limitations and future directions for on-device LLM applications.

VisualTrap: A Stealthy Backdoor Attack on GUI Agents via Visual Grounding Manipulation

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have emerged as a revolutionary approach to automating human-machine interactions, capable of autonomously operating personal devices (e.g., mobile phones) or applications within the device to perform complex real-world tasks in a human-like manner. However, their close integration with personal devices raises significant security concerns, with many threats, including backdoor attacks, remaining largely unexplored. This work reveals that the visual grounding of GUI agent-mapping textual plans to GUI elements-can introduce vulnerabilities, enabling new types of backdoor attacks. With backdoor attack targeting visual grounding, the agent's behavior can be compromised even when given correct task-solving plans. To validate this vulnerability, we propose VisualTrap, a method that can hijack the grounding by misleading the agent to locate textual plans to trigger locations instead of the intended targets. VisualTrap uses the common method of injecting poisoned data for attacks, and does so during the pre-training of visual grounding to ensure practical feasibility of attacking. Empirical results show that VisualTrap can effectively hijack visual grounding with as little as 5% poisoned data and highly stealthy visual triggers (invisible to the human eye); and the attack can be generalized to downstream tasks, even after clean fine-tuning. Moreover, the injected trigger can remain effective across different GUI environments, e.g., being trained on mobile/web and generalizing to desktop environments. These findings underscore the urgent need for further research on backdoor attack risks in GUI agents.

VideoCAD: A Large-Scale Video Dataset for Learning UI Interactions and 3D Reasoning from CAD Software

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a time-consuming and complex process, requiring precise, long-horizon user interactions with intricate 3D interfaces. While recent advances in AI-driven user interface (UI) agents show promise, most existing datasets and methods focus on short, low-complexity tasks in mobile or web applications, failing to capture the demands of professional engineering tools. In this work, we introduce VideoCAD, the first attempt at engineering UI interaction learning for precision tasks. Specifically, VideoCAD is a large-scale synthetic dataset consisting of over 41K annotated video recordings of CAD operations, generated using an automated framework for collecting high-fidelity UI action data from human-made CAD designs. Compared to existing datasets, VideoCAD offers an order of magnitude higher complexity in UI interaction learning for real-world engineering tasks, having up to a 20x longer time horizon than other datasets. We show two important downstream applications of VideoCAD: learning UI interactions from professional precision 3D CAD tools and a visual question-answering (VQA) benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models' (LLM) spatial reasoning and video understanding abilities. To learn the UI interactions, we propose VideoCADFormer - a state-of-the-art model in learning CAD interactions directly from video, which outperforms multiple behavior cloning baselines. Both VideoCADFormer and the VQA benchmark derived from VideoCAD reveal key challenges in the current state of video-based UI understanding, including the need for precise action grounding, multi-modal and spatial reasoning, and long-horizon dependencies.

Recent Advancements in Deep Learning Applications and Methods for Autonomous Navigation: A Comprehensive Review

This review article is an attempt to survey all recent AI based techniques used to deal with major functions in This review paper presents a comprehensive overview of end-to-end deep learning frameworks used in the context of autonomous navigation, including obstacle detection, scene perception, path planning, and control. The paper aims to bridge the gap between autonomous navigation and deep learning by analyzing recent research studies and evaluating the implementation and testing of deep learning methods. It emphasizes the importance of navigation for mobile robots, autonomous vehicles, and unmanned aerial vehicles, while also acknowledging the challenges due to environmental complexity, uncertainty, obstacles, dynamic environments, and the need to plan paths for multiple agents. The review highlights the rapid growth of deep learning in engineering data science and its development of innovative navigation methods. It discusses recent interdisciplinary work related to this field and provides a brief perspective on the limitations, challenges, and potential areas of growth for deep learning methods in autonomous navigation. Finally, the paper summarizes the findings and practices at different stages, correlating existing and future methods, their applicability, scalability, and limitations. The review provides a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working in the field of autonomous navigation and deep learning.

MobileUse: A GUI Agent with Hierarchical Reflection for Autonomous Mobile Operation

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled the development of mobile agents that can understand visual inputs and follow user instructions, unlocking new possibilities for automating complex tasks on mobile devices. However, applying these models to real-world mobile scenarios remains a significant challenge due to the long-horizon task execution, difficulty in error recovery, and the cold-start problem in unfamiliar environments. To address these challenges, we propose MobileUse, a GUI agent designed for robust and adaptive mobile task execution. To improve resilience in long-horizon tasks and dynamic environments, we introduce a hierarchical reflection architecture that enables the agent to self-monitor, detect, and recover from errors across multiple temporal scales-ranging from individual actions to overall task completion-while maintaining efficiency through a reflection-on-demand strategy. To tackle cold-start issues, we further introduce a proactive exploration module, which enriches the agent's understanding of the environment through self-planned exploration. Evaluations on AndroidWorld and AndroidLab benchmarks demonstrate that MobileUse establishes new state-of-the-art performance, achieving success rates of 62.9% and 44.2%, respectively. To facilitate real-world applications, we release an out-of-the-box toolkit for automated task execution on physical mobile devices, which is available at https://github.com/MadeAgents/mobile-use.

DM-VTON: Distilled Mobile Real-time Virtual Try-On

The fashion e-commerce industry has witnessed significant growth in recent years, prompting exploring image-based virtual try-on techniques to incorporate Augmented Reality (AR) experiences into online shopping platforms. However, existing research has primarily overlooked a crucial aspect - the runtime of the underlying machine-learning model. While existing methods prioritize enhancing output quality, they often disregard the execution time, which restricts their applications on a limited range of devices. To address this gap, we propose Distilled Mobile Real-time Virtual Try-On (DM-VTON), a novel virtual try-on framework designed to achieve simplicity and efficiency. Our approach is based on a knowledge distillation scheme that leverages a strong Teacher network as supervision to guide a Student network without relying on human parsing. Notably, we introduce an efficient Mobile Generative Module within the Student network, significantly reducing the runtime while ensuring high-quality output. Additionally, we propose Virtual Try-on-guided Pose for Data Synthesis to address the limited pose variation observed in training images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve 40 frames per second on a single Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU and only take up 37 MB of memory while producing almost the same output quality as other state-of-the-art methods. DM-VTON stands poised to facilitate the advancement of real-time AR applications, in addition to the generation of lifelike attired human figures tailored for diverse specialized training tasks. https://sites.google.com/view/ltnghia/research/DMVTON

Mobile-R1: Towards Interactive Reinforcement Learning for VLM-Based Mobile Agent via Task-Level Rewards

Vision-language model-based mobile agents have gained the ability to not only understand complex instructions and mobile screenshots, but also optimize their action outputs via thinking and reasoning, benefiting from reinforcement learning, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, existing research centers on offline reinforcement learning training or online optimization using action-level rewards, which limits the agent's dynamic interaction with the environment. This often results in agents settling into local optima, thereby weakening their ability for exploration and error action correction. To address these challenges, we introduce an approach called Mobile-R1, which employs interactive multi-turn reinforcement learning with task-level rewards for mobile agents. Our training framework consists of three stages: initial format finetuning, single-step online training via action-level reward, followed by online training via task-level reward based on multi-turn trajectories. This strategy is designed to enhance the exploration and error correction capabilities of Mobile-R1, leading to significant performance improvements. Moreover, we have collected a dataset covering 28 Chinese applications with 24,521 high-quality manual annotations and established a new benchmark with 500 trajectories. We will open source all resources, including the dataset, benchmark, model weight, and codes: https://mobile-r1.github.io/Mobile-R1/.

Sim-to-Real Transfer for Mobile Robots with Reinforcement Learning: from NVIDIA Isaac Sim to Gazebo and Real ROS 2 Robots

Unprecedented agility and dexterous manipulation have been demonstrated with controllers based on deep reinforcement learning (RL), with a significant impact on legged and humanoid robots. Modern tooling and simulation platforms, such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, have been enabling such advances. This article focuses on demonstrating the applications of Isaac in local planning and obstacle avoidance as one of the most fundamental ways in which a mobile robot interacts with its environments. Although there is extensive research on proprioception-based RL policies, the article highlights less standardized and reproducible approaches to exteroception. At the same time, the article aims to provide a base framework for end-to-end local navigation policies and how a custom robot can be trained in such simulation environment. We benchmark end-to-end policies with the state-of-the-art Nav2, navigation stack in Robot Operating System (ROS). We also cover the sim-to-real transfer process by demonstrating zero-shot transferability of policies trained in the Isaac simulator to real-world robots. This is further evidenced by the tests with different simulated robots, which show the generalization of the learned policy. Finally, the benchmarks demonstrate comparable performance to Nav2, opening the door to quick deployment of state-of-the-art end-to-end local planners for custom robot platforms, but importantly furthering the possibilities by expanding the state and action spaces or task definitions for more complex missions. Overall, with this article we introduce the most important steps, and aspects to consider, in deploying RL policies for local path planning and obstacle avoidance with Isaac Sim training, Gazebo testing, and ROS 2 for real-time inference in real robots. The code is available at https://github.com/sahars93/RL-Navigation.

