Students Rather Than Experts: A New AI For Education Pipeline To Model More Human-Like And Personalised Early Adolescences

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have been applied in expert systems across various domains, providing new opportunities for AI in Education. Educational interactions involve a cyclical exchange between teachers and students. Current research predominantly focuses on using LLMs to simulate teachers, leveraging their expertise to enhance student learning outcomes. However, the simulation of students, which could improve teachers' instructional skills, has received insufficient attention due to the challenges of modeling and evaluating virtual students. This research asks: Can LLMs be utilized to develop virtual student agents that mimic human-like behavior and individual variability? Unlike expert systems focusing on knowledge delivery, virtual students must replicate learning difficulties, emotional responses, and linguistic uncertainties. These traits present significant challenges in both modeling and evaluation. To address these issues, this study focuses on language learning as a context for modeling virtual student agents. We propose a novel AI4Education framework, called SOE (Scene-Object-Evaluation), to systematically construct LVSA (LLM-based Virtual Student Agents). By curating a dataset of personalized teacher-student interactions with various personality traits, question types, and learning stages, and fine-tuning LLMs using LoRA, we conduct multi-dimensional evaluation experiments. Specifically, we: (1) develop a theoretical framework for generating LVSA; (2) integrate human subjective evaluation metrics into GPT-4 assessments, demonstrating a strong correlation between human evaluators and GPT-4 in judging LVSA authenticity; and (3) validate that LLMs can generate human-like, personalized virtual student agents in educational contexts, laying a foundation for future applications in pre-service teacher training and multi-agent simulation environments.

Can LVLMs Describe Videos like Humans? A Five-in-One Video Annotations Benchmark for Better Human-Machine Comparison

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have made significant strides in addressing complex video tasks, sparking researchers' interest in their human-like multimodal understanding capabilities. Video description serves as a fundamental task for evaluating video comprehension, necessitating a deep understanding of spatial and temporal dynamics, which presents challenges for both humans and machines. Thus, investigating whether LVLMs can describe videos as comprehensively as humans (through reasonable human-machine comparisons using video captioning as a proxy task) will enhance our understanding and application of these models. However, current benchmarks for video comprehension have notable limitations, including short video durations, brief annotations, and reliance on a single annotator's perspective. These factors hinder a comprehensive assessment of LVLMs' ability to understand complex, lengthy videos and prevent the establishment of a robust human baseline that accurately reflects human video comprehension capabilities. To address these issues, we propose a novel benchmark, FIOVA (Five In One Video Annotations), designed to evaluate the differences between LVLMs and human understanding more comprehensively. FIOVA includes 3,002 long video sequences (averaging 33.6 seconds) that cover diverse scenarios with complex spatiotemporal relationships. Each video is annotated by five distinct annotators, capturing a wide range of perspectives and resulting in captions that are 4-15 times longer than existing benchmarks, thereby establishing a robust baseline that represents human understanding comprehensively for the first time in video description tasks. Using the FIOVA benchmark, we conducted an in-depth evaluation of six state-of-the-art LVLMs, comparing their performance with humans. More detailed information can be found at https://huuuuusy.github.io/fiova/.

DTVLT: A Multi-modal Diverse Text Benchmark for Visual Language Tracking Based on LLM

Visual language tracking (VLT) has emerged as a cutting-edge research area, harnessing linguistic data to enhance algorithms with multi-modal inputs and broadening the scope of traditional single object tracking (SOT) to encompass video understanding applications. Despite this, most VLT benchmarks still depend on succinct, human-annotated text descriptions for each video. These descriptions often fall short in capturing the nuances of video content dynamics and lack stylistic variety in language, constrained by their uniform level of detail and a fixed annotation frequency. As a result, algorithms tend to default to a "memorize the answer" strategy, diverging from the core objective of achieving a deeper understanding of video content. Fortunately, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the generation of diverse text. This work utilizes LLMs to generate varied semantic annotations (in terms of text lengths and granularities) for representative SOT benchmarks, thereby establishing a novel multi-modal benchmark. Specifically, we (1) propose a new visual language tracking benchmark with diverse texts, named DTVLT, based on five prominent VLT and SOT benchmarks, including three sub-tasks: short-term tracking, long-term tracking, and global instance tracking. (2) We offer four granularity texts in our benchmark, considering the extent and density of semantic information. We expect this multi-granular generation strategy to foster a favorable environment for VLT and video understanding research. (3) We conduct comprehensive experimental analyses on DTVLT, evaluating the impact of diverse text on tracking performance and hope the identified performance bottlenecks of existing algorithms can support further research in VLT and video understanding. The proposed benchmark, experimental results and toolkit will be released gradually on http://videocube.aitestunion.com/.

