ReSPEC: A Framework for Online Multispectral Sensor Reconfiguration in Dynamic Environments

Multi-sensor fusion is central to robust robotic perception, yet most existing systems operate under static sensor configurations, collecting all modalities at fixed rates and fidelity regardless of their situational utility. This rigidity wastes bandwidth, computation, and energy, and prevents systems from prioritizing sensors under challenging conditions such as poor lighting or occlusion. Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) and modality-aware fusion suggest the potential for adaptive perception, but prior efforts have largely focused on re-weighting features at inference time, ignoring the physical cost of sensor data collection. We introduce a framework that unifies sensing, learning, and actuation into a closed reconfiguration loop. A task-specific detection backbone extracts multispectral features (e.g. RGB, IR, mmWave, depth) and produces quantitative contribution scores for each modality. These scores are passed to an RL agent, which dynamically adjusts sensor configurations, including sampling frequency, resolution, sensing range, and etc., in real time. Less informative sensors are down-sampled or deactivated, while critical sensors are sampled at higher fidelity as environmental conditions evolve. We implement and evaluate this framework on a mobile rover, showing that adaptive control reduces GPU load by 29.3\% with only a 5.3\% accuracy drop compared to a heuristic baseline. These results highlight the potential of resource-aware adaptive sensing for embedded robotic platforms.

LLM-based Conversational AI Therapist for Daily Functioning Screening and Psychotherapeutic Intervention via Everyday Smart Devices

Despite the global mental health crisis, access to screenings, professionals, and treatments remains high. In collaboration with licensed psychotherapists, we propose a Conversational AI Therapist with psychotherapeutic Interventions (CaiTI), a platform that leverages large language models (LLM)s and smart devices to enable better mental health self-care. CaiTI can screen the day-to-day functioning using natural and psychotherapeutic conversations. CaiTI leverages reinforcement learning to provide personalized conversation flow. CaiTI can accurately understand and interpret user responses. When the user needs further attention during the conversation, CaiTI can provide conversational psychotherapeutic interventions, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and motivational interviewing (MI). Leveraging the datasets prepared by the licensed psychotherapists, we experiment and microbenchmark various LLMs' performance in tasks along CaiTI's conversation flow and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. With the psychotherapists, we implement CaiTI and conduct 14-day and 24-week studies. The study results, validated by therapists, demonstrate that CaiTI can converse with users naturally, accurately understand and interpret user responses, and provide psychotherapeutic interventions appropriately and effectively. We showcase the potential of CaiTI LLMs to assist the mental therapy diagnosis and treatment and improve day-to-day functioning screening and precautionary psychotherapeutic intervention systems.