MobileQuant: Mobile-friendly Quantization for On-device Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized language processing, delivering outstanding results across multiple applications. However, deploying LLMs on edge devices poses several challenges with respect to memory, energy, and compute costs, limiting their widespread use in devices such as mobile phones. A promising solution is to reduce the number of bits used to represent weights and activations. While existing works have found partial success at quantizing LLMs to lower bitwidths, e.g. 4-bit weights, quantizing activations beyond 16 bits often leads to large computational overheads due to poor on-device quantization support, or a considerable accuracy drop. Yet, 8-bit activations are very attractive for on-device deployment as they would enable LLMs to fully exploit mobile-friendly hardware, e.g. Neural Processing Units (NPUs). In this work, we make a first attempt to facilitate the on-device deployment of LLMs using integer-only quantization. We first investigate the limitations of existing quantization methods for on-device deployment, with a special focus on activation quantization. We then address these limitations by introducing a simple post-training quantization method, named MobileQuant, that extends previous weight equivalent transformation works by jointly optimizing the weight transformation and activation range parameters in an end-to-end manner. MobileQuant demonstrates superior capabilities over existing methods by 1) achieving near-lossless quantization on a wide range of LLM benchmarks, 2) reducing latency and energy consumption by 20\%-50\% compared to current on-device quantization strategies, 3) requiring limited compute budget, 4) being compatible with mobile-friendly compute units, e.g. NPU.

Mobile-MMLU: A Mobile Intelligence Language Understanding Benchmark

Rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have increased interest in deploying them on mobile devices for on-device AI applications. Mobile users interact differently with LLMs compared to desktop users, creating unique expectations and data biases. Current benchmark datasets primarily target at server and desktop environments, and there is a notable lack of extensive datasets specifically designed for mobile contexts. Additionally, mobile devices face strict limitations in storage and computing resources, constraining model size and capabilities, thus requiring optimized efficiency and prioritized knowledge. To address these challenges, we introduce Mobile-MMLU, a large-scale benchmark dataset tailored for mobile intelligence. It consists of 16,186 questions across 80 mobile-related fields, designed to evaluate LLM performance in realistic mobile scenarios. A challenging subset, Mobile-MMLU-Pro, provides advanced evaluation similar in size to MMLU-Pro but significantly more difficult than our standard full set. Both benchmarks use multiple-choice, order-invariant questions focused on practical mobile interactions, such as recipe suggestions, travel planning, and essential daily tasks. The dataset emphasizes critical mobile-specific metrics like inference latency, energy consumption, memory usage, and response quality, offering comprehensive insights into model performance under mobile constraints. Moreover, it prioritizes privacy and adaptability, assessing models' ability to perform on-device processing, maintain user privacy, and adapt to personalized usage patterns. Mobile-MMLU family offers a standardized framework for developing and comparing mobile-optimized LLMs, enabling advancements in productivity and decision-making within mobile computing environments. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/VILA-Lab/Mobile-MMLU.

EvaSurf: Efficient View-Aware Implicit Textured Surface Reconstruction on Mobile Devices

Reconstructing real-world 3D objects has numerous applications in computer vision, such as virtual reality, video games, and animations. Ideally, 3D reconstruction methods should generate high-fidelity results with 3D consistency in real-time. Traditional methods match pixels between images using photo-consistency constraints or learned features, while differentiable rendering methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) use differentiable volume rendering or surface-based representation to generate high-fidelity scenes. However, these methods require excessive runtime for rendering, making them impractical for daily applications. To address these challenges, we present EvaSurf, an Efficient View-Aware implicit textured Surface reconstruction method on mobile devices. In our method, we first employ an efficient surface-based model with a multi-view supervision module to ensure accurate mesh reconstruction. To enable high-fidelity rendering, we learn an implicit texture embedded with a set of Gaussian lobes to capture view-dependent information. Furthermore, with the explicit geometry and the implicit texture, we can employ a lightweight neural shader to reduce the expense of computation and further support real-time rendering on common mobile devices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can reconstruct high-quality appearance and accurate mesh on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Moreover, our method can be trained in just 1-2 hours using a single GPU and run on mobile devices at over 40 FPS (Frames Per Second), with a final package required for rendering taking up only 40-50 MB.

MAS-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Shortcut-Augmented Hybrid Mobile GUI Agents

To enhance the efficiency of GUI agents on various platforms like smartphones and computers, a hybrid paradigm that combines flexible GUI operations with efficient shortcuts (e.g., API, deep links) is emerging as a promising direction. However, a framework for systematically benchmarking these hybrid agents is still underexplored. To take the first step in bridging this gap, we introduce MAS-Bench, a benchmark that pioneers the evaluation of GUI-shortcut hybrid agents with a specific focus on the mobile domain. Beyond merely using predefined shortcuts, MAS-Bench assesses an agent's capability to autonomously generate shortcuts by discovering and creating reusable, low-cost workflows. It features 139 complex tasks across 11 real-world applications, a knowledge base of 88 predefined shortcuts (APIs, deep-links, RPA scripts), and 7 evaluation metrics. The tasks are designed to be solvable via GUI-only operations, but can be significantly accelerated by intelligently embedding shortcuts. Experiments show that hybrid agents achieve significantly higher success rates and efficiency than their GUI-only counterparts. This result also demonstrates the effectiveness of our method for evaluating an agent's shortcut generation capabilities. MAS-Bench fills a critical evaluation gap, providing a foundational platform for future advancements in creating more efficient and robust intelligent agents.

AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

The recent progress of large language model agents has opened new possibilities for automating tasks through graphical user interfaces (GUIs), especially in mobile environments where intelligent interaction can greatly enhance usability. However, practical deployment of such agents remains constrained by several key challenges. Existing training data is often noisy and lack semantic diversity, which hinders the learning of precise grounding and planning. Models trained purely by imitation tend to overfit to seen interface patterns and fail to generalize in unfamiliar scenarios. Moreover, most prior work focuses on English interfaces while overlooks the growing diversity of non-English applications such as those in the Chinese mobile ecosystem. In this work, we present AgentCPM-GUI, an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction. Our training pipeline includes grounding-aware pre-training to enhance perception, supervised fine-tuning on high-quality Chinese and English trajectories to imitate human-like actions, and reinforcement fine-tuning with GRPO to improve reasoning capability. We also introduce a compact action space that reduces output length and supports low-latency execution on mobile devices. AgentCPM-GUI achieves state-of-the-art performance on five public benchmarks and a new Chinese GUI benchmark called CAGUI, reaching 96.9% Type-Match and 91.3% Exact-Match. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we publicly release all code, model checkpoint, and evaluation data.

Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Help Mobile GUI Agent? An Empirical Study

Reasoning capabilities have significantly improved the performance of vision-language models (VLMs) in domains such as mathematical problem-solving, coding, and visual question-answering. However, their impact on real-world applications remains unclear. This paper presents the first empirical study on the effectiveness of reasoning-enabled VLMs in mobile GUI agents, a domain that requires interpreting complex screen layouts, understanding user instructions, and executing multi-turn interactions. We evaluate two pairs of commercial models--Gemini 2.0 Flash and Claude 3.7 Sonnet--comparing their base and reasoning-enhanced versions across two static benchmarks (ScreenSpot and AndroidControl) and one interactive environment (AndroidWorld). We surprisingly find the Claude 3.7 Sonnet reasoning model achieves state-of-the-art performance on AndroidWorld. However, reasoning VLMs generally offer marginal improvements over non-reasoning models on static benchmarks and even degrade performance in some agent setups. Notably, reasoning and non-reasoning VLMs fail on different sets of tasks, suggesting that reasoning does have an impact, but its benefits and drawbacks counterbalance each other. We attribute these inconsistencies to the limitations of benchmarks and VLMs. Based on the findings, we provide insights for further enhancing mobile GUI agents in terms of benchmarks, VLMs, and their adaptability in dynamically invoking reasoning VLMs. The experimental data are publicly available at https://github.com/LlamaTouch/VLM-Reasoning-Traces.

