Although engagement in self-directed wellness exercises typically declines over time, integrating social support such as coaching can sustain it. However, traditional forms of support are often inaccessible due to the high costs and complex coordination. Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in providing human-like dialogues that could emulate social support. Yet, in-depth, in situ investigations of LLMs to support behavior change remain underexplored. We conducted two randomized experiments to assess the impact of LLM agents on user engagement with mindfulness exercises. First, a single-session study, involved 502 crowdworkers; second, a three-week study, included 54 participants. We explored two types of LLM agents: one providing information and another facilitating self-reflection. Both agents enhanced users' intentions to practice mindfulness. However, only the information-providing LLM, featuring a friendly persona, significantly improved engagement with the exercises. Our findings suggest that specific LLM agents may bridge the social support gap in digital health interventions.

Others, accent identification (AID) models are used to generate embeddings [19, 20]. For instance, the Currently, end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition methods authors in [21, 22] suggest connecting accent embeddings and have achieved promising performance. However, auto speech acoustic features to adapt the acoustic model. In [23], they utilized recognition (ASR) models still face challenges in recognizing well-trained accent classifiers to extract accent embedding multi-accent speech accurately. We propose a layer-adapted fusion for layer-to-layer adaptation of E2E ASR models. A multi-task (LAF) model, called Qifusion-Net, which does not require framework was proposed in [21, 24] to jointly model ASR and any prior knowledge about the target accent. Based on dynamic AID tasks. All previous researches have significantly enhanced chunk strategy, our approach enables streaming decoding and the accuracy of accent speech recognition in specific contexts.

This study employs cutting-edge wearable monitoring technology to conduct high-precision, high-temporal-resolution (1-second interval) cognitive load assessment on electroencephalogram (EEG) data from the FP1 channel and heart rate variability (HRV) data of secondary vocational students. By jointly analyzing these two critical physiological indicators, the research delves into their application value in assessing cognitive load among secondary vocational students and their utility across various tasks. The study designed two experiments to validate the efficacy of the proposed approach: Initially, a random forest classification model, developed using the N-BACK task, enabled the precise decoding of physiological signal characteristics in secondary vocational students under different levels of cognitive load, achieving a classification accuracy of 97%. Subsequently, this classification model was applied in a cross-task experiment involving the National Computer Rank Examination (Level-1), demonstrating the method's significant applicability and cross-task transferability in diverse learning contexts. Conducted with high portability, this research holds substantial theoretical and practical significance for optimizing teaching resource allocation in secondary vocational education, as well as for cognitive load assessment methods and monitoring. Currently, the research findings are undergoing trial implementation in the school.

Sign language, essential for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, presents unique challenges in translation and production due to its multimodal nature and the inherent ambiguity in mapping sign language motion to spoken language words. Previous methods often rely on gloss annotations, requiring time-intensive labor and specialized expertise in sign language. Gloss-free methods have emerged to address these limitations, but they often depend on external sign language data or dictionaries, failing to completely eliminate the need for gloss annotations. There is a clear demand for a comprehensive approach that can supplant gloss annotations and be utilized for both Sign Language Translation (SLT) and Sign Language Production (SLP). We introduce Universal Gloss-level Representation (UniGloR), a unified and self-supervised solution for both SLT and SLP, trained on multiple datasets including PHOENIX14T, How2Sign, and NIASL2021. Our results demonstrate UniGloR's effectiveness in the translation and production tasks. We further report an encouraging result for the Sign Language Recognition (SLR) on previously unseen data. Our study suggests that self-supervised learning can be made in a unified manner, paving the way for innovative and practical applications in future research.

Large language models (LLMs) are used for long-form question answering (LFQA), which requires them to generate paragraph-length answers to complex questions. While LFQA has been well-studied in English, this research has not been extended to other languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce CaLMQA, a collection of 1.5K complex culturally specific questions spanning 23 languages and 51 culturally agnostic questions translated from English into 22 other languages. We define culturally specific questions as those uniquely or more likely to be asked by people from cultures associated with the question's language. We collect naturally-occurring questions from community web forums and hire native speakers to write questions to cover under-resourced, rarely-studied languages such as Fijian and Kirundi. Our dataset contains diverse, complex questions that reflect cultural topics (e.g. traditions, laws, news) and the language usage of native speakers. We automatically evaluate a suite of open- and closed-source models on CaLMQA by detecting incorrect language and token repetitions in answers, and observe that the quality of LLM-generated answers degrades significantly for some low-resource languages. Lastly, we perform human evaluation on a subset of models and languages. Manual evaluation reveals that model performance is significantly worse for culturally specific questions than for culturally agnostic questions. Our findings highlight the need for further research in non-English LFQA and provide an evaluation framework.

