We present OLIVE, a framework for adapting a foundation model to provide real-time assistance in temporally demanding, high-stakes, and dynamic tasks. We show that passive EEG, fused online with behavioral evidence, can meaningfully extend the number of targets users detect and engage beyond their unaided action bandwidth. OLIVE learns from both explicit behavioral signals (the targets the user shoots down in an XR first-person shooter game) and implicit physiological signals (fixation-locked EEG) to provide timely guidance, continuously adapting a frozen vision-language model's inference on which items are task-relevant by jointly estimating per-source reliability without manual labels or offline training. Through three user studies, including two live deployments of an assistive agent driven by OLIVE in XR, we show that OLIVE Pareto-dominates prior test-time adaptation frameworks, achieving the highest convergence rate at comparable convergence speed. Combining implicit physiological and explicit behavioral signals, the OLIVE agent produces the largest and most reliable within-session improvement to a user's ability to detect and engage targets, largely independent of the individual's skill. When the target switches silently, the agent that uses both behavioral and physiological signals reconverges significantly faster than the behavior-only agent (1.27 times faster on average, p = .008), restoring trustworthy guidance at the moment the task changes, precisely when reliable assistance matters most.
Jingong Chen, Qingwen Zhang, Sanghyeon Jun +3cs.CV
Continuous-time 4D reconstruction remains impractical on standalone XR headsets. Per-scene optimization demands deployment-infeasible compute, and lower budgets cause collapse rather than degrade gradually. Feed-forward prediction is fast, but struggle to recover scene-specific detail. We present Amortized Anchor Refinement, which uses a frozen backbone to predict an initial Gaussian representation and a short optimization to specialize it under a fixed compute budget, with a capacity floor preserving representational density. A training-free stage then applies a persistent-homology constraint to prune unstable Gaussians while preserving topologically persistent structures, and streams the resulting trajectories directly as scene flow. On the Stage-Capture benchmark, Amortized Anchor Refinement achieves 24.31$\pm$2.22dB, while our deployment experiments demonstrate reconstruction within the target budget on a single consumer GPU and playback on a standalone XR headset.
Ensuring that Extended Reality (XR) environments are age-appropriate is an important regulatory and safety challenge. However, current age assurance operates only at registration and cannot verify the age of the active user during a session. Face-based approaches, the dominant solution in social media and adult platforms, are impractical in XR, because they require removing the headset and taking a self-captured image, often on a mobile app. This both breaks immersion and introduces the privacy risk of sharing face pictures with third parties, which leaves XR platforms without a viable path to continuous, in-session and privacy-preserving age assurance. We propose the dorsal part of the hand as an alternative to the face, by exploiting the egocentric cameras that XR headsets inherently and naturally use to capture gesture interactions. To evaluate this, we collect an age- and sex-stratified, ethnodiverse dataset of 436 participants spanning the minor--adult boundary, captured under unconstrained lighting and orientation conditions. To characterise what is achievable with off-the-shelf methods at the minor--adult boundary, we evaluate standard neural network architectures for age assurance at the legally critical 18-year threshold. Analysis confirms performance is robust to skin-tone variation. On this dataset, the challenge-31 operating point achieves zero minor admission, making the system a viable first-stage filter for age assurance. These findings position dorsal hand morphometrics as an effective and more privacy-preserving biometric modality for in-session age assurance in XR.
Marcos Carvalho, Fatih Temiz, Shavbo Salehi +2cs.NI cs.AI
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) hold strong potential for enabling ultra-reliable low-latency communication for time-sensitive applications, such as eXtended Reality (XR). However, the widespread adoption of XR introduces significant challenges due to co-located services in MEC environments, leading to contention for shared network resources. Moreover, XR traffic types have distinct characteristics and criticality in terms of timing requirements, further increasing the complexity and dynamics of such environments. Although reinforcement learning has shown promise for TSN scheduling optimization in dynamic network scenarios, existing approaches rely on centralized or high-level multi-agent designs and are typically tailored to periodic and predictable industrial traffic, limiting their applicability to XR workloads. As a result, these approaches suffer from (i) limited ability to capture inter-queue dependencies due to coarse-grained control, and (ii) poor adaptability to highly dynamic and heterogeneous XR traffic. To address these gaps, we propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning approach for queue-level XR traffic scheduling. We adopt the multi-agent transformer (MAT) to model inter-queue dependencies via attention over agents' observations and actions, enabling implicit coordination across heterogeneous co-located XR applications. Our simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms baselines, achieving up to 71.42% latency reduction and up to 83.2% reduction in failure rate, while consistently achieving high reliability across all queues.
Extended Reality (XR) presents a challenging use case for 5G and 6G networks, requiring high data-rates and lowlatency communication to deliver a truly immersive experience. Moreover, in order to seamlessly translate physical actions to the virtual world, accurate gesture recognition and pose estimation are required. Current XR interaction solutions based on handheld controllers and cameras cannot easily capture full-body poses, inhibit the free use of hands, and require good visibility and a clear line of sight. In this work, we propose a multimodal sensing architecture for XR that combines 5G MillimeterWave (mmWave) Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and surface electromyography (sEMG) signals. 5G mmWave ISAC cannot only be used to deliver content wirelessly to the Head-mounted display (HMD), but also the same communication signals can be used to derive coarse body-level gestures and poses of the user, to support real-time avatar control. For fine-grained finger-level gestures, our architecture leverages lightweight sEMG sensors that capture forearm muscle activity. To illustrate the need of both modalities, we present evaluations of both sensing technologies. At the body level (5G), our architecture relies on power-per-beam-pair (PPBP), which can be computed from standard beam management or beam sweeping procedures of the 5G NR standard. PPBP-based sensing achieves 82.2$\pm$5.9% average accuracy when evaluated on users not seen during training. For fine-grained finger-level interactions, we show that surface electromyography (sEMG) carries strong discriminative information achieving consistent promising performance across different movement settings. Thus, combining the two modalities enables multi-scale gesture recognition, at the body level via existing 5G signals and finger level via lightweight sEMG sensors, forming a complete XR framework.