Atomic-to-Compositional Generalization for Mobile Agents with A New Benchmark and Scheduling System

Autonomous agents powered by multimodal large language models have been developed to facilitate task execution on mobile devices. However, prior work has predominantly focused on atomic tasks -- such as shot-chain execution tasks and single-screen grounding tasks -- while overlooking the generalization to compositional tasks, which are indispensable for real-world applications. This work introduces UI-NEXUS, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate mobile agents on three categories of compositional operations: Simple Concatenation, Context Transition, and Deep Dive. UI-NEXUS supports interactive evaluation in 20 fully controllable local utility app environments, as well as 30 online Chinese and English service apps. It comprises 100 interactive task templates with an average optimal step count of 14.05. Experimental results across a range of mobile agents with agentic workflow or agent-as-a-model show that UI-NEXUS presents significant challenges. Specifically, existing agents generally struggle to balance performance and efficiency, exhibiting representative failure modes such as under-execution, over-execution, and attention drift, causing visible atomic-to-compositional generalization gap. Inspired by these findings, we propose AGENT-NEXUS, a lightweight and efficient scheduling system to tackle compositional mobile tasks. AGENT-NEXUS extrapolates the abilities of existing mobile agents by dynamically decomposing long-horizon tasks to a series of self-contained atomic subtasks. AGENT-NEXUS achieves 24% to 40% task success rate improvement for existing mobile agents on compositional operation tasks within the UI-NEXUS benchmark without significantly sacrificing inference overhead. The demo video, dataset, and code are available on the project page at https://ui-nexus.github.io.

Efficient and Personalized Mobile Health Event Prediction via Small Language Models

Healthcare monitoring is crucial for early detection, timely intervention, and the ongoing management of health conditions, ultimately improving individuals' quality of life. Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in supporting healthcare tasks. However, existing LLM-based healthcare solutions typically rely on cloud-based systems, which raise privacy concerns and increase the risk of personal information leakage. As a result, there is growing interest in running these models locally on devices like mobile phones and wearables to protect users' privacy. Small Language Models (SLMs) are potential candidates to solve privacy and computational issues, as they are more efficient and better suited for local deployment. However, the performance of SLMs in healthcare domains has not yet been investigated. This paper examines the capability of SLMs to accurately analyze health data, such as steps, calories, sleep minutes, and other vital statistics, to assess an individual's health status. Our results show that, TinyLlama, which has 1.1 billion parameters, utilizes 4.31 GB memory, and has 0.48s latency, showing the best performance compared other four state-of-the-art (SOTA) SLMs on various healthcare applications. Our results indicate that SLMs could potentially be deployed on wearable or mobile devices for real-time health monitoring, providing a practical solution for efficient and privacy-preserving healthcare.

MobileFlow: A Multimodal LLM For Mobile GUI Agent

Currently, the integration of mobile Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) is ubiquitous in most people's daily lives. And the ongoing evolution of multimodal large-scale models, such as GPT-4v, Qwen-VL-Max, has significantly bolstered the capabilities of GUI comprehension and user action analysis, showcasing the potentiality of intelligent GUI assistants. However, current GUI Agents often need to access page layout information through calling system APIs, which may pose privacy risks. Fixing GUI (such as mobile interfaces) to a certain low resolution might result in the loss of fine-grained image details. At the same time, the multimodal large models built for GUI Agents currently have poor understanding and decision-making abilities for Chinese GUI interfaces, making them difficult to apply to a large number of Chinese apps. This paper introduces MobileFlow, a multimodal large language model meticulously crafted for mobile GUI agents. Transforming from the open-source model Qwen-VL-Chat into GUI domain, MobileFlow contains approximately 21 billion parameters and is equipped with novel hybrid visual encoders, making it possible for variable resolutions of image inputs and good support for multilingual GUI. By incorporating Mixture of Experts (MoE) expansions and pioneering alignment training strategies, MobileFlow has the capacity to fully interpret image data and comprehend user instructions for GUI interaction tasks. Finally, MobileFlow outperforms Qwen-VL-Max and GPT-4v in terms of task execution by GUI agents on both public and our proposed evaluation metrics, and has been successfully deployed in real-world business contexts, proving its effectiveness for practical applications.

PP-MobileSeg: Explore the Fast and Accurate Semantic Segmentation Model on Mobile Devices

The success of transformers in computer vision has led to several attempts to adapt them for mobile devices, but their performance remains unsatisfactory in some real-world applications. To address this issue, we propose PP-MobileSeg, a semantic segmentation model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on mobile devices. PP-MobileSeg comprises three novel parts: the StrideFormer backbone, the Aggregated Attention Module (AAM), and the Valid Interpolate Module (VIM). The four-stage StrideFormer backbone is built with MV3 blocks and strided SEA attention, and it is able to extract rich semantic and detailed features with minimal parameter overhead. The AAM first filters the detailed features through semantic feature ensemble voting and then combines them with semantic features to enhance the semantic information. Furthermore, we proposed VIM to upsample the downsampled feature to the resolution of the input image. It significantly reduces model latency by only interpolating classes present in the final prediction, which is the most significant contributor to overall model latency. Extensive experiments show that PP-MobileSeg achieves a superior tradeoff between accuracy, model size, and latency compared to other methods. On the ADE20K dataset, PP-MobileSeg achieves 1.57% higher accuracy in mIoU than SeaFormer-Base with 32.9% fewer parameters and 42.3% faster acceleration on Qualcomm Snapdragon 855. Source codes are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg/tree/release/2.8.

Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey

GUIs have long been central to human-computer interaction, providing an intuitive and visually-driven way to access and interact with digital systems. The advent of LLMs, particularly multimodal models, has ushered in a new era of GUI automation. They have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in natural language understanding, code generation, and visual processing. This has paved the way for a new generation of LLM-brained GUI agents capable of interpreting complex GUI elements and autonomously executing actions based on natural language instructions. These agents represent a paradigm shift, enabling users to perform intricate, multi-step tasks through simple conversational commands. Their applications span across web navigation, mobile app interactions, and desktop automation, offering a transformative user experience that revolutionizes how individuals interact with software. This emerging field is rapidly advancing, with significant progress in both research and industry. To provide a structured understanding of this trend, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of LLM-brained GUI agents, exploring their historical evolution, core components, and advanced techniques. We address research questions such as existing GUI agent frameworks, the collection and utilization of data for training specialized GUI agents, the development of large action models tailored for GUI tasks, and the evaluation metrics and benchmarks necessary to assess their effectiveness. Additionally, we examine emerging applications powered by these agents. Through a detailed analysis, this survey identifies key research gaps and outlines a roadmap for future advancements in the field. By consolidating foundational knowledge and state-of-the-art developments, this work aims to guide both researchers and practitioners in overcoming challenges and unlocking the full potential of LLM-brained GUI agents.

Tiny Robotics Dataset and Benchmark for Continual Object Detection

Detecting objects in mobile robotics is crucial for numerous applications, from autonomous navigation to inspection. However, robots are often required to perform tasks in different domains with respect to the training one and need to adapt to these changes. Tiny mobile robots, subject to size, power, and computational constraints, encounter even more difficulties in running and adapting these algorithms. Such adaptability, though, is crucial for real-world deployment, where robots must operate effectively in dynamic and unpredictable settings. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark to evaluate the continual learning capabilities of object detection systems in tiny robotic platforms. Our contributions include: (i) Tiny Robotics Object Detection (TiROD), a comprehensive dataset collected using a small mobile robot, designed to test the adaptability of object detectors across various domains and classes; (ii) an evaluation of state-of-the-art real-time object detectors combined with different continual learning strategies on this dataset, providing detailed insights into their performance and limitations; and (iii) we publish the data and the code to replicate the results to foster continuous advancements in this field. Our benchmark results indicate key challenges that must be addressed to advance the development of robust and efficient object detection systems for tiny robotics.

