Can We Improve Educational Diagram Generation with In-Context Examples? Not if a Hallucination Spoils the Bunch

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has found a widespread use in computing education; at the same time, quality of generated materials raises concerns among educators and students. This study addresses this issue by introducing a novel method for diagram code generation with in-context examples based on the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), which aims to improve diagram generation by aligning models' output with user expectations. Our approach is evaluated by computer science educators, who assessed 150 diagrams generated with large language models (LLMs) for logical organization, connectivity, layout aesthetic, and AI hallucination. The assessment dataset is additionally investigated for its utility in automated diagram evaluation. The preliminary results suggest that our method decreases the rate of factual hallucination and improves diagram faithfulness to provided context; however, due to LLMs' stochasticity, the quality of the generated diagrams varies. Additionally, we present an in-depth analysis and discussion on the connection between AI hallucination and the quality of generated diagrams, which reveals that text contexts of higher complexity lead to higher rates of hallucination and LLMs often fail to detect mistakes in their output.

AI2D-RST: A multimodal corpus of 1000 primary school science diagrams

This article introduces AI2D-RST, a multimodal corpus of 1000 English-language diagrams that represent topics in primary school natural science, such as food webs, life cycles, moon phases and human physiology. The corpus is based on the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Diagrams (AI2D) dataset, a collection of diagrams with crowd-sourced descriptions, which was originally developed for computational tasks such as automatic diagram understanding and visual question answering. Building on the segmentation of diagram layouts in AI2D, the AI2D-RST corpus presents a new multi-layer annotation schema that provides a rich description of their multimodal structure. Annotated by trained experts, the layers describe (1) the grouping of diagram elements into perceptual units, (2) the connections set up by diagrammatic elements such as arrows and lines, and (3) the discourse relations between diagram elements, which are described using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Each annotation layer in AI2D-RST is represented using a graph. The corpus is freely available for research and teaching.