As machine learning becomes more widespread and is used in more critical applications, it's important to provide explanations for these models, to prevent unintended behavior. Unfortunately, many current interpretability methods struggle with faithfulness. Therefore, this Ph.D. thesis investigates the question "How to provide and ensure faithful explanations for complex general-purpose neural NLP models?" The main thesis is that we should develop new paradigms in interpretability. This is achieved by first developing solid faithfulness metrics and then applying the lessons learned from this investigation to develop new paradigms. The two new paradigms explored are faithfulness measurable models (FMMs) and self-explanations. The idea in self-explanations is to have large language models explain themselves, we identify that current models are not capable of doing this consistently. However, we suggest how this could be achieved. The idea of FMMs is to create models that are designed such that measuring faithfulness is cheap and precise. This makes it possible to optimize an explanation towards maximum faithfulness, which makes FMMs designed to be explained. We find that FMMs yield explanations that are near theoretical optimal in terms of faithfulness. Overall, from all investigations of faithfulness, results show that post-hoc and intrinsic explanations are by default model and task-dependent. However, this was not the case when using FMMs, even with the same post-hoc explanation methods. This shows, that even simple modifications to the model, such as randomly masking the training dataset, as was done in FMMs, can drastically change the situation and result in consistently faithful explanations. This answers the question of how to provide and ensure faithful explanations.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenge task that combines natural language processing and computer vision techniques and gradually becomes a benchmark test task in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The goal of our survey is to provide an overview of the development of VQA and a detailed description of the latest models with high timeliness. This survey gives an up-to-date synthesis of natural language understanding of images and text, as well as the knowledge reasoning module based on image-question information on the core VQA tasks. In addition, we elaborate on recent advances in extracting and fusing modal information with vision-language pretraining models and multimodal large language models in VQA. We also exhaustively review the progress of knowledge reasoning in VQA by detailing the extraction of internal knowledge and the introduction of external knowledge. Finally, we present the datasets of VQA and different evaluation metrics and discuss possible directions for future work.

Knowledge-enhanced language models (KELMs) have emerged as promising tools to bridge the gap between large-scale language models and domain-specific knowledge. KELMs can achieve higher factual accuracy and mitigate hallucinations by leveraging knowledge graphs (KGs). They are frequently combined with adapter modules to reduce the computational load and risk of catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) on adapter-based approaches to KELMs. We provide a structured overview of existing methodologies in the field through quantitative and qualitative analysis and explore the strengths and potential shortcomings of individual approaches. We show that general knowledge and domain-specific approaches have been frequently explored along with various adapter architectures and downstream tasks. We particularly focused on the popular biomedical domain, where we provided an insightful performance comparison of existing KELMs. We outline the main trends and propose promising future directions.

This study examines conversational business analytics, an approach that utilizes AI to address the technical competency gaps that hinder end users from effectively using traditional self-service analytics. By facilitating natural language interactions, conversational business analytics aims to empower end users to independently retrieve data and generate insights. The analysis focuses on Text-to-SQL as a representative technology for translating natural language requests into SQL statements. Developing theoretical models grounded in expected utility theory, this study identifies the conditions under which conversational business analytics, through partial or full support, can outperform delegation to human experts. The results indicate that partial support, focusing solely on information generation by AI, is viable when the accuracy of AI-generated SQL queries leads to a profit that surpasses the performance of a human expert. In contrast, full support includes not only information generation but also validation through explanations provided by the AI, and requires sufficiently high validation effectiveness to be reliable. However, user-based validation presents challenges, such as misjudgment and rejection of valid SQL queries, which may limit the effectiveness of conversational business analytics. These challenges underscore the need for robust validation mechanisms, including improved user support, automated processes, and methods for assessing quality independent of the technical competency of end users.

Event Causality Identification (ECI) has become a crucial task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), aimed at automatically extracting causalities from textual data. In this survey, we systematically address the foundational principles, technical frameworks, and challenges of ECI, offering a comprehensive taxonomy to categorize and clarify current research methodologies, as well as a quantitative assessment of existing models. We first establish a conceptual framework for ECI, outlining key definitions, problem formulations, and evaluation standards. Our taxonomy classifies ECI methods according to the two primary tasks of sentence-level (SECI) and document-level (DECI) event causality identification. For SECI, we examine feature pattern-based matching, deep semantic encoding, causal knowledge pre-training and prompt-based fine-tuning, and external knowledge enhancement methods. For DECI, we highlight approaches focused on event graph reasoning and prompt-based techniques to address the complexity of cross-sentence causal inference. Additionally, we analyze the strengths, limitations, and open challenges of each approach. We further conduct an extensive quantitative evaluation of various ECI methods on two benchmark datasets. Finally, we explore future research directions, highlighting promising pathways to overcome current limitations and broaden ECI applications.

