EVQAScore: Efficient Video Question Answering Data Evaluation

Video question-answering (QA) is a core task in video understanding. Evaluating the quality of video QA and video caption data quality for training video large language models (VideoLLMs) is an essential challenge. Although various methods have been proposed for assessing video caption quality, there remains a lack of dedicated evaluation methods for Video QA. To address this gap, we introduce EVQAScore, a reference-free method that leverages keyword extraction to assess both video caption and video QA data quality. Additionally, we incorporate frame sampling and rescaling techniques to enhance the efficiency and robustness of our evaluation, this enables our score to evaluate the quality of extremely long videos. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance (32.8 for Kendall correlation and 42.3 for Spearman correlation, 4.7 and 5.9 higher than the previous method PAC-S++) on the VATEX-EVAL benchmark for video caption evaluation. Furthermore, by using EVQAScore for data selection, we achieved SOTA results with only 12.5\% of the original data volume, outperforming the previous SOTA method PAC-S and 100\% of data.

Auto311: A Confidence-guided Automated System for Non-emergency Call

Emergency and non-emergency response systems are essential services provided by local governments and critical to protecting lives, the environment, and property. The effective handling of (non-)emergency calls is critical for public safety and well-being. By reducing the burden through non-emergency callers, residents in critical need of assistance through 911 will receive a fast and effective response. Collaborating with the Department of Emergency Communications (DEC) in Nashville, we analyzed 11,796 non-emergency call recordings and developed Auto311, the first automated system to handle 311 non-emergency calls, which (1) effectively and dynamically predicts ongoing non-emergency incident types to generate tailored case reports during the call; (2) itemizes essential information from dialogue contexts to complete the generated reports; and (3) strategically structures system-caller dialogues with optimized confidence. We used real-world data to evaluate the system's effectiveness and deployability. The experimental results indicate that the system effectively predicts incident type with an average F-1 score of 92.54%. Moreover, the system successfully itemizes critical information from relevant contexts to complete reports, evincing a 0.93 average consistency score compared to the ground truth. Additionally, emulations demonstrate that the system effectively decreases conversation turns as the utterance size gets more extensive and categorizes the ongoing call with 94.49% mean accuracy.

CitySpec with Shield: A Secure Intelligent Assistant for Requirement Formalization

An increasing number of monitoring systems have been developed in smart cities to ensure that the real-time operations of a city satisfy safety and performance requirements. However, many existing city requirements are written in English with missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. There is a high demand for assisting city policymakers in converting human-specified requirements to machine-understandable formal specifications for monitoring systems. To tackle this limitation, we build CitySpec, the first intelligent assistant system for requirement specification in smart cities. To create CitySpec, we first collect over 1,500 real-world city requirements across different domains (e.g., transportation and energy) from over 100 cities and extract city-specific knowledge to generate a dataset of city vocabulary with 3,061 words. We also build a translation model and enhance it through requirement synthesis and develop a novel online learning framework with shielded validation. The evaluation results on real-world city requirements show that CitySpec increases the sentence-level accuracy of requirement specification from 59.02% to 86.64%, and has strong adaptability to a new city and a new domain (e.g., the F1 score for requirements in Seattle increases from 77.6% to 93.75% with online learning). After the enhancement from the shield function, CitySpec is now immune to most known textual adversarial inputs (e.g., the attack success rate of DeepWordBug after the shield function is reduced to 0% from 82.73%). We test the CitySpec with 18 participants from different domains. CitySpec shows its strong usability and adaptability to different domains, and also its robustness to malicious inputs.

Bil-DOS: A Bi-lingual Dialogue Ordering System

Due to the unfamiliarity to particular words(or proper nouns) for ingredients, non-native English speakers can be extremely confused about the ordering process in restaurants like Subway. Thus, We developed a dialogue system, which supports Chinese(Mandarin)1 and English2 at the same time. In other words, users can switch arbitrarily between Chinese(Mandarin) and English as the conversation is being conducted. This system is specifically designed for Subway ordering3. In BilDOS, we designed a Discriminator module to tell the language is being used in inputted user utterance, a Translator module to translate used language into English if it is not English, and a Dialogue Manager module to detect the intention within inputted user utterances, handle outlier inputs by throwing clarification requests, map detected Intention and detailed Keyword4 into a particular intention class, locate the current ordering process, continue to give queries to finish the order, conclude the order details once the order is completed, activate the evaluation process when the conversation is done.

Applying FrameNet to Chinese(Poetry)

FrameNet( Fillmore and Baker [2009] ) is well-known for its wide use for knowledge representation in the form of inheritance-based ontologies and lexica( Trott et al. [2020] ). Although FrameNet is usually applied to languages like English, Spanish and Italian, there are still plenty of FrameNet data sets available for other languages like Chinese, which differs significantly from those languages based on Latin alphabets. In this paper, the translation from ancient Chinese Poetry to modern Chinese will be first conducted to further apply the Chinese FrameNet(CFN, provided by Shanxi University). Afterwards, the translation from modern Chinese will be conducted as well for the comparison between the applications of CFN and English FrameNet. Finally, the overall comparison will be draw between CFN to modern Chinese and English FrameNet.

An Intelligent Assistant for Converting City Requirements to Formal Specification

As more and more monitoring systems have been deployed to smart cities, there comes a higher demand for converting new human-specified requirements to machine-understandable formal specifications automatically. However, these human-specific requirements are often written in English and bring missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. In this paper, we present CitySpec, an intelligent assistant system for requirement specification in smart cities. CitySpec not only helps overcome the language differences brought by English requirements and formal specifications, but also offers solutions to those missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how CitySpec works. Specifically, we present three demos: (1) interactive completion of requirements in CitySpec; (2) human-in-the-loop correction while CitySepc encounters exceptions; (3) online learning in CitySpec.

CitySpec: An Intelligent Assistant System for Requirement Specification in Smart Cities

An increasing number of monitoring systems have been developed in smart cities to ensure that real-time operations of a city satisfy safety and performance requirements. However, many existing city requirements are written in English with missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. There is a high demand for assisting city policy makers in converting human-specified requirements to machine-understandable formal specifications for monitoring systems. To tackle this limitation, we build CitySpec, the first intelligent assistant system for requirement specification in smart cities. To create CitySpec, we first collect over 1,500 real-world city requirements across different domains from over 100 cities and extract city-specific knowledge to generate a dataset of city vocabulary with 3,061 words. We also build a translation model and enhance it through requirement synthesis and develop a novel online learning framework with validation under uncertainty. The evaluation results on real-world city requirements show that CitySpec increases the sentence-level accuracy of requirement specification from 59.02% to 86.64%, and has strong adaptability to a new city and a new domain (e.g., F1 score for requirements in Seattle increases from 77.6% to 93.75% with online learning).

Detecting Heads using Feature Refine Net and Cascaded Multi-Scale Architecture

This paper presents a method that can accurately detect heads especially small heads under the indoor scene. To achieve this, we propose a novel method, Feature Refine Net (FRN), and a cascaded multi-scale architecture. FRN exploits the multi-scale hierarchical features created by deep convolutional neural networks. The proposed channel weighting method enables FRN to make use of features alternatively and effectively. To improve the performance of small head detection, we propose a cascaded multi-scale architecture which has two detectors. One called global detector is responsible for detecting large objects and acquiring the global distribution information. The other called local detector is designed for small objects detection and makes use of the information provided by global detector. Due to the lack of head detection datasets, we have collected and labeled a new large dataset named SCUT-HEAD which includes 4405 images with 111251 heads annotated. Experiments show that our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on SCUT-HEAD.