Assessing the influence of attractor-verb distance on grammatical agreement in humans and language models

Subject-verb agreement in the presence of an attractor noun located between the main noun and the verb elicits complex behavior: judgments of grammaticality are modulated by the grammatical features of the attractor. For example, in the sentence "The girl near the boys likes climbing", the attractor (boys) disagrees in grammatical number with the verb (likes), creating a locally implausible transition probability. Here, we parametrically modulate the distance between the attractor and the verb while keeping the length of the sentence equal. We evaluate the performance of both humans and two artificial neural network models: both make more mistakes when the attractor is closer to the verb, but neural networks get close to the chance level while humans are mostly able to overcome the attractor interference. Additionally, we report a linear effect of attractor distance on reaction times. We hypothesize that a possible reason for the proximity effect is the calculation of transition probabilities between adjacent words. Nevertheless, classical models of attraction such as the cue-based model might suffice to explain this phenomenon, thus paving the way for new research. Data and analyses available at https://osf.io/d4g6k

Mental state attribution to educational robots: an experience with children in primary school

The work presented in this paper was carried out in the context of the project Girls and boys: one day at university promoted by the City of Turin together with the University of Turin. We were responsible for two educational activities on robotics and coding hosted at the Computer Science Department, which made one of its laboratories available for this kind of lesson. At the conclusion of the lab's sessions, children compiled the Attribution of Mental State (AMS) questionnaire, which is a measure of mental states that participants attribute to robots, namely the user's perception of the robot's mental qualities as compared to humans. We distributed the questionnaires both to children attending the educational robotics lab and to children performing coding activities. Results show that the first group attributed higher mental qualities to the robots, compared to the attribution given by children that did not have a direct experience with a robot.

Evaluation of Large Language Models: STEM education and Gender Stereotypes

Large Language Models (LLMs) have an increasing impact on our lives with use cases such as chatbots, study support, coding support, ideation, writing assistance, and more. Previous studies have revealed linguistic biases in pronouns used to describe professions or adjectives used to describe men vs women. These issues have to some degree been addressed in updated LLM versions, at least to pass existing tests. However, biases may still be present in the models, and repeated use of gender stereotypical language may reinforce the underlying assumptions and are therefore important to examine further. This paper investigates gender biases in LLMs in relation to educational choices through an open-ended, true to user-case experimental design and a quantitative analysis. We investigate the biases in the context of four different cultures, languages, and educational systems (English/US/UK, Danish/DK, Catalan/ES, and Hindi/IN) for ages ranging from 10 to 16 years, corresponding to important educational transition points in the different countries. We find that there are significant and large differences in the ratio of STEM to non-STEM suggested education paths provided by chatGPT when using typical girl vs boy names to prompt lists of suggested things to become. There are generally fewer STEM suggestions in the Danish, Spanish, and Indian context compared to the English. We also find subtle differences in the suggested professions, which we categorise and report.

Class Gradient Projection For Continual Learning

Catastrophic forgetting is one of the most critical challenges in Continual Learning (CL). Recent approaches tackle this problem by projecting the gradient update orthogonal to the gradient subspace of existing tasks. While the results are remarkable, those approaches ignore the fact that these calculated gradients are not guaranteed to be orthogonal to the gradient subspace of each class due to the class deviation in tasks, e.g., distinguishing "Man" from "Sea" v.s. differentiating "Boy" from "Girl". Therefore, this strategy may still cause catastrophic forgetting for some classes. In this paper, we propose Class Gradient Projection (CGP), which calculates the gradient subspace from individual classes rather than tasks. Gradient update orthogonal to the gradient subspace of existing classes can be effectively utilized to minimize interference from other classes. To improve the generalization and efficiency, we further design a Base Refining (BR) algorithm to combine similar classes and refine class bases dynamically. Moreover, we leverage a contrastive learning method to improve the model's ability to handle unseen tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. It improves the previous methods by 2.0% on the CIFAR-100 dataset.

Memory-Free Generative Replay For Class-Incremental Learning

Regularization-based methods are beneficial to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem in class-incremental learning. With the absence of old task images, they often assume that old knowledge is well preserved if the classifier produces similar output on new images. In this paper, we find that their effectiveness largely depends on the nature of old classes: they work well on classes that are easily distinguishable between each other but may fail on more fine-grained ones, e.g., boy and girl. In spirit, such methods project new data onto the feature space spanned by the weight vectors in the fully connected layer, corresponding to old classes. The resulting projections would be similar on fine-grained old classes, and as a consequence the new classifier will gradually lose the discriminative ability on these classes. To address this issue, we propose a memory-free generative replay strategy to preserve the fine-grained old classes characteristics by generating representative old images directly from the old classifier and combined with new data for new classifier training. To solve the homogenization problem of the generated samples, we also propose a diversity loss that maximizes Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence between generated samples. Our method is best complemented by prior regularization-based methods proved to be effective for easily distinguishable old classes. We validate the above design and insights on CUB-200-2011, Caltech-101, CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet and show that our strategy outperforms existing memory-free methods with a clear margin. Code is available at https://github.com/xmengxin/MFGR