Visual Language Tracking with Multi-modal Interaction: A Robust Benchmark

Visual Language Tracking (VLT) enhances tracking by mitigating the limitations of relying solely on the visual modality, utilizing high-level semantic information through language. This integration of the language enables more advanced human-machine interaction. The essence of interaction is cognitive alignment, which typically requires multiple information exchanges, especially in the sequential decision-making process of VLT. However, current VLT benchmarks do not account for multi-round interactions during tracking. They provide only an initial text and bounding box (bbox) in the first frame, with no further interaction as tracking progresses, deviating from the original motivation of the VLT task. To address these limitations, we propose a novel and robust benchmark, VLT-MI (Visual Language Tracking with Multi-modal Interaction), which introduces multi-round interaction into the VLT task for the first time. (1) We generate diverse, multi-granularity texts for multi-round, multi-modal interaction based on existing mainstream VLT benchmarks using DTLLM-VLT, leveraging the world knowledge of LLMs. (2) We propose a new VLT interaction paradigm that achieves multi-round interaction through text updates and object recovery. When multiple tracking failures occur, we provide the tracker with more aligned texts and corrected bboxes through interaction, thereby expanding the scope of VLT downstream tasks. (3) We conduct comparative experiments on both traditional VLT benchmarks and VLT-MI, evaluating and analyzing the accuracy and robustness of trackers under the interactive paradigm. This work offers new insights and paradigms for the VLT task, enabling a fine-grained evaluation of multi-modal trackers. We believe this approach can be extended to additional datasets in the future, supporting broader evaluations and comparisons of video-language model capabilities.

DTLLM-VLT: Diverse Text Generation for Visual Language Tracking Based on LLM

Visual Language Tracking (VLT) enhances single object tracking (SOT) by integrating natural language descriptions from a video, for the precise tracking of a specified object. By leveraging high-level semantic information, VLT guides object tracking, alleviating the constraints associated with relying on a visual modality. Nevertheless, most VLT benchmarks are annotated in a single granularity and lack a coherent semantic framework to provide scientific guidance. Moreover, coordinating human annotators for high-quality annotations is laborious and time-consuming. To address these challenges, we introduce DTLLM-VLT, which automatically generates extensive and multi-granularity text to enhance environmental diversity. (1) DTLLM-VLT generates scientific and multi-granularity text descriptions using a cohesive prompt framework. Its succinct and highly adaptable design allows seamless integration into various visual tracking benchmarks. (2) We select three prominent benchmarks to deploy our approach: short-term tracking, long-term tracking, and global instance tracking. We offer four granularity combinations for these benchmarks, considering the extent and density of semantic information, thereby showcasing the practicality and versatility of DTLLM-VLT. (3) We conduct comparative experiments on VLT benchmarks with different text granularities, evaluating and analyzing the impact of diverse text on tracking performance. Conclusionally, this work leverages LLM to provide multi-granularity semantic information for VLT task from efficient and diverse perspectives, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multi-modal trackers. In the future, we believe this work can be extended to more datasets to support vision datasets understanding.

Sparse array design for MIMO radar in multipath scenarios

Sparse array designs have focused mostly on angular resolution, peak sidelobe level and directivity factor of virtual arrays for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. The notion of the MIMO radar virtual array is based on the direct path assumption in that the direction-of-departure (DOD) and direction-of-arrival (DOA) of the targets are equal. However, the DOD and DOA of targets in multipath scenarios are likely to be very different. The identification of multipath targets requires DOD-DOA imaging using the the transmit and receive arrays, not the virtual array. To improve the imaging of both direct path and multipath targets, we introduce several new criteria for MIMO radar sparse linear array (SLA) designs for multipath scenarios. Under the new criteria, we adopt a cyclic optimization strategy under a coordinate descent framework to design the MIMO SLAs. We present several numerical examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.