Neural Networks for Text Correction and Completion in Keyboard Decoding

Despite the ubiquity of mobile and wearable text messaging applications, the problem of keyboard text decoding is not tackled sufficiently in the light of the enormous success of the deep learning Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for natural language understanding. In particular, considering that the keyboard decoders should operate on devices with memory and processor resource constraints, makes it challenging to deploy industrial scale deep neural network (DNN) models. This paper proposes a sequence-to-sequence neural attention network system for automatic text correction and completion. Given an erroneous sequence, our model encodes character level hidden representations and then decodes the revised sequence thus enabling auto-correction and completion. We achieve this by a combination of character level CNN and gated recurrent unit (GRU) encoder along with and a word level gated recurrent unit (GRU) attention decoder. Unlike traditional language models that learn from billions of words, our corpus size is only 12 million words; an order of magnitude smaller. The memory footprint of our learnt model for inference and prediction is also an order of magnitude smaller than the conventional language model based text decoders. We report baseline performance for neural keyboard decoders in such limited domain. Our models achieve a word level accuracy of 90% and a character error rate CER of 2.4% over the Twitter typo dataset. We present a novel dataset of noisy to corrected mappings by inducing the noise distribution from the Twitter data over the OpenSubtitles 2009 dataset; on which our model predicts with a word level accuracy of 98% and sequence accuracy of 68.9%. In our user study, our model achieved an average CER of 2.6% with the state-of-the-art non-neural touch-screen keyboard decoder at CER of 1.6%.

BottleFit: Learning Compressed Representations in Deep Neural Networks for Effective and Efficient Split Computing

Although mission-critical applications require the use of deep neural networks (DNNs), their continuous execution at mobile devices results in a significant increase in energy consumption. While edge offloading can decrease energy consumption, erratic patterns in channel quality, network and edge server load can lead to severe disruption of the system's key operations. An alternative approach, called split computing, generates compressed representations within the model (called "bottlenecks"), to reduce bandwidth usage and energy consumption. Prior work has proposed approaches that introduce additional layers, to the detriment of energy consumption and latency. For this reason, we propose a new framework called BottleFit, which, in addition to targeted DNN architecture modifications, includes a novel training strategy to achieve high accuracy even with strong compression rates. We apply BottleFit on cutting-edge DNN models in image classification, and show that BottleFit achieves 77.1% data compression with up to 0.6% accuracy loss on ImageNet dataset, while state of the art such as SPINN loses up to 6% in accuracy. We experimentally measure the power consumption and latency of an image classification application running on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano board (GPU-based) and a Raspberry PI board (GPU-less). We show that BottleFit decreases power consumption and latency respectively by up to 49% and 89% with respect to (w.r.t.) local computing and by 37% and 55% w.r.t. edge offloading. We also compare BottleFit with state-of-the-art autoencoders-based approaches, and show that (i) BottleFit reduces power consumption and execution time respectively by up to 54% and 44% on the Jetson and 40% and 62% on Raspberry PI; (ii) the size of the head model executed on the mobile device is 83 times smaller. We publish the code repository for reproducibility of the results in this study.

Efficient Track Anything

Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has emerged as a powerful tool for video object segmentation and tracking anything. Key components of SAM 2 that drive the impressive video object segmentation performance include a large multistage image encoder for frame feature extraction and a memory mechanism that stores memory contexts from past frames to help current frame segmentation. The high computation complexity of multistage image encoder and memory module has limited its applications in real-world tasks, e.g., video object segmentation on mobile devices. To address this limitation, we propose EfficientTAMs, lightweight track anything models that produce high-quality results with low latency and model size. Our idea is based on revisiting the plain, nonhierarchical Vision Transformer (ViT) as an image encoder for video object segmentation, and introducing an efficient memory module, which reduces the complexity for both frame feature extraction and memory computation for current frame segmentation. We take vanilla lightweight ViTs and efficient memory module to build EfficientTAMs, and train the models on SA-1B and SA-V datasets for video object segmentation and track anything tasks. We evaluate on multiple video segmentation benchmarks including semi-supervised VOS and promptable video segmentation, and find that our proposed EfficientTAM with vanilla ViT perform comparably to SAM 2 model (HieraB+SAM 2) with ~2x speedup on A100 and ~2.4x parameter reduction. On segment anything image tasks, our EfficientTAMs also perform favorably over original SAM with ~20x speedup on A100 and ~20x parameter reduction. On mobile devices such as iPhone 15 Pro Max, our EfficientTAMs can run at ~10 FPS for performing video object segmentation with reasonable quality, highlighting the capability of small models for on-device video object segmentation applications.

PockEngine: Sparse and Efficient Fine-tuning in a Pocket

On-device learning and efficient fine-tuning enable continuous and privacy-preserving customization (e.g., locally fine-tuning large language models on personalized data). However, existing training frameworks are designed for cloud servers with powerful accelerators (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) and lack the optimizations for learning on the edge, which faces challenges of resource limitations and edge hardware diversity. We introduce PockEngine: a tiny, sparse and efficient engine to enable fine-tuning on various edge devices. PockEngine supports sparse backpropagation: it prunes the backward graph and sparsely updates the model with measured memory saving and latency reduction while maintaining the model quality. Secondly, PockEngine is compilation first: the entire training graph (including forward, backward and optimization steps) is derived at compile-time, which reduces the runtime overhead and brings opportunities for graph transformations. PockEngine also integrates a rich set of training graph optimizations, thus can further accelerate the training cost, including operator reordering and backend switching. PockEngine supports diverse applications, frontends and hardware backends: it flexibly compiles and tunes models defined in PyTorch/TensorFlow/Jax and deploys binaries to mobile CPU/GPU/DSPs. We evaluated PockEngine on both vision models and large language models. PockEngine achieves up to 15 times speedup over off-the-shelf TensorFlow (Raspberry Pi), 5.6 times memory saving back-propagation (Jetson AGX Orin). Remarkably, PockEngine enables fine-tuning LLaMav2-7B on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin at 550 tokens/s, 7.9times faster than the PyTorch.

On-Device Language Models: A Comprehensive Review

The advent of large language models (LLMs) revolutionized natural language processing applications, and running LLMs on edge devices has become increasingly attractive for reasons including reduced latency, data localization, and personalized user experiences. This comprehensive review examines the challenges of deploying computationally expensive LLMs on resource-constrained devices and explores innovative solutions across multiple domains. The paper investigates the development of on-device language models, their efficient architectures, including parameter sharing and modular designs, as well as state-of-the-art compression techniques like quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation. Hardware acceleration strategies and collaborative edge-cloud deployment approaches are analyzed, highlighting the intricate balance between performance and resource utilization. Case studies of on-device language models from major mobile manufacturers demonstrate real-world applications and potential benefits. The review also addresses critical aspects such as adaptive learning, multi-modal capabilities, and personalization. By identifying key research directions and open challenges, this paper provides a roadmap for future advancements in on-device language models, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary efforts to realize the full potential of ubiquitous, intelligent computing while ensuring responsible and ethical deployment. For a comprehensive review of research work and educational resources on on-device large language models (LLMs), please visit https://github.com/NexaAI/Awesome-LLMs-on-device. To download and run on-device LLMs, visit https://www.nexaai.com/models.

MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks

In this paper we describe a new mobile architecture, MobileNetV2, that improves the state of the art performance of mobile models on multiple tasks and benchmarks as well as across a spectrum of different model sizes. We also describe efficient ways of applying these mobile models to object detection in a novel framework we call SSDLite. Additionally, we demonstrate how to build mobile semantic segmentation models through a reduced form of DeepLabv3 which we call Mobile DeepLabv3. The MobileNetV2 architecture is based on an inverted residual structure where the input and output of the residual block are thin bottleneck layers opposite to traditional residual models which use expanded representations in the input an MobileNetV2 uses lightweight depthwise convolutions to filter features in the intermediate expansion layer. Additionally, we find that it is important to remove non-linearities in the narrow layers in order to maintain representational power. We demonstrate that this improves performance and provide an intuition that led to this design. Finally, our approach allows decoupling of the input/output domains from the expressiveness of the transformation, which provides a convenient framework for further analysis. We measure our performance on Imagenet classification, COCO object detection, VOC image segmentation. We evaluate the trade-offs between accuracy, and number of operations measured by multiply-adds (MAdd), as well as the number of parameters

