Oceania
HintEval: A Comprehensive Framework for Hint Generation and Evaluation for Questions
Mozafari, Jamshid, Piryani, Bhawna, Abdallah, Abdelrahman, Jatowt, Adam
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming how people find information, and many users turn nowadays to chatbots to obtain answers to their questions. Despite the instant access to abundant information that LLMs offer, it is still important to promote critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Automatic hint generation is a new task that aims to support humans in answering questions by themselves by creating hints that guide users toward answers without directly revealing them. In this context, hint evaluation focuses on measuring the quality of hints, helping to improve the hint generation approaches. However, resources for hint research are currently spanning different formats and datasets, while the evaluation tools are missing or incompatible, making it hard for researchers to compare and test their models. To overcome these challenges, we introduce HintEval, a Python library that makes it easy to access diverse datasets and provides multiple approaches to generate and evaluate hints. HintEval aggregates the scattered resources into a single toolkit that supports a range of research goals and enables a clear, multi-faceted, and reliable evaluation. The proposed library also includes detailed online documentation, helping users quickly explore its features and get started. By reducing barriers to entry and encouraging consistent evaluation practices, HintEval offers a major step forward for facilitating hint generation and analysis research within the NLP/IR community.
IEEEICM25: "A High-Performance Disturbance Observer"
This paper proposes a novel Disturbance Observer, termed the High-Performance Disturbance Observer, which achieves more accurate disturbance estimation compared to the conventional disturbance observer, thereby delivering significant improvements in robustness and performance for motion control systems.
UniGraph2: Learning a Unified Embedding Space to Bind Multimodal Graphs
He, Yufei, Sui, Yuan, He, Xiaoxin, Liu, Yue, Sun, Yifei, Hooi, Bryan
Existing foundation models, such as CLIP, aim to learn a unified embedding space for multimodal data, enabling a wide range of downstream web-based applications like search, recommendation, and content classification. However, these models often overlook the inherent graph structures in multimodal datasets, where entities and their relationships are crucial. Multimodal graphs (MMGs) represent such graphs where each node is associated with features from different modalities, while the edges capture the relationships between these entities. On the other hand, existing graph foundation models primarily focus on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) and are not designed to handle the complexities of MMGs. To address these limitations, we propose UniGraph2, a novel cross-domain graph foundation model that enables general representation learning on MMGs, providing a unified embedding space. UniGraph2 employs modality-specific encoders alongside a graph neural network (GNN) to learn a unified low-dimensional embedding space that captures both the multimodal information and the underlying graph structure. We propose a new cross-domain multi-graph pre-training algorithm at scale to ensure effective transfer learning across diverse graph domains and modalities. Additionally, we adopt a Mixture of Experts (MoE) component to align features from different domains and modalities, ensuring coherent and robust embeddings that unify the information across modalities. Extensive experiments on a variety of multimodal graph tasks demonstrate that UniGraph2 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in tasks such as representation learning, transfer learning, and multimodal generative tasks, offering a scalable and flexible solution for learning on MMGs.
Zero-Shot Warning Generation for Misinformative Multimodal Content
Delvecchio, Giovanni Pio, Nguyen, Huy Hong, Echizen, Isao
The widespread prevalence of misinformation poses significant societal concerns. Out-of-context misinformation, where authentic images are paired with false text, is particularly deceptive and easily misleads audiences. Most existing detection methods primarily evaluate image-text consistency but often lack sufficient explanations, which are essential for effectively debunking misinformation. We present a model that detects multimodal misinformation through cross-modality consistency checks, requiring minimal training time. Additionally, we propose a lightweight model that achieves competitive performance using only one-third of the parameters. We also introduce a dual-purpose zero-shot learning task for generating contextualized warnings, enabling automated debunking and enhancing user comprehension. Qualitative and human evaluations of the generated warnings highlight both the potential and limitations of our approach.
Faster Configuration Performance Bug Testing with Neural Dual-level Prioritization
Ma, Youpeng, Chen, Tao, Li, Ke
As software systems become more complex and configurable, more performance problems tend to arise from the configuration designs. This has caused some configuration options to unexpectedly degrade performance which deviates from their original expectations designed by the developers. Such discrepancies, namely configuration performance bugs (CPBugs), are devastating and can be deeply hidden in the source code. Yet, efficiently testing CPBugs is difficult, not only due to the test oracle is hard to set, but also because the configuration measurement is expensive and there are simply too many possible configurations to test. As such, existing testing tools suffer from lengthy runtime or have been ineffective in detecting CPBugs when the budget is limited, compounded by inaccurate test oracle. In this paper, we seek to achieve significantly faster CPBug testing by neurally prioritizing the testing at both the configuration option and value range levels with automated oracle estimation. Our proposed tool, dubbed NDP, is a general framework that works with different heuristic generators. The idea is to leverage two neural language models: one to estimate the CPBug types that serve as the oracle while, more vitally, the other to infer the probabilities of an option being CPBug-related, based on which the options and the value ranges to be searched can be prioritized. Experiments on several widely-used systems of different versions reveal that NDP can, in general, better predict CPBug type in 87% cases and find more CPBugs with up to 88.88x testing efficiency speedup over the state-of-the-art tools.
