Dr.Academy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Questioning Capability in Education for Large Language Models

Teachers are important to imparting knowledge and guiding learners, and the role of large language models (LLMs) as potential educators is emerging as an important area of study. Recognizing LLMs' capability to generate educational content can lead to advances in automated and personalized learning. While LLMs have been tested for their comprehension and problem-solving skills, their capability in teaching remains largely unexplored. In teaching, questioning is a key skill that guides students to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize core concepts and principles. Therefore, our research introduces a benchmark to evaluate the questioning capability in education as a teacher of LLMs through evaluating their generated educational questions, utilizing Anderson and Krathwohl's taxonomy across general, monodisciplinary, and interdisciplinary domains. We shift the focus from LLMs as learners to LLMs as educators, assessing their teaching capability through guiding them to generate questions. We apply four metrics, including relevance, coverage, representativeness, and consistency, to evaluate the educational quality of LLMs' outputs. Our results indicate that GPT-4 demonstrates significant potential in teaching general, humanities, and science courses; Claude2 appears more apt as an interdisciplinary teacher. Furthermore, the automatic scores align with human perspectives.

XMeCap: Meme Caption Generation with Sub-Image Adaptability

Humor, deeply rooted in societal meanings and cultural details, poses a unique challenge for machines. While advances have been made in natural language processing, real-world humor often thrives in a multi-modal context, encapsulated distinctively by memes. This paper poses a particular emphasis on the impact of multi-images on meme captioning. After that, we introduce the \textsc{XMeCap} framework, a novel approach that adopts supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning based on an innovative reward model, which factors in both global and local similarities between visuals and text. Our results, benchmarked against contemporary models, manifest a marked improvement in caption generation for both single-image and multi-image memes, as well as different meme categories. \textsc{XMeCap} achieves an average evaluation score of 75.85 for single-image memes and 66.32 for multi-image memes, outperforming the best baseline by 3.71\% and 4.82\%, respectively. This research not only establishes a new frontier in meme-related studies but also underscores the potential of machines in understanding and generating humor in a multi-modal setting.