LeYOLO, New Scalable and Efficient CNN Architecture for Object Detection

Computational efficiency in deep neural networks is critical for object detection, especially as newer models prioritize speed over efficient computation (FLOP). This evolution has somewhat left behind embedded and mobile-oriented AI object detection applications. In this paper, we focus on design choices of neural network architectures for efficient object detection computation based on FLOP and propose several optimizations to enhance the efficiency of YOLO-based models. Firstly, we introduce an efficient backbone scaling inspired by inverted bottlenecks and theoretical insights from the Information Bottleneck principle. Secondly, we present the Fast Pyramidal Architecture Network (FPAN), designed to facilitate fast multiscale feature sharing while reducing computational resources. Lastly, we propose a Decoupled Network-in-Network (DNiN) detection head engineered to deliver rapid yet lightweight computations for classification and regression tasks. Building upon these optimizations and leveraging more efficient backbones, this paper contributes to a new scaling paradigm for object detection and YOLO-centric models called LeYOLO. Our contribution consistently outperforms existing models in various resource constraints, achieving unprecedented accuracy and flop ratio. Notably, LeYOLO-Small achieves a competitive mAP score of 38.2% on the COCOval with just 4.5 FLOP(G), representing a 42% reduction in computational load compared to the latest state-of-the-art YOLOv9-Tiny model while achieving similar accuracy. Our novel model family achieves a FLOP-to-accuracy ratio previously unattained, offering scalability that spans from ultra-low neural network configurations (< 1 GFLOP) to efficient yet demanding object detection setups (> 4 GFLOPs) with 25.2, 31.3, 35.2, 38.2, 39.3 and 41 mAP for 0.66, 1.47, 2.53, 4.51, 5.8 and 8.4 FLOP(G).

TimeCMA: Towards LLM-Empowered Time Series Forecasting via Cross-Modality Alignment

The widespread adoption of scalable mobile sensing has led to large amounts of time series data for real-world applications. A fundamental application is multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF), which aims to predict future time series values based on historical observations. Existing MTSF methods suffer from limited parameterization and small-scale training data. Recently, Large language models (LLMs) have been introduced in time series, which achieve promising forecasting performance but incur heavy computational costs. To solve these challenges, we propose TimeCMA, an LLM-empowered framework for time series forecasting with cross-modality alignment. We design a dual-modality encoding module with two branches, where the time series encoding branch extracts relatively low-quality yet pure embeddings of time series through an inverted Transformer. In addition, the LLM-empowered encoding branch wraps the same time series as prompts to obtain high-quality yet entangled prompt embeddings via a Pre-trained LLM. Then, we design a cross-modality alignment module to retrieve high-quality and pure time series embeddings from the prompt embeddings. Moreover, we develop a time series forecasting module to decode the aligned embeddings while capturing dependencies among multiple variables for forecasting. Notably, we tailor the prompt to encode sufficient temporal information into a last token and design the last token embedding storage to reduce computational costs. Extensive experiments on real data offer insight into the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed framework.

UniMTS: Unified Pre-training for Motion Time Series

Motion time series collected from mobile and wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches offer significant insights into human behavioral patterns, with wide applications in healthcare, automation, IoT, and AR/XR due to their low-power, always-on nature. However, given security and privacy concerns, building large-scale motion time series datasets remains difficult, preventing the development of pre-trained models for human activity analysis. Typically, existing models are trained and tested on the same dataset, leading to poor generalizability across variations in device location, device mounting orientation and human activity type. In this paper, we introduce UniMTS, the first unified pre-training procedure for motion time series that generalizes across diverse device latent factors and activities. Specifically, we employ a contrastive learning framework that aligns motion time series with text descriptions enriched by large language models. This helps the model learn the semantics of time series to generalize across activities. Given the absence of large-scale motion time series data, we derive and synthesize time series from existing motion skeleton data with all-joint coverage. Spatio-temporal graph networks are utilized to capture the relationships across joints for generalization across different device locations. We further design rotation-invariant augmentation to make the model agnostic to changes in device mounting orientations. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 18 motion time series classification benchmark datasets, outperforming the best baselines by 340% in the zero-shot setting, 16.3% in the few-shot setting, and 9.2% in the full-shot setting.

Knowledge Concentration: Learning 100K Object Classifiers in a Single CNN

Fine-grained image labels are desirable for many computer vision applications, such as visual search or mobile AI assistant. These applications rely on image classification models that can produce hundreds of thousands (e.g. 100K) of diversified fine-grained image labels on input images. However, training a network at this vocabulary scale is challenging, and suffers from intolerable large model size and slow training speed, which leads to unsatisfying classification performance. A straightforward solution would be training separate expert networks (specialists), with each specialist focusing on learning one specific vertical (e.g. cars, birds...). However, deploying dozens of expert networks in a practical system would significantly increase system complexity and inference latency, and consumes large amounts of computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose a Knowledge Concentration method, which effectively transfers the knowledge from dozens of specialists (multiple teacher networks) into one single model (one student network) to classify 100K object categories. There are three salient aspects in our method: (1) a multi-teacher single-student knowledge distillation framework; (2) a self-paced learning mechanism to allow the student to learn from different teachers at various paces; (3) structurally connected layers to expand the student network capacity with limited extra parameters. We validate our method on OpenImage and a newly collected dataset, Entity-Foto-Tree (EFT), with 100K categories, and show that the proposed model performs significantly better than the baseline generalist model.

Cross-Layer Protocols for Multimedia Communications over Wireless Networks

In the last few years, the Internet throughput, usage and reliability have increased almost exponentially. The introduction of broadband wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and cellular networks together with increased computational power have opened the door for a new breed of applications to be created, namely real-time multimedia applications. Delivering real-time multimedia traffic over a complex network like the Internet is a particularly challenging task since these applications have strict quality-of-service (QoS) requirements on bandwidth, delay, and delay jitter. Traditional Internet protocol (IP)-based best effort service is not able to meet these stringent requirements. The time-varying nature of wireless channels and resource constrained wireless devices make the problem even more difficult. To improve perceived media quality by end users over wireless Internet, QoS supports can be addressed in different layers, including application layer, transport layer and link layer. Cross layer design is a well-known approach to achieve this adaptation. In cross-layer design, the challenges from the physical wireless medium and the QoS-demands from the applications are taken into account so that the rate, power, and coding at the physical (PHY) layer can adapted to meet the requirements of the applications given the current channel and network conditions. A number of propositions for cross-layer designs exist in the literature. In this chapter, an extensive review has been made on these cross-layer architectures that combine the application-layer, transport layer and the link layer controls. Particularly, the issues like channel estimation techniques, adaptive controls at the application and link layers for energy efficiency, priority based scheduling, transmission rate control at the transport layer, and adaptive automatic repeat request (ARQ) are discussed in detail.

A Large-scale Multi Domain Leukemia Dataset for the White Blood Cells Detection with Morphological Attributes for Explainability

Earlier diagnosis of Leukemia can save thousands of lives annually. The prognosis of leukemia is challenging without the morphological information of White Blood Cells (WBC) and relies on the accessibility of expensive microscopes and the availability of hematologists to analyze Peripheral Blood Samples (PBS). Deep Learning based methods can be employed to assist hematologists. However, these algorithms require a large amount of labeled data, which is not readily available. To overcome this limitation, we have acquired a realistic, generalized, and large dataset. To collect this comprehensive dataset for real-world applications, two microscopes from two different cost spectrums (high-cost HCM and low-cost LCM) are used for dataset capturing at three magnifications (100x, 40x, 10x) through different sensors (high-end camera for HCM, middle-level camera for LCM and mobile-phone camera for both). The high-sensor camera is 47 times more expensive than the middle-level camera and HCM is 17 times more expensive than LCM. In this collection, using HCM at high resolution (100x), experienced hematologists annotated 10.3k WBC types (14) and artifacts, having 55k morphological labels (Cell Size, Nuclear Chromatin, Nuclear Shape, etc.) from 2.4k images of several PBS leukemia patients. Later on, these annotations are transferred to other 2 magnifications of HCM, and 3 magnifications of LCM, and on each camera captured images. Along with the LeukemiaAttri dataset, we provide baselines over multiple object detectors and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) strategies, along with morphological information-based attribute prediction. The dataset will be publicly available after publication to facilitate the research in this direction.

