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Sanae Yamashita

Publications and source records attributed to Sanae Yamashita.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Learning from Success and Failure: Acquiring Adaptive Dialogue Strategies for Social Robots

Traditional dialogue systems for social robots require both dialogue strategies and user attribute recognition, each demanding specialized expertise. However, data collection is costly in real-world deployments, and the resulting datasets often include many failure cases. In this study, we aim to automate the acquisition of dialogue strategies by leveraging both successful and failed interactions using a vision-language model (VLM) and a large language model (LLM). We propose an architecture in which user attributes, recognized by the VLM, along with dialogue history, are fed into the LLM to generate dialogue strategies tailored to specific user attributes. We extracted dialogue strategies from an interaction dataset collected through a field experiment and evaluated their effectiveness. The results demonstrate that explicitly representing failure strategies complements success strategies and improves performance. Our findings highlight a practical pipeline for constructing and maintaining an interpretable strategy repository from in-the-wild deployment logs by recycling abundant failure interactions as reusable constraints, ultimately reducing the development cost of social robots.

cs.HC↗

Breaking the 15% Barrier: A Real-World Data-Driven System for Proactive Social Robot Triggered by User Nonverbal Cues

Service robots in retail stores increasingly rely on cascaded speech pipelines (STT-LLM-TTS), yet many customer-robot interactions are initiated or guided by nonverbal behaviors such as approaching, waving, pointing, or showing items. This paper studies such cues in a real-world store deployment with a teleoperated humanoid robot and shows that a non-negligible portion of robot turns are triggered by nonverbal behaviors rather than spoken input, revealing a limitation of audio-only dialogue systems. In a 6-day in-the-wild deployment, 15.3\% of robot utterances were initiated by users' nonverbal behaviors rather than spoken input. Based on an analysis of observed customer behaviors, we define a set of frequent, service-relevant nonverbal cues and develop a real-time multi-person, multi-label recognizer that runs online from video. We then propose a dialogue framework that conditions LLM-based utterance generation on recognized nonverbal cue tokens, and optionally leverages a vision-language model when items are shown, enabling proactive robot responses without hand-crafted rules. We evaluate the approach offline on nonverbal-triggered turns and demonstrate an online prototype that reacts to users' nonverbal cues in real time.

cs.RO↗