Two RO-MAN papers

The CARES lab has 2 exciting papers to be presented at RO-MAN!

Age-Related Differences in Children’s Spontaneous Gesturing with a Robot versus Human Instructor

(Wilson et al., 2025)

This study examined how children of different ages naturally use gestures when comuicating with social robots versus human instructors. We analyzed pointing, showing, and conventional gestures by 5 to 8 year old children. Our findings reveal that while older children showed decreased rates of show and conventional gestures with humans, their gesture rates remained remarkably consistent across all ages.

ToMCAT: Benchmark for Socially Assistive Robots with Theory of Mind

(Wilson et al., 2025)

This paper introduces a new benchmark for evaluating Theory of Mind capabilities in socially assistive robots. Unlike existing evaluations, ToMCAT features complex goals, multiple solution paths, and real mistakes using tangram puzzle assembly data from real children. We tested baseline performance using an analogical reasoing algorithm and a large language model. The analogical reasoning approach achieved perfect accuracy once at least half of the piece relationships were correctly established, while the LLM correctly identified complete puzzles only 79% of the time and performed even worse on incomplete or error-containing puzzles.

The dataset for this benchmark is now publicly available and can be found at https://github.com/FandM-CARES/ToMCAT