Language-Agnostic Suicidal Risk Detection Using Large Language Models

Suicidal risk detection in adolescents is a critical challenge, yet existing methods rely on language-specific models, limiting scalability and generalization. This study introduces a novel language-agnostic framework for suicidal risk assessment with large language models (LLMs). We generate Chinese transcripts from speech using an ASR model and then employ LLMs with prompt-based queries to extract suicidal risk-related features from these transcripts. The extracted features are retained in both Chinese and English to enable cross-linguistic analysis and then used to fine-tune corresponding pretrained language models independently. Experimental results show that our method achieves performance comparable to direct fine-tuning with ASR results or to models trained solely on Chinese suicidal risk-related features, demonstrating its potential to overcome language constraints and improve the robustness of suicidal risk assessment.

EndoForce: Development of an Intuitive Axial Force Measurement Device for Endoscopic Robotic Systems

Robotic endoscopic systems provide intuitive control and eliminate radiation exposure, making them a promising alternative to conventional methods. However, the lack of axial force measurement from the robot remains a major challenge, as it can lead to excessive colonic elongation, perforation, or ureteral complications. Although various methods have been proposed in previous studies, limitations such as model dependency, bulkiness, and environmental sensitivity remain challenges that should be addressed before clinical application. In this study, we propose EndoForce, a device designed for intuitive and accurate axial force measurement in endoscopic robotic systems. Inspired by the insertion motion performed by medical doctors during ureteroscopy and gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy, EndoForce ensures precise force measuring while maintaining compatibility with clinical environments. The device features a streamlined design, allowing for the easy attachment and detachment of a sterile cover, and incorporates a commercial load cell to enhance cost-effectiveness and facilitate practical implementation in real medical applications. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed EndoForce, physical experiments were performed using a testbed that simulates the ureter. We show that the axial force generated during insertion was measured with high accuracy, regardless of whether the pathway was straight or curved, in a testbed simulating the human ureter.

Domain Adversarial Training for Mitigating Gender Bias in Speech-based Mental Health Detection

Speech-based AI models are emerging as powerful tools for detecting depression and the presence of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), offering a non-invasive and cost-effective way to assess mental health. However, these models often struggle with gender bias, which can lead to unfair and inaccurate predictions. In this study, our study addresses this issue by introducing a domain adversarial training approach that explicitly considers gender differences in speech-based depression and PTSD detection. Specifically, we treat different genders as distinct domains and integrate this information into a pretrained speech foundation model. We then validate its effectiveness on the E-DAIC dataset to assess its impact on performance. Experimental results show that our method notably improves detection performance, increasing the F1-score by up to 13.29 percentage points compared to the baseline. This highlights the importance of addressing demographic disparities in AI-driven mental health assessment.

What is a Good Question? Utility Estimation with LLM-based Simulations

Asking questions is a fundamental aspect of learning that facilitates deeper understanding. However, characterizing and crafting questions that effectively improve learning remains elusive. To address this gap, we propose QUEST (Question Utility Estimation with Simulated Tests). QUEST simulates a learning environment that enables the quantification of a question's utility based on its direct impact on improving learning outcomes. Furthermore, we can identify high-utility questions and use them to fine-tune question generation models with rejection sampling. We find that questions generated by models trained with rejection sampling based on question utility result in exam scores that are higher by at least 20% than those from specialized prompting grounded on educational objectives literature and models fine-tuned with indirect measures of question quality, such as saliency and expected information gain.

REALTALK: A 21-Day Real-World Dataset for Long-Term Conversation

Long-term, open-domain dialogue capabilities are essential for chatbots aiming to recall past interactions and demonstrate emotional intelligence (EI). Yet, most existing research relies on synthetic, LLM-generated data, leaving open questions about real-world conversational patterns. To address this gap, we introduce REALTALK, a 21-day corpus of authentic messaging app dialogues, providing a direct benchmark against genuine human interactions. We first conduct a dataset analysis, focusing on EI attributes and persona consistency to understand the unique challenges posed by real-world dialogues. By comparing with LLM-generated conversations, we highlight key differences, including diverse emotional expressions and variations in persona stability that synthetic dialogues often fail to capture. Building on these insights, we introduce two benchmark tasks: (1) persona simulation where a model continues a conversation on behalf of a specific user given prior dialogue context; and (2) memory probing where a model answers targeted questions requiring long-term memory of past interactions. Our findings reveal that models struggle to simulate a user solely from dialogue history, while fine-tuning on specific user chats improves persona emulation. Additionally, existing models face significant challenges in recalling and leveraging long-term context within real-world conversations.