We present MMDS, a system capable of recognizing medical images and patient facial details, and providing professional medical diagnoses. The system consists of two core components:The first component is the analysis of medical images and videos. We trained a specialized multimodal medical model capable of interpreting medical images and accurately analyzing patients' facial emotions and facial paralysis conditions. The model achieved an accuracy of 72.59% on the FER2013 facial emotion recognition dataset, with a 91.1% accuracy in recognizing the "happy" emotion. In facial paralysis recognition, the model reached an accuracy of 92%, which is 30% higher than that of GPT-4o. Based on this model, we developed a parser for analyzing facial movement videos of patients with facial paralysis, achieving precise grading of the paralysis severity. In tests on 30 videos of facial paralysis patients, the system demonstrated a grading accuracy of 83.3%.The second component is the generation of professional medical responses. We employed a large language model, integrated with a medical knowledge base, to generate professional diagnoses based on the analysis of medical images or videos. The core innovation lies in our development of a department-specific knowledge base routing management mechanism, in which the large language model categorizes data by medical departments and, during the retrieval process, determines the appropriate knowledge base to query. This significantly improves retrieval accuracy in the RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) process.

This study focuses on Intelligent Fault Diagnosis (IFD) in rotating machinery utilizing a single microphone and a data-driven methodology, effectively diagnosing 42 classes of fault types and severities. The research leverages sound data from the imbalanced MaFaulDa dataset, aiming to strike a balance between high performance and low resource consumption. The testing phase encompassed a variety of configurations, including sampling, quantization, signal normalization, silence removal, Wiener filtering, data scaling, windowing, augmentation, and classifier tuning using XGBoost. Through the analysis of time, frequency, mel-frequency, and statistical features, we achieved an impressive accuracy of 99.54% and an F-Beta score of 99.52% with just 6 boosting trees at an 8 kHz, 8-bit configuration. Moreover, when utilizing only MFCCs along with their first- and second-order deltas, we recorded an accuracy of 97.83% and an F-Beta score of 97.67%. Lastly, by implementing a greedy wrapper approach, we obtained a remarkable accuracy of 96.82% and an F-Beta score of 98.86% using 50 selected features, nearly all of which were first- and second-order deltas of the MFCCs.

Advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with recent Knowledge-based VQA tasks, such as INFOSEEK and Encyclopedic-VQA, due to their limited and frozen knowledge scope, often leading to ambiguous and inaccurate responses. Thus, multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) is naturally introduced to provide MLLMs with comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge, effectively expanding the knowledge scope. However, current mRAG methods have inherent drawbacks, including: 1) Performing retrieval even when external knowledge is not needed. 2) Lacking of identification of evidence that supports the query. 3) Increasing model complexity due to additional information filtering modules or rules. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel generalized framework called \textbf{m}ultimodal \textbf{R}etrieval-\textbf{R}eflection-\textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{G}eneration (mR$^2$AG), which achieves adaptive retrieval and useful information localization to enable answers through two easy-to-implement reflection operations, preventing high model complexity. In mR$^2$AG, Retrieval-Reflection is designed to distinguish different user queries and avoids redundant retrieval calls, and Relevance-Reflection is introduced to guide the MLLM in locating beneficial evidence of the retrieved content and generating answers accordingly. In addition, mR$^2$AG can be integrated into any well-trained MLLM with efficient fine-tuning on the proposed mR$^2$AG Instruction-Tuning dataset (mR$^2$AG-IT). mR$^2$AG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art MLLMs (e.g., GPT-4v/o) and RAG-based MLLMs on INFOSEEK and Encyclopedic-VQA, while maintaining the exceptional capabilities of base MLLMs across a wide range of Visual-dependent tasks.

The disparity in access to quality education is significant, both between developed and developing countries and within nations, regardless of their economic status. Socioeconomic barriers and rapid changes in the job market further intensify this issue, highlighting the need for innovative solutions that can deliver quality education at scale and low cost. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing an AI-powered digital learning framework grounded in Deep Learning (DL) theory. The DL theory emphasizes learner agency and redefines the role of teachers as facilitators, making it particularly suitable for scalable educational environments. We outline eight key principles derived from learning science and AI that are essential for implementing DL-based Digital Learning Environments (DLEs). Our proposed framework leverages AI for learner modelling based on Open Learner Modeling (OLM), activity suggestions, and AI-assisted support for both learners and facilitators, fostering collaborative and engaging learning experiences. Our framework provides a promising direction for scalable, high-quality education globally, offering practical solutions to some of the AI-related challenges in education.

The development of artificial intelligence systems capable of understanding and reasoning about complex real-world scenarios is a significant challenge. In this work we present a novel approach to enhance and exploit LLM reactive capability to address complex problems and interpret deeply contextual real-world meaning. We introduce a method and a tool for creating a multimodal, knowledge-augmented formal representation of meaning that combines the strengths of large language models with structured semantic representations. Our method begins with an image input, utilizing state-of-the-art large language models to generate a natural language description. This description is then transformed into an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph, which is formalized and enriched with logical design patterns, and layered semantics derived from linguistic and factual knowledge bases. The resulting graph is then fed back into the LLM to be extended with implicit knowledge activated by complex heuristic learning, including semantic implicatures, moral values, embodied cognition, and metaphorical representations. By bridging the gap between unstructured language models and formal semantic structures, our method opens new avenues for tackling intricate problems in natural language understanding and reasoning.