Personalized Image Generation with Large Multimodal Models
Xu, Yiyan, Wang, Wenjie, Zhang, Yang, Tang, Biao, Yan, Peng, Feng, Fuli, He, Xiangnan
Personalized content filtering, such as recommender systems, has become a critical infrastructure to alleviate information overload. However, these systems merely filter existing content and are constrained by its limited diversity, making it difficult to meet users' varied content needs. To address this limitation, personalized content generation has emerged as a promising direction with broad applications. Nevertheless, most existing research focuses on personalized text generation, with relatively little attention given to personalized image generation. The limited work in personalized image generation faces challenges in accurately capturing users' visual preferences and needs from noisy user-interacted images and complex multimodal instructions. Worse still, there is a lack of supervised data for training personalized image generation models. To overcome the challenges, we propose a Personalized Image Generation Framework named Pigeon, which adopts exceptional large multimodal models with three dedicated modules to capture users' visual preferences and needs from noisy user history and multimodal instructions. To alleviate the data scarcity, we introduce a two-stage preference alignment scheme, comprising masked preference reconstruction and pairwise preference alignment, to align Pigeon with the personalized image generation task. We apply Pigeon to personalized sticker and movie poster generation, where extensive quantitative results and human evaluation highlight its superiority over various generative baselines.
A Comprehensive Analysis on LLM-based Node Classification Algorithms
Wu, Xixi, Shen, Yifei, Ge, Fangzhou, Shan, Caihua, Jiao, Yizhu, Sun, Xiangguo, Cheng, Hong
Node classification is a fundamental task in graph analysis, with broad applications across various fields. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled LLM-based approaches for this task. Although many studies demonstrate the impressive performance of LLM-based methods, the lack of clear design guidelines may hinder their practical application. In this work, we aim to establish such guidelines through a fair and systematic comparison of these algorithms. As a first step, we developed LLMNodeBed, a comprehensive codebase and testbed for node classification using LLMs. It includes ten datasets, eight LLM-based algorithms, and three learning paradigms, and is designed for easy extension with new methods and datasets. Subsequently, we conducted extensive experiments, training and evaluating over 2,200 models, to determine the key settings (e.g., learning paradigms and homophily) and components (e.g., model size) that affect performance. Our findings uncover eight insights, e.g., (1) LLM-based methods can significantly outperform traditional methods in a semi-supervised setting, while the advantage is marginal in a supervised setting; (2) Graph Foundation Models can beat open-source LLMs but still fall short of strong LLMs like GPT-4o in a zero-shot setting. We hope that the release of LLMNodeBed, along with our insights, will facilitate reproducible research and inspire future studies in this field. Codes and datasets are released at \href{https://llmnodebed.github.io/}{https://llmnodebed.github.io/}.
"Would You Want an AI Tutor?" Understanding Stakeholder Perceptions of LLM-based Chatbots in the Classroom
Fuligni, Caterina, Figaredo, Daniel Dominguez, Stoyanovich, Julia
In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly gained popularity across all parts of society, including education. After initial skepticism and bans, many schools have chosen to embrace this new technology by integrating it into their curricula in the form of virtual tutors and teaching assistants. However, neither the companies developing this technology nor the public institutions involved in its implementation have set up a formal system to collect feedback from the stakeholders impacted by them. In this paper, we argue that understanding the perceptions of those directly affected by LLMS in the classroom, such as students and teachers, as well as those indirectly impacted, like parents and school staff, is essential for ensuring responsible use of AI in this critical domain. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we present results of a literature review focusing on the perceptions of LLM-based chatbots in education. We highlight important gaps in the literature, such as the exclusion of key educational agents (e.g., parents or school administrators) when analyzing the role of stakeholders, and the frequent omission of the learning contexts in which the AI systems are implemented. Thus, we present a taxonomy that organizes existing literature on stakeholder perceptions. Second, we propose the Contextualized Perceptions for the Adoption of Chatbots in Education (Co-PACE) framework, which can be used to systematically elicit perceptions and inform whether and how LLM-based chatbots should be designed, developed, and deployed in the classroom.
Revealed: What life on Earth will look like in 2100 - with entire cities plunged underwater and millions of people perishing in the heat
From Snowpiercer to The Day After Tomorrow, countless movies and series have put forward their vision of how climate change might reshape the world. Worryingly, scientists predict that the reality might be far more shocking than anything imagined by a Hollywood studio. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) reveals what this might look like. With Google's ImageFX AI image generator, MailOnline has used the latest scientific research to predict how the world will be in 2100. As greenhouse gas levels continue to increase, scientists predict that entire cities will be plunged under water.
MODS: Moderating a Mixture of Document Speakers to Summarize Debatable Queries in Document Collections
Balepur, Nishant, Siu, Alexa, Lipka, Nedim, Dernoncourt, Franck, Sun, Tong, Boyd-Graber, Jordan, Mathur, Puneet
Query-focused summarization (QFS) gives a summary of documents to answer a query. Past QFS work assumes queries have one answer, ignoring debatable ones (Is law school worth it?). We introduce Debatable QFS (DQFS), a task to create summaries that answer debatable queries via documents with opposing perspectives; summaries must comprehensively cover all sources and balance perspectives, favoring no side. These goals elude LLM QFS systems, which: 1) lack structured content plans, failing to guide LLMs to write balanced summaries, and 2) use the same query to retrieve contexts across documents, failing to cover all perspectives specific to each document's content. To overcome this, we design MODS, a multi-LLM framework mirroring human panel discussions. MODS treats documents as individual Speaker LLMs and has a Moderator LLM that picks speakers to respond to tailored queries for planned topics. Speakers use tailored queries to retrieve relevant contexts from their documents and supply perspectives, which are tracked in a rich outline, yielding a content plan to guide the final summary. Experiments on ConflictingQA with controversial web queries and DebateQFS, our new dataset of debate queries from Debatepedia, show MODS beats SOTA by 38-59% in topic paragraph coverage and balance, based on new citation metrics. Users also find MODS's summaries to be readable and more balanced.