A Survey on Security and Privacy Protocols for Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have emerged as an important and new area in wireless and mobile computing research because of their numerous potential applications that range from indoor deployment scenarios in home and office to outdoor deployment in adversary's territory in tactical battleground. Since in many WSN applications, lives and livelihoods may depend on the timeliness and correctness of sensor data obtained from dispersed sensor nodes, these networks must be secured to prevent any possible attacks that may be launched on them. Security is, therefore, an important issue in WSNs. However, this issue becomes even more critical in cognitive wireless sensor networks, a type of WSN in which the sensor nodes have the capabilities of changing their transmission and reception parameters according to the radio environment under which they operate in order to achieve reliable and efficient communication and optimum utilization of the network resources. This survey paper presents a comprehensive discussion on various security issues in CWSNs by identifying numerous security threats in these networks and defense mechanisms to counter these vulnerabilities. Various types of attacks on CWSNs are categorized under different classes based on their natures and tragets, and corresponding to each attack class, appropriate security mechanisms are presented. The paper also identifies some open problems in this emerging area of wireless networking.

EfficientFormer: Vision Transformers at MobileNet Speed

Vision Transformers (ViT) have shown rapid progress in computer vision tasks, achieving promising results on various benchmarks. However, due to the massive number of parameters and model design, e.g., attention mechanism, ViT-based models are generally times slower than lightweight convolutional networks. Therefore, the deployment of ViT for real-time applications is particularly challenging, especially on resource-constrained hardware such as mobile devices. Recent efforts try to reduce the computation complexity of ViT through network architecture search or hybrid design with MobileNet block, yet the inference speed is still unsatisfactory. This leads to an important question: can transformers run as fast as MobileNet while obtaining high performance? To answer this, we first revisit the network architecture and operators used in ViT-based models and identify inefficient designs. Then we introduce a dimension-consistent pure transformer (without MobileNet blocks) as a design paradigm. Finally, we perform latency-driven slimming to get a series of final models dubbed EfficientFormer. Extensive experiments show the superiority of EfficientFormer in performance and speed on mobile devices. Our fastest model, EfficientFormer-L1, achieves 79.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with only 1.6 ms inference latency on iPhone 12 (compiled with CoreML), which runs as fast as MobileNetV2times 1.4 (1.6 ms, 74.7% top-1), and our largest model, EfficientFormer-L7, obtains 83.3% accuracy with only 7.0 ms latency. Our work proves that properly designed transformers can reach extremely low latency on mobile devices while maintaining high performance.

Efficient Personalization of Quantized Diffusion Model without Backpropagation

Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in image synthesis, but they demand extensive computational and memory resources for training, fine-tuning and inference. Although advanced quantization techniques have successfully minimized memory usage for inference, training and fine-tuning these quantized models still require large memory possibly due to dequantization for accurate computation of gradients and/or backpropagation for gradient-based algorithms. However, memory-efficient fine-tuning is particularly desirable for applications such as personalization that often must be run on edge devices like mobile phones with private data. In this work, we address this challenge by quantizing a diffusion model with personalization via Textual Inversion and by leveraging a zeroth-order optimization on personalization tokens without dequantization so that it does not require gradient and activation storage for backpropagation that consumes considerable memory. Since a gradient estimation using zeroth-order optimization is quite noisy for a single or a few images in personalization, we propose to denoise the estimated gradient by projecting it onto a subspace that is constructed with the past history of the tokens, dubbed Subspace Gradient. In addition, we investigated the influence of text embedding in image generation, leading to our proposed time steps sampling, dubbed Partial Uniform Timestep Sampling for sampling with effective diffusion timesteps. Our method achieves comparable performance to prior methods in image and text alignment scores for personalizing Stable Diffusion with only forward passes while reducing training memory demand up to 8.2times.

Attention as an RNN

The advent of Transformers marked a significant breakthrough in sequence modelling, providing a highly performant architecture capable of leveraging GPU parallelism. However, Transformers are computationally expensive at inference time, limiting their applications, particularly in low-resource settings (e.g., mobile and embedded devices). Addressing this, we (1) begin by showing that attention can be viewed as a special Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with the ability to compute its many-to-one RNN output efficiently. We then (2) show that popular attention-based models such as Transformers can be viewed as RNN variants. However, unlike traditional RNNs (e.g., LSTMs), these models cannot be updated efficiently with new tokens, an important property in sequence modelling. Tackling this, we (3) introduce a new efficient method of computing attention's many-to-many RNN output based on the parallel prefix scan algorithm. Building on the new attention formulation, we (4) introduce Aaren, an attention-based module that can not only (i) be trained in parallel (like Transformers) but also (ii) be updated efficiently with new tokens, requiring only constant memory for inferences (like traditional RNNs). Empirically, we show Aarens achieve comparable performance to Transformers on 38 datasets spread across four popular sequential problem settings: reinforcement learning, event forecasting, time series classification, and time series forecasting tasks while being more time and memory-efficient.

Loghub: A Large Collection of System Log Datasets for AI-driven Log Analytics

Logs have been widely adopted in software system development and maintenance because of the rich runtime information they record. In recent years, the increase of software size and complexity leads to the rapid growth of the volume of logs. To handle these large volumes of logs efficiently and effectively, a line of research focuses on developing intelligent and automated log analysis techniques. However, only a few of these techniques have reached successful deployments in industry due to the lack of public log datasets and open benchmarking upon them. To fill this significant gap and facilitate more research on AI-driven log analytics, we have collected and released loghub, a large collection of system log datasets. In particular, loghub provides 19 real-world log datasets collected from a wide range of software systems, including distributed systems, supercomputers, operating systems, mobile systems, server applications, and standalone software. In this paper, we summarize the statistics of these datasets, introduce some practical usage scenarios of the loghub datasets, and present our benchmarking results on loghub to benefit the researchers and practitioners in this field. Up to the time of this paper writing, the loghub datasets have been downloaded for roughly 90,000 times in total by hundreds of organizations from both industry and academia. The loghub datasets are available at https://github.com/logpai/loghub.

Tools and Benchmarks for Automated Log Parsing

Logs are imperative in the development and maintenance process of many software systems. They record detailed runtime information that allows developers and support engineers to monitor their systems and dissect anomalous behaviors and errors. The increasing scale and complexity of modern software systems, however, make the volume of logs explodes. In many cases, the traditional way of manual log inspection becomes impractical. Many recent studies, as well as industrial tools, resort to powerful text search and machine learning-based analytics solutions. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, a first crucial step is to parse log messages into structured data for subsequent analysis. In recent years, automated log parsing has been widely studied in both academia and industry, producing a series of log parsers by different techniques. To better understand the characteristics of these log parsers, in this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation study on automated log parsing and further release the tools and benchmarks for easy reuse. More specifically, we evaluate 13 log parsers on a total of 16 log datasets spanning distributed systems, supercomputers, operating systems, mobile systems, server applications, and standalone software. We report the benchmarking results in terms of accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, which are of practical importance when deploying automated log parsing in production. We also share the success stories and lessons learned in an industrial application at Huawei. We believe that our work could serve as the basis and provide valuable guidance to future research and deployment of automated log parsing.

PLM: Efficient Peripheral Language Models Hardware-Co-Designed for Ubiquitous Computing

While scaling laws have been continuously validated in large language models (LLMs) with increasing model parameters, the inherent tension between the inference demands of LLMs and the limited resources of edge devices poses a critical challenge to the development of edge intelligence. Recently, numerous small language models have emerged, aiming to distill the capabilities of LLMs into smaller footprints. However, these models often retain the fundamental architectural principles of their larger counterparts, still imposing considerable strain on the storage and bandwidth capacities of edge devices. In this paper, we introduce the PLM, a Peripheral Language Model, developed through a co-design process that jointly optimizes model architecture and edge system constraints. The PLM utilizes a Multi-head Latent Attention mechanism and employs the squared ReLU activation function to encourage sparsity, thereby reducing peak memory footprint during inference. During training, we collect and reorganize open-source datasets, implement a multi-phase training strategy, and empirically investigate the Warmup-Stable-Decay-Constant (WSDC) learning rate scheduler. Additionally, we incorporate Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) by adopting the ARIES preference learning approach. Following a two-phase SFT process, this method yields performance gains of 2% in general tasks, 9% in the GSM8K task, and 11% in coding tasks. In addition to its novel architecture, evaluation results demonstrate that PLM outperforms existing small language models trained on publicly available data while maintaining the lowest number of activated parameters. Furthermore, deployment across various edge devices, including consumer-grade GPUs, mobile phones, and Raspberry Pis, validates PLM's suitability for peripheral applications. The PLM series models are publicly available at https://github.com/plm-team/PLM.

