Emotional support conversation (ESC) helps reduce people's psychological stress and provide emotional value through interactive dialogues. Due to the high cost of crowdsourcing a large ESC corpus, recent attempts use large language models for dialogue augmentation. However, existing approaches largely overlook the social dynamics inherent in ESC, leading to less effective simulations. In this paper, we introduce SocialSim, a novel framework that simulates ESC by integrating key aspects of social interactions: social disclosure and social awareness. On the seeker side, we facilitate social disclosure by constructing a comprehensive persona bank that captures diverse and authentic help-seeking scenarios. On the supporter side, we enhance social awareness by eliciting cognitive reasoning to generate logical and supportive responses. Building upon SocialSim, we construct SSConv, a large-scale synthetic ESC corpus of which quality can even surpass crowdsourced ESC data. We further train a chatbot on SSConv and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance in both automatic and human evaluations. We believe SocialSim offers a scalable way to synthesize ESC, making emotional care more accessible and practical.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the cognitive capability to perceive and ascribe mental states to oneself and others. Recent research has sparked a debate over whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit a form of ToM. However, existing ToM evaluations are hindered by challenges such as constrained scope, subjective judgment, and unintended contamination, yielding inadequate assessments. To address this gap, we introduce ToMBench with three key characteristics: a systematic evaluation framework encompassing 8 tasks and 31 abilities in social cognition, a multiple-choice question format to support automated and unbiased evaluation, and a build-from-scratch bilingual inventory to strictly avoid data leakage. Based on ToMBench, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the ToM performance of 10 popular LLMs across tasks and abilities. We find that even the most advanced LLMs like GPT-4 lag behind human performance by over 10% points, indicating that LLMs have not achieved a human-level theory of mind yet. Our aim with ToMBench is to enable an efficient and effective evaluation of LLMs' ToM capabilities, thereby facilitating the development of LLMs with inherent social intelligence.

AI systems are increasingly intertwined with daily life, assisting users with various tasks and guiding decision-making. This integration introduces risks of AI-driven manipulation, where such systems may exploit users' cognitive biases and emotional vulnerabilities to steer them toward harmful outcomes. Through a randomized between-subjects experiment with 233 participants, we examined human susceptibility to such manipulation in financial (e.g., purchases) and emotional (e.g., conflict resolution) decision-making contexts. Participants interacted with one of three AI agents: a neutral agent (NA) optimizing for user benefit without explicit influence, a manipulative agent (MA) designed to covertly influence beliefs and behaviors, or a strategy-enhanced manipulative agent (SEMA) equipped with established psychological tactics, allowing it to select and apply them adaptively during interactions to reach its hidden objectives. By analyzing participants' preference ratings, we found significant susceptibility to AI-driven manipulation. Particularly across both decision-making domains, interacting with the manipulative agents significantly increased the odds of rating hidden incentives higher than optimal options (Financial, MA: OR=5.24, SEMA: OR=7.96; Emotional, MA: OR=5.52, SEMA: OR=5.71) compared to the NA group. Notably, we found no clear evidence that employing psychological strategies (SEMA) was overall more effective than simple manipulative objectives (MA) on our primary outcomes. Hence, AI-driven manipulation could become widespread even without requiring sophisticated tactics and expertise. While our findings are preliminary and derived from hypothetical, low-stakes scenarios, we highlight a critical vulnerability in human-AI interactions, emphasizing the need for ethical safeguards and regulatory frameworks to protect human autonomy.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising results in a variety of tasks that combine vision and language. As these models become more integral to research and applications, conducting comprehensive evaluations of their capabilities has grown increasingly important. However, most existing benchmarks fail to consider that, in certain situations, images need to be interpreted within a broader context. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark, named as CODIS, designed to assess the ability of models to use context provided in free-form text to enhance visual comprehension. Our findings indicate that MLLMs consistently fall short of human performance on this benchmark. Further analysis confirms that these models struggle to effectively extract and utilize contextual information to improve their understanding of images. This underscores the pressing need to enhance the ability of MLLMs to comprehend visuals in a context-dependent manner. View our project website at this https URL

Small object detection has important application value in the fields of autonomous driving and drone scene analysis. As one of the most advanced object detection algorithms, YOLOv3 suffers some challenges when detecting small objects, such as the problem of detection failure of small objects and occluded objects. To solve these problems, an improved YOLOv3 algorithm for small object detection is proposed. In the proposed method, the dilated convolutions mish (DCM) module is introduced into the backbone network of YOLOv3 to improve the feature expression ability by fusing the feature maps of different receptive fields. In the neck network of YOLOv3, the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) and multi-level fusion module are introduced to select the important information for small object detection in the shallow network, suppress the uncritical information, and use the fusion module to fuse the feature maps of different scales, so as to improve the detection accuracy of the algorithm. In addition, the Soft-NMS and Complete-IoU (CloU) strategies are applied to candidate frame screening, which improves the accuracy of the algorithm for the detection of occluded objects. The ablation experiment of the MS COCO2017 object detection task proves the effectiveness of several modules introduced in this paper for small object detection. The experimental results on the MS COCO2017, VOC2007, and VOC2012 datasets show that the Average Precision (AP) of this method is 16.5%, 8.71%, and 9.68% higher than that of YOLOv3, respectively.