STAR: A Simple Training-free Approach for Recommendations using Large Language Models

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) offers promising new approaches for recommendation system (RecSys) tasks. While the current state-of-the-art methods rely on fine-tuning LLMs to achieve optimal results, this process is costly and introduces significant engineering complexities. Conversely, methods that bypass fine-tuning and use LLMs directly are less resource-intensive but often fail to fully capture both semantic and collaborative information, resulting in sub-optimal performance compared to their fine-tuned counterparts. In this paper, we propose a Simple Training-free Approach for Recommendation (STAR), a framework that utilizes LLMs and can be applied to various recommendation tasks without the need for fine-tuning. Our approach involves a retrieval stage that uses semantic embeddings from LLMs combined with collaborative user information to retrieve candidate items. We then apply an LLM for pairwise ranking to enhance next-item prediction. Experimental results on the Amazon Review dataset show competitive performance for next item prediction, even with our retrieval stage alone. Our full method achieves Hits@10 performance of +23.8% on Beauty, +37.5% on Toys and Games, and -1.8% on Sports and Outdoors relative to the best supervised models. This framework offers an effective alternative to traditional supervised models, highlighting the potential of LLMs in recommendation systems without extensive training or custom architectures.

Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents

Existing works on long-term open-domain dialogues focus on evaluating model responses within contexts spanning no more than five chat sessions. Despite advancements in long-context large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques, their efficacy in very long-term dialogues remains unexplored. To address this research gap, we introduce a machine-human pipeline to generate high-quality, very long-term dialogues by leveraging LLM-based agent architectures and grounding their dialogues on personas and temporal event graphs. Moreover, we equip each agent with the capability of sharing and reacting to images. The generated conversations are verified and edited by human annotators for long-range consistency and grounding to the event graphs. Using this pipeline, we collect LoCoMo, a dataset of very long-term conversations, each encompassing 300 turns and 9K tokens on avg., over up to 35 sessions. Based on LoCoMo, we present a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to measure long-term memory in models, encompassing question answering, event summarization, and multi-modal dialogue generation tasks. Our experimental results indicate that LLMs exhibit challenges in understanding lengthy conversations and comprehending long-range temporal and causal dynamics within dialogues. Employing strategies like long-context LLMs or RAG can offer improvements but these models still substantially lag behind human performance.

Integrating Pre-Trained Language Model with Physical Layer Communications

The burgeoning field of on-device AI communication, where devices exchange information directly through embedded foundation models, such as language models (LMs), requires robust, efficient, and generalizable communication frameworks. However, integrating these frameworks with existing wireless systems and effectively managing noise and bit errors pose significant challenges. In this work, we introduce a practical on-device AI communication framework, integrated with physical layer (PHY) communication functions, demonstrated through its performance on a link-level simulator. Our framework incorporates end-to-end training with channel noise to enhance resilience, incorporates vector quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAE) for efficient and robust communication, and utilizes pre-trained encoder-decoder transformers for improved generalization capabilities. Simulations, across various communication scenarios, reveal that our framework achieves a 50% reduction in transmission size while demonstrating substantial generalization ability and noise robustness under standardized 3GPP channel models.

PLUG: Leveraging Pivot Language in Cross-Lingual Instruction Tuning

Instruction tuning has remarkably advanced large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to diverse human instructions. Despite the success in high-resource languages, its application in lower-resource ones faces challenges due to the imbalanced foundational abilities of LLMs across different languages, stemming from the uneven language distribution in their pre-training data. To tackle this issue, we propose pivot language guided generation (PLUG), an approach that utilizes a high-resource language, primarily English, as the pivot to enhance instruction tuning in lower-resource languages. It trains the model to first process instructions in the pivot language, and then produce responses in the target language. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a benchmark, X-AlpacaEval, of instructions in 4 languages (Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish), each annotated by professional translators. Our approach demonstrates a significant improvement in the instruction-following abilities of LLMs by 29% on average, compared to directly responding in the target language alone. Further experiments validate the versatility of our approach by employing alternative pivot languages beyond English to assist languages where LLMs exhibit lower proficiency.

Making Large Language Models Better Data Creators

Although large language models (LLMs) have advanced the state-of-the-art in NLP significantly, deploying them for downstream applications is still challenging due to cost, responsiveness, control, or concerns around privacy and security. As such, trainable models are still the preferred option in some cases. However, these models still require human-labeled data for optimal performance, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. In order to address this issue, several techniques to reduce human effort involve labeling or generating data using LLMs. Although these methods are effective for certain applications, in practice they encounter difficulties in real-world scenarios. Labeling data requires careful data selection, while generating data necessitates task-specific prompt engineering. In this paper, we propose a unified data creation pipeline that requires only a single formatting example, and which is applicable to a broad range of tasks, including traditionally problematic ones with semantically devoid label spaces. In our experiments we demonstrate that instruction-following LLMs are highly cost-effective data creators, and that models trained with these data exhibit performance better than those trained with human-labeled data (by up to 17.5%) on out-of-distribution evaluation, while maintaining comparable performance on in-distribution tasks. These results have important implications for the robustness of NLP systems deployed in the real-world.