Tiny Transformers for Environmental Sound Classification at the Edge

With the growth of the Internet of Things and the rise of Big Data, data processing and machine learning applications are being moved to cheap and low size, weight, and power (SWaP) devices at the edge, often in the form of mobile phones, embedded systems, or microcontrollers. The field of Cyber-Physical Measurements and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) makes use of these devices to analyze and exploit data in ways not otherwise possible, which results in increased data quality, increased security, and decreased bandwidth. However, methods to train and deploy models at the edge are limited, and models with sufficient accuracy are often too large for the edge device. Therefore, there is a clear need for techniques to create efficient AI/ML at the edge. This work presents training techniques for audio models in the field of environmental sound classification at the edge. Specifically, we design and train Transformers to classify office sounds in audio clips. Results show that a BERT-based Transformer, trained on Mel spectrograms, can outperform a CNN using 99.85% fewer parameters. To achieve this result, we first tested several audio feature extraction techniques designed for Transformers, using ESC-50 for evaluation, along with various augmentations. Our final model outperforms the state-of-the-art MFCC-based CNN on the office sounds dataset, using just over 6,000 parameters -- small enough to run on a microcontroller.

Practical, Automated Scenario-based Mobile App Testing

The importance of mobile application (app) quality insurance is increasing with the rapid development of the mobile Internet. Automated test generation approaches, as a dominant direction of app quality insurance, follow specific models or strategies, targeting at optimizing the code coverage. Such approaches lead to a huge gap between testing execution and app business logic. Test scripts developed by human testers consider business logic by focusing on testing scenarios. Due to the GUI-intensive feature of mobile apps, human testers always understand app GUI to organize test scripts for scenarios. This inspires us to utilize domain knowledge from app GUI understanding for scenario-based test generation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, ScenTest, for scenario-based mobile app testing with event knowledge graph (EKG) via GUI image understanding. ScenTest tries to start automated testing by imitating human practices and integrating domain knowledge into scenario-based mobile app testing, realizing fully automated testing on target testing scenarios for the first time. ScenTest extracts four kinds of entities and five kinds of corresponding relationships from crowdsourced test reports, where the test events and app GUI information are presented, and constructs the EKGs for specific scenarios. Then, ScenTest conducts test generation for specific scenarios on different apps with the guidance of EKG with the combination consideration of app current state and testing context. We conduct an evaluation on ScenTest on different aspects. The results show that the test generation of ScenTest on the basis of EKG is effective, and ScenTest can reveal 80+ distinct real-world bugs in specific scenarios compared with representative baselines.

Determining the Difficulties of Students With Dyslexia via Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence: An Exploratory Analysis

Learning disorders are neurological conditions that affect the brain's ability to interconnect communication areas. Dyslexic students experience problems with reading, memorizing, and exposing concepts; however the magnitude of these can be mitigated through both therapies and the creation of compensatory mechanisms. Several efforts have been made to mitigate these issues, leading to the creation of digital resources for students with specific learning disorders attending primary and secondary education levels. Conversely, a standard approach is still missed in higher education. The VRAIlexia project has been created to tackle this issue by proposing two different tools: a mobile application integrating virtual reality (VR) to collect data quickly and easily, and an artificial intelligencebased software (AI) to analyze the collected data for customizing the supporting methodology for each student. The first one has been created and is being distributed among dyslexic students in Higher Education Institutions, for the conduction of specific psychological and psychometric tests. The second tool applies specific artificial intelligence algorithms to the data gathered via the application and other surveys. These AI techniques have allowed us to identify the most relevant difficulties faced by the students' cohort. Our different models have obtained around 90\% mean accuracy for predicting the support tools and learning strategies.

A Pressure Ulcer Care System For Remote Medical Assistance: Residual U-Net with an Attention Model Based for Wound Area Segmentation

Increasing numbers of patients with disabilities or elderly people with mobility issues often suffer from a pressure ulcer. The affected areas need regular checks, but they have a difficulty in accessing a hospital. Some remote diagnosis systems are being used for them, but there are limitations in checking a patient's status regularly. In this paper, we present a remote medical assistant that can help pressure ulcer management with image processing techniques. The proposed system includes a mobile application with a deep learning model for wound segmentation and analysis. As there are not enough data to train the deep learning model, we make use of a pretrained model from a relevant domain and data augmentation that is appropriate for this task. First of all, an image preprocessing method using bilinear interpolation is used to resize images and normalize the images. Second, for data augmentation, we use rotation, reflection, and a watershed algorithm. Third, we use a pretrained deep learning model generated from skin wound images similar to pressure ulcer images. Finally, we added an attention module that can provide hints on the pressure ulcer image features. The resulting model provides an accuracy of 99.0%, an intersection over union (IoU) of 99.99%, and a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 93.4% for pressure ulcer segmentation, which is better than existing results.

Pūioio: On-device Real-Time Smartphone-Based Automated Exercise Repetition Counting System

Automated exercise repetition counting has applications across the physical fitness realm, from personal health to rehabilitation. Motivated by the ubiquity of mobile phones and the benefits of tracking physical activity, this study explored the feasibility of counting exercise repetitions in real-time, using only on-device inference, on smartphones. In this work, after providing an extensive overview of the state-of-the-art automatic exercise repetition counting methods, we introduce a deep learning based exercise repetition counting system for smartphones consisting of five components: (1) Pose estimation, (2) Thresholding, (3) Optical flow, (4) State machine, and (5) Counter. The system is then implemented via a cross-platform mobile application named P\=uioio that uses only the smartphone camera to track repetitions in real time for three standard exercises: Squats, Push-ups, and Pull-ups. The proposed system was evaluated via a dataset of pre-recorded videos of individuals exercising as well as testing by subjects exercising in real time. Evaluation results indicated the system was 98.89% accurate in real-world tests and up to 98.85% when evaluated via the pre-recorded dataset. This makes it an effective, low-cost, and convenient alternative to existing solutions since the proposed system has minimal hardware requirements without requiring any wearable or specific sensors or network connectivity.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants with LLM-based Process Automation

While intelligent virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have become ubiquitous in modern life, they still face limitations in their ability to follow multi-step instructions and accomplish complex goals articulated in natural language. However, recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) show promise for overcoming existing barriers by enhancing natural language processing and reasoning capabilities. Though promising, applying LLMs to create more advanced virtual assistants still faces challenges like ensuring robust performance and handling variability in real-world user commands. This paper proposes a novel LLM-based virtual assistant that can automatically perform multi-step operations within mobile apps based on high-level user requests. The system represents an advance in assistants by providing an end-to-end solution for parsing instructions, reasoning about goals, and executing actions. LLM-based Process Automation (LLMPA) has modules for decomposing instructions, generating descriptions, detecting interface elements, predicting next actions, and error checking. Experiments demonstrate the system completing complex mobile operation tasks in Alipay based on natural language instructions. This showcases how large language models can enable automated assistants to accomplish real-world tasks. The main contributions are the novel LLMPA architecture optimized for app process automation, the methodology for applying LLMs to mobile apps, and demonstrations of multi-step task completion in a real-world environment. Notably, this work represents the first real-world deployment and extensive evaluation of a large language model-based virtual assistant in a widely used mobile application with an enormous user base numbering in the hundreds of millions.

MobileSteward: Integrating Multiple App-Oriented Agents with Self-Evolution to Automate Cross-App Instructions

Mobile phone agents can assist people in automating daily tasks on their phones, which have emerged as a pivotal research spotlight. However, existing procedure-oriented agents struggle with cross-app instructions, due to the following challenges: (1) complex task relationships, (2) diverse app environment, and (3) error propagation and information loss in multi-step execution. Drawing inspiration from object-oriented programming principles, we recognize that object-oriented solutions is more suitable for cross-app instruction. To address these challenges, we propose a self-evolving multi-agent framework named MobileSteward, which integrates multiple app-oriented StaffAgents coordinated by a centralized StewardAgent. We design three specialized modules in MobileSteward: (1) Dynamic Recruitment generates a scheduling graph guided by information flow to explicitly associate tasks among apps. (2) Assigned Execution assigns the task to app-oriented StaffAgents, each equipped with app-specialized expertise to address the diversity between apps. (3) Adjusted Evaluation conducts evaluation to provide reflection tips or deliver key information, which alleviates error propagation and information loss during multi-step execution. To continuously improve the performance of MobileSteward, we develop a Memory-based Self-evolution mechanism, which summarizes the experience from successful execution, to improve the performance of MobileSteward. We establish the first English Cross-APP Benchmark (CAPBench) in the real-world environment to evaluate the agents' capabilities of solving complex cross-app instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that MobileSteward achieves the best performance compared to both single-agent and multi-agent frameworks, highlighting the superiority of MobileSteward in better handling user instructions with diverse complexity.

