An LLM-Empowered Low-Resolution Vision System for On-Device Human Behavior Understanding

The rapid advancements in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) offer the potential to surpass conventional labeling by generating richer, more detailed descriptions of on-device human behavior understanding (HBU) in low-resolution vision systems, such as depth, thermal, and infrared. However, existing large vision language model (LVLM) approaches are unable to understand low-resolution data well as they are primarily designed for high-resolution data, such as RGB images. A quick fixing approach is to caption a large amount of low-resolution data, but it requires a significant amount of labor-intensive annotation efforts. In this paper, we propose a novel, labor-saving system, Llambda, designed to support low-resolution HBU. The core idea is to leverage limited labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data to guide LLMs in generating informative captions, which can be combined with raw data to effectively fine-tune LVLM models for understanding low-resolution videos in HBU. First, we propose a Contrastive-Oriented Data Labeler, which can capture behavior-relevant information from long, low-resolution videos and generate high-quality pseudo labels for unlabeled data via contrastive learning. Second, we propose a Physical-Knowledge Guided Captioner, which utilizes spatial and temporal consistency checks to mitigate errors in pseudo labels. Therefore, it can improve LLMs' understanding of sequential data and then generate high-quality video captions. Finally, to ensure on-device deployability, we employ LoRA-based efficient fine-tuning to adapt LVLMs for low-resolution data. We evaluate Llambda using a region-scale real-world testbed and three distinct low-resolution datasets, and the experiments show that Llambda outperforms several state-of-the-art LVLM systems up to 40.03% on average Bert-Score.