The paper introduces Smol‑VL‑BLV, a compact vision‑language model designed for blind and low‑vision users. It employs a 500M decoder transformer with teacher‑student distillation and Group Relative Policy Optimization to add spatial detail, directional cues, and hazard detection to post‑training. After a lightweight finetuning step, the model achieves significant gains on spatial, social, OCR, and VQA benchmarks while remaining under 450 MB and running entirely offline on a mid‑range Android phone.
By Rishabh Choudhary, Shreyansh Raj, Umesh Goyal, Shubh Kashyap, Shrestha Kumar, Sushovan Jena, Komal Kumar, Hisham Cholakkal, Aditya Nigam
arXiv:2607. 03213v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present OpenGlass, an open-source, privacy-oriented, local-first system for low-latency multimodal visual assistance, with a primary focus on blind and low-vision users.
By Mengzhang Li, Yuan Yao
arXiv:2607. 29353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the ever-increasing pervasiveness of smart edge devices, the demand is growing for applications that can be tailored to users (e.
By Douwe den Blanken, Martin Lefebvre, Charlotte Frenkel
arXiv:2607. 03089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: HAR is increasingly expected to run continuously on edge devices, yet recent LLM-based methods remain hard to deploy: raw sensor prompts are long, cloud inference adds latency and privacy risk, and fine-tuned LLM pipelines turn general-purpose models into task-specific classifiers.
By Nirhoshan Sivaroopan, Albert Zomaya, Kanchana Thilakarathna
arXiv:2608. 15614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The use of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for egocentric video understanding with wearable devices is constrained by the token budget.
By Matteo Stoiber, Niels Buus Lassen
The paper presents a comprehensive benchmark for Domain Generalization (DG) in smartphone-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR), running over 410,000 experiments across multiple architectures, training objectives, initialization strategies, and architectural tweaks. It finds that individual DG components offer limited, highly conditional improvements, while combined configurations often yield stronger, sometimes super‑additive gains that depend on the model and shift scenario. The study also highlights that current source‑validation selection captures only a fraction of the potential oracle performance, underscoring the need for joint DG design and robust model‑selection methods.
By Ot\'avio Oliveira Napoli, Edson Borin