T-FREX: A Transformer-based Feature Extraction Method from Mobile App Reviews

Mobile app reviews are a large-scale data source for software-related knowledge generation activities, including software maintenance, evolution and feedback analysis. Effective extraction of features (i.e., functionalities or characteristics) from these reviews is key to support analysis on the acceptance of these features, identification of relevant new feature requests and prioritization of feature development, among others. Traditional methods focus on syntactic pattern-based approaches, typically context-agnostic, evaluated on a closed set of apps, difficult to replicate and limited to a reduced set and domain of apps. Meanwhile, the pervasiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the Transformer architecture in software engineering tasks lays the groundwork for empirical evaluation of the performance of these models to support feature extraction. In this study, we present T-FREX, a Transformer-based, fully automatic approach for mobile app review feature extraction. First, we collect a set of ground truth features from users in a real crowdsourced software recommendation platform and transfer them automatically into a dataset of app reviews. Then, we use this newly created dataset to fine-tune multiple LLMs on a named entity recognition task under different data configurations. We assess the performance of T-FREX with respect to this ground truth, and we complement our analysis by comparing T-FREX with a baseline method from the field. Finally, we assess the quality of new features predicted by T-FREX through an external human evaluation. Results show that T-FREX outperforms on average the traditional syntactic-based method, especially when discovering new features from a domain for which the model has been fine-tuned.

SmartBench: Is Your LLM Truly a Good Chinese Smartphone Assistant?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to daily life, especially advancing as intelligent assistants through on-device deployment on smartphones. However, existing LLM evaluation benchmarks predominantly focus on objective tasks like mathematics and coding in English, which do not necessarily reflect the practical use cases of on-device LLMs in real-world mobile scenarios, especially for Chinese users. To address these gaps, we introduce SmartBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of on-device LLMs in Chinese mobile contexts. We analyze functionalities provided by representative smartphone manufacturers and divide them into five categories: text summarization, text Q&A, information extraction, content creation, and notification management, further detailed into 20 specific tasks. For each task, we construct high-quality datasets comprising 50 to 200 question-answer pairs that reflect everyday mobile interactions, and we develop automated evaluation criteria tailored for these tasks. We conduct comprehensive evaluations of on-device LLMs and MLLMs using SmartBench and also assess their performance after quantized deployment on real smartphone NPUs. Our contributions provide a standardized framework for evaluating on-device LLMs in Chinese, promoting further development and optimization in this critical area. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/vivo-ai-lab/SmartBench.

Leveraging Large Language Models for Mobile App Review Feature Extraction

Mobile app review analysis presents unique challenges due to the low quality, subjective bias, and noisy content of user-generated documents. Extracting features from these reviews is essential for tasks such as feature prioritization and sentiment analysis, but it remains a challenging task. Meanwhile, encoder-only models based on the Transformer architecture have shown promising results for classification and information extraction tasks for multiple software engineering processes. This study explores the hypothesis that encoder-only large language models can enhance feature extraction from mobile app reviews. By leveraging crowdsourced annotations from an industrial context, we redefine feature extraction as a supervised token classification task. Our approach includes extending the pre-training of these models with a large corpus of user reviews to improve contextual understanding and employing instance selection techniques to optimize model fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that this method improves the precision and recall of extracted features and enhances performance efficiency. Key contributions include a novel approach to feature extraction, annotated datasets, extended pre-trained models, and an instance selection mechanism for cost-effective fine-tuning. This research provides practical methods and empirical evidence in applying large language models to natural language processing tasks within mobile app reviews, offering improved performance in feature extraction.

MAPLE: A Mobile Agent with Persistent Finite State Machines for Structured Task Reasoning

Mobile GUI agents aim to autonomously complete user-instructed tasks across mobile apps. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable these agents to interpret UI screens, identify actionable elements, and perform interactions such as tapping or typing. However, existing agents remain reactive: they reason only over the current screen and lack a structured model of app navigation flow, limiting their ability to understand context, detect unexpected outcomes, and recover from errors. We present MAPLE, a state-aware multi-agent framework that abstracts app interactions as a Finite State Machine (FSM). We computationally model each UI screen as a discrete state and user actions as transitions, allowing the FSM to provide a structured representation of the app execution. MAPLE consists of specialized agents responsible for four phases of task execution: planning, execution, verification, error recovery, and knowledge retention. These agents collaborate to dynamically construct FSMs in real time based on perception data extracted from the UI screen, allowing the GUI agents to track navigation progress and flow, validate action outcomes through pre- and post-conditions of the states, and recover from errors by rolling back to previously stable states. Our evaluation results on two challenging cross-app benchmarks, Mobile-Eval-E and SPA-Bench, show that MAPLE outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline, improving task success rate by up to 12%, recovery success by 13.8%, and action accuracy by 6.5%. Our results highlight the importance of structured state modeling in guiding mobile GUI agents during task execution. Moreover, our FSM representation can be integrated into future GUI agent architectures as a lightweight, model-agnostic memory layer to support structured planning, execution verification, and error recovery.

Mobile-Agent-E: Self-Evolving Mobile Assistant for Complex Tasks

Smartphones have become indispensable in modern life, yet navigating complex tasks on mobile devices often remains frustrating. Recent advancements in large multimodal model (LMM)-based mobile agents have demonstrated the ability to perceive and act in mobile environments. However, current approaches face significant limitations: they fall short in addressing real-world human needs, struggle with reasoning-intensive and long-horizon tasks, and lack mechanisms to learn and improve from prior experiences. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Mobile-Agent-E, a hierarchical multi-agent framework capable of self-evolution through past experience. By hierarchical, we mean an explicit separation of high-level planning and low-level action execution. The framework comprises a Manager, responsible for devising overall plans by breaking down complex tasks into subgoals, and four subordinate agents--Perceptor, Operator, Action Reflector, and Notetaker--which handle fine-grained visual perception, immediate action execution, error verification, and information aggregation, respectively. Mobile-Agent-E also features a novel self-evolution module which maintains a persistent long-term memory comprising Tips and Shortcuts. Tips are general guidance and lessons learned from prior tasks on how to effectively interact with the environment. Shortcuts are reusable, executable sequences of atomic operations tailored for specific subroutines. The inclusion of Tips and Shortcuts facilitates continuous refinement in performance and efficiency. Alongside this framework, we introduce Mobile-Eval-E, a new benchmark featuring complex mobile tasks requiring long-horizon, multi-app interactions. Empirical results show that Mobile-Agent-E achieves a 22% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches across three foundation model backbones. Project page: https://x-plug.github.io/MobileAgent.

Empowering LLM to use Smartphone for Intelligent Task Automation

Mobile task automation is an attractive technique that aims to enable voice-based hands-free user interaction with smartphones. However, existing approaches suffer from poor scalability due to the limited language understanding ability and the non-trivial manual efforts required from developers or end-users. The recent advance of large language models (LLMs) in language understanding and reasoning inspires us to rethink the problem from a model-centric perspective, where task preparation, comprehension, and execution are handled by a unified language model. In this work, we introduce AutoDroid, a mobile task automation system that can handle arbitrary tasks on any Android application without manual efforts. The key insight is to combine the commonsense knowledge of LLMs and domain-specific knowledge of apps through automated dynamic analysis. The main components include a functionality-aware UI representation method that bridges the UI with the LLM, exploration-based memory injection techniques that augment the app-specific domain knowledge of LLM, and a multi-granularity query optimization module that reduces the cost of model inference. We integrate AutoDroid with off-the-shelf LLMs including online GPT-4/GPT-3.5 and on-device Vicuna, and evaluate its performance on a new benchmark for memory-augmented Android task automation with 158 common tasks. The results demonstrated that AutoDroid is able to precisely generate actions with an accuracy of 90.9%, and complete tasks with a success rate of 71.3%, outperforming the GPT-4-powered baselines by 36.4% and 39.7%. The demo, benchmark suites, and source code of AutoDroid will be released at url{https://autodroid-sys.github.io/}.