ChildGAN: Large Scale Synthetic Child Facial Data Using Domain Adaptation in StyleGAN

In this research work, we proposed a novel ChildGAN, a pair of GAN networks for generating synthetic boys and girls facial data derived from StyleGAN2. ChildGAN is built by performing smooth domain transfer using transfer learning. It provides photo-realistic, high-quality data samples. A large-scale dataset is rendered with a variety of smart facial transformations: facial expressions, age progression, eye blink effects, head pose, skin and hair color variations, and variable lighting conditions. The dataset comprises more than 300k distinct data samples. Further, the uniqueness and characteristics of the rendered facial features are validated by running different computer vision application tests which include CNN-based child gender classifier, face localization and facial landmarks detection test, identity similarity evaluation using ArcFace, and lastly running eye detection and eye aspect ratio tests. The results demonstrate that synthetic child facial data of high quality offers an alternative to the cost and complexity of collecting a large-scale dataset from real children.

Classification of ADHD and Healthy Children Using EEG Based Multi-Band Spatial Features Enhancement

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder in children, characterized by difficulties in attention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Early and accurate diagnosis of ADHD is critical for effective intervention and management. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have emerged as a non-invasive and efficient tool for ADHD detection due to their high temporal resolution and ability to capture neural dynamics. In this study, we propose a method for classifying ADHD and healthy children using EEG data from the benchmark dataset. There were 61 children with ADHD and 60 healthy children, both boys and girls, aged 7 to 12. The EEG signals, recorded from 19 channels, were processed to extract Power Spectral Density (PSD) and Spectral Entropy (SE) features across five frequency bands, resulting in a comprehensive 190-dimensional feature set. To evaluate the classification performance, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) with the RBF kernel demonstrated the best performance with a mean cross-validation accuracy of 99.2\% and a standard deviation of 0.0079, indicating high robustness and precision. These results highlight the potential of spatial features in conjunction with machine learning for accurately classifying ADHD using EEG data. This work contributes to developing non-invasive, data-driven tools for early diagnosis and assessment of ADHD in children.

Personalized Large Vision-Language Models

The personalization model has gained significant attention in image generation yet remains underexplored for large vision-language models (LVLMs). Beyond generic ones, with personalization, LVLMs handle interactive dialogues using referential concepts (e.g., ``Mike and Susan are talking.'') instead of the generic form (e.g., ``a boy and a girl are talking.''), making the conversation more customizable and referentially friendly. In addition, PLVM is equipped to continuously add new concepts during a dialogue without incurring additional costs, which significantly enhances the practicality. PLVM proposes Aligner, a pre-trained visual encoder to align referential concepts with the queried images. During the dialogues, it extracts features of reference images with these corresponding concepts and recognizes them in the queried image, enabling personalization. We note that the computational cost and parameter count of the Aligner are negligible within the entire framework. With comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analyses, we reveal the effectiveness and superiority of PLVM.

The Golden Rule as a Heuristic to Measure the Fairness of Texts Using Machine Learning

To treat others as one would wish to be treated is a common formulation of the golden rule (GR). Yet, despite its prevalence as an axiom throughout history, no transfer of this moral philosophy into computational systems exists. In this paper we consider how to algorithmically operationalise this rule so that it may be used to measure sentences such as the boy harmed the girl, and categorise them as fair or unfair. For the purposes of the paper, we define a fair act as one that one would be accepting of if it were done to oneself. A review and reply to criticisms of the GR is made. We share the code for the digitisation of the GR, and test it with a list of sentences. Implementing it within two language models, the USE, and ALBERT, we find F1 scores of 78.0, 85.0, respectively. A suggestion of how the technology may be implemented to avoid unfair biases in word embeddings is made - given that individuals would typically not wish to be on the receiving end of an unfair act, such as racism, irrespective of whether the corpus being used deems such discrimination as praiseworthy.

ChildAugment: Data Augmentation Methods for Zero-Resource Children's Speaker Verification

The accuracy of modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems, when trained exclusively on adult data, drops substantially when applied to children's speech. The scarcity of children's speech corpora hinders fine-tuning ASV systems for children's speech. Hence, there is a timely need to explore more effective ways of reusing adults' speech data. One promising approach is to align vocal-tract parameters between adults and children through children-specific data augmentation, referred here to as ChildAugment. Specifically, we modify the formant frequencies and formant bandwidths of adult speech to emulate children's speech. The modified spectra are used to train ECAPA-TDNN (emphasized channel attention, propagation, and aggregation in time-delay neural network) recognizer for children. We compare ChildAugment against various state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques for children's ASV. We also extensively compare different scoring methods, including cosine scoring, PLDA (probabilistic linear discriminant analysis), and NPLDA (neural PLDA). We also propose a low-complexity weighted cosine score for extremely low-resource children ASV. Our findings on the CSLU kids corpus indicate that ChildAugment holds promise as a simple, acoustics-motivated approach, for improving state-of-the-art deep learning based ASV for children. We achieve up to 12.45% (boys) and 11.96% (girls) relative improvement over the baseline.