Pre-trained models produce strong generic representations that can be adapted via fine-tuning. The learned weight difference relative to the pre-trained model, known as a task vector, characterises the direction and stride of fine-tuning. The significance of task vectors is such that simple arithmetic operations on them can be used to combine diverse representations from different domains. This paper builds on these properties of task vectors and aims to answer (1) whether components of task vectors, particularly parameter blocks, exhibit similar characteristics, and (2) how such blocks can be used to enhance knowledge composition and transfer. To this end, we introduce aTLAS, an algorithm that linearly combines parameter blocks with different learned coefficients, resulting in anisotropic scaling at the task vector level. We show that such linear combinations explicitly exploit the low intrinsic dimensionality of pre-trained models, with only a few coefficients being the learnable parameters. Furthermore, composition of parameter blocks leverages the already learned representations, thereby reducing the dependency on large amounts of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in task arithmetic, few-shot recognition and test-time adaptation, with supervised or unsupervised objectives. In particular, we show that (1) learned anisotropic scaling allows task vectors to be more disentangled, causing less interference in composition; (2) task vector composition excels with scarce or no labeled data and is less prone to domain shift, thus leading to better generalisability; (3) mixing the most informative parameter blocks across different task vectors prior to training can reduce the memory footprint and improve the flexibility of knowledge transfer. Moreover, we show the potential of aTLAS as a PEFT method, particularly with less data, and demonstrate that its scalibility.

Length generalization refers to the ability to extrapolate from short training sequences to long test sequences and is a challenge for current large language models. While prior work has proposed some architecture or data format changes to achieve length generalization, these proposals typically apply to a limited set of tasks. Building on prior scratchpad and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques, we propose Turing Programs, a novel CoT strategy that decomposes an algorithmic task into steps mimicking the computation of a Turing Machine. This framework is both universal, as it can accommodate any algorithmic task, and simple, requiring only copying text from the context with small modifications. We show that by using Turing Programs, we obtain robust length generalization on a range of algorithmic tasks: addition, multiplication and in-context SGD. We then demonstrate that transformers achieve length generalization on random Turing Programs, suggesting that length generalization is possible for any algorithmic task. Finally, we theoretically prove that transformers can implement Turing Programs, constructing a simple RASP (Weiss et al. [53]) program that simulates an arbitrary Turing machine.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks, but fall short of the performance of supervised methods in generalizing to downstream tasks with limited data. Prompt learning is emerging as a parameter-efficient method for adapting VLMs, but state-of-the-art approaches require annotated samples. In this paper we propose a novel approach to prompt learning based on unsupervised knowledge distillation from more powerful models. Our approach, which we call Knowledge Distillation Prompt Learning (KDPL), can be integrated into existing prompt learning techniques and eliminates the need for labeled examples during adaptation. Our experiments on more than ten standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that KDPL is very effective at improving generalization of learned prompts for zero-shot domain generalization, zero-shot cross-dataset generalization, and zero-shot base-to-novel class generalization problems. KDPL requires no ground-truth labels for adaptation, and moreover we show that even in the absence of any knowledge of training class names it can be used to effectively transfer knowledge. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/miccunifi/KDPL.

Despite the various FCE passages retrieved from external retrievers or search engines [27], methods proposed earlier, these methods are evaluated on datasets has demonstrated strong performance on various knowledge intensive generated by specific Large Language Models (LLMs). Without a tasks such as open domain conversation [38, 41] and question comprehensive benchmark, it remains unexplored how these FCE answering [19]. Despite its bright prospect, factual consistency remains methods perform on other LLMs with different error distributions a critical issue for RAG systems. Recent assessment reveals or even unseen error types, as these methods may fail to detect the that even for the leading-edge commercial RAG systems like Bing error types generated by other LLMs. To fill this gap, in this paper, Chat and Perplexity, barely over half of their outputs are factual we propose the first comprehensive FCE benchmark Face4RAG for consistent with the references [29]. This issue urges the need of RAG independent of the underlying LLM. Our benchmark consists studying factual consistency evaluation (FCE) in the RAG task. of a synthetic dataset built upon a carefully designed typology for Various FCE methods have been proposed to evaluate the factual factuality inconsistency error and a real-world dataset constructed consistency of specific RAG systems, among which a two-step from six commonly used LLMs, enabling evaluation of FCE methods approach shows promising results, especially for evaluating long on specific error types or real-world error distributions.

Large language models (LLMs) appear to bias their survey answers toward certain values. Nonetheless, some argue that LLMs are too inconsistent to simulate particular values. Are they? To answer, we first define value consistency as the similarity of answers across (1) paraphrases of one question, (2) related questions under one topic, (3) multiple-choice and open-ended use-cases of one question, and (4) multilingual translations of a question to English, Chinese, German, and Japanese. We apply these measures to a few large ($>=34b$), open LLMs including llama-3, as well as gpt-4o, using eight thousand questions spanning more than 300 topics. Unlike prior work, we find that models are relatively consistent across paraphrases, use-cases, translations, and within a topic. Still, some inconsistencies remain. Models are more consistent on uncontroversial topics (e.g., in the U.S., "Thanksgiving") than on controversial ones ("euthanasia"). Base models are both more consistent compared to fine-tuned models and are uniform in their consistency across topics, while fine-tuned models are more inconsistent about some topics ("euthanasia") than others ("women's rights") like our human subjects (n=165).