Dunhuang murals are a collection of Chinese style and national style, forming a self-contained Chinese-style Buddhist art. It has very high historical and cultural value and research significance. Among them, the lines of Dunhuang murals are highly general and expressive. It reflects the character's distinctive character and complex inner emotions. Therefore, the outline drawing of murals is of great significance to the research of Dunhuang Culture. The contour generation of Dunhuang murals belongs to image edge detection, which is an important branch of computer vision, aims to extract salient contour information in images. Although convolution-based deep learning networks have achieved good results in image edge extraction by exploring the contextual and semantic features of images. However, with the enlargement of the receptive field, some local detail information is lost. This makes it impossible for them to generate reasonable outline drawings of murals. In this paper, we propose a novel edge detector based on self-attention combined with convolution to generate line drawings of Dunhuang murals. Compared with existing edge detection methods, firstly, a new residual self-attention and convolution mixed module (Ramix) is proposed to fuse local and global features in feature maps. Secondly, a novel densely connected backbone extraction network is designed to efficiently propagate rich edge feature information from shallow layers into deep layers. Compared with existing methods, it is shown on different public datasets that our method is able to generate sharper and richer edge maps. In addition, testing on the Dunhuang mural dataset shows that our method can achieve very competitive performance.

Existing large language models (LLMs) for machine translation are typically fine-tuned on sentence-level translation instructions and achieve satisfactory performance at the sentence level. However, when applied to document-level translation, these models face a significant challenge, particularly when dealing with documents containing over 512 tokens. This challenge arises from the issue of sentence-level coverage, where subsequent sentences in the document remain untranslated. As a result, the document-level translation capability of LLMs fine-tuned on sentence-level translation instructions is significantly limited. We conjecture that the primary cause of LLMs' weak document-level translation performance is the absence of document-to-document mapping ability. To address the issue, we propose an approach that combines sentence-level and document-level translation instructions of varying lengths to fine-tune LLMs. Our proposed translation mixed-instructions enable LLMs (Llama-2~7B and 13B) to maintain consistent translation performance from the sentence level to documents containing as many as 2048 tokens. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly enhances the document-level translation capabilities of LLMs on 10 language pairs, effectively mitigating the sentence-level coverage issue in document-level translation. Experimentation on discourse phenomena has demonstrated that our document-level translation approach significantly improves translation quality, both in terms of BLEU score and discourse coherence.

Probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) has broad application in open-set verification tasks, such as speaker verification. A key concern for PLDA is that the model is too simple (linear Gaussian) to deal with complicated data; however, the simplicity by itself is a major advantage of PLDA, as it leads to desirable generalization. An interesting research therefore is how to improve modeling capacity of PLDA while retaining the simplicity. This paper presents a decoupling approach, which involves a global model that is simple and generalizable, and a local model that is complex and expressive. While the global model holds a bird view on the entire data, the local model represents the details of individual classes. We conduct a preliminary study towards this direction and investigate a simple decoupling model including both the global and local models. The new model, which we call decoupled PLDA, is tested on a speaker verification task. Experimental results show that it consistently outperforms the vanilla PLDA when the model is based on raw speaker vectors. However, when the speaker vectors are processed by length normalization, the advantage of decoupled PLDA will be largely lost, suggesting future research on non-linear local models.

Climate change and global warming are among the most significant issues that humanity is currently facing, and also among the issues that pose the greatest threats to all mankind. These issues are primarily driven by abnormal increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. Mathematical modeling serves as a powerful approach to analyze the dynamic patterns of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In this paper, we established a mathmetical model with four state variables to investigate the dynamic behavior of the interaction between atmospheric carbon dioxide, GDP, forest area and human population. Relevant theories were employed to analyze the system's boundedness and the stability of equilibrium points. The parameter values were estimated with the help of the actual data in China and numerical fitting was carried out to verify the results of the theoretical analysis. The sensitivity analysis of the compartments with respect to the model parameters was analyzed by using the Partial Rank Correlation Coefficient (PRCC) and the Latin Hypercube Sampling test. Apply the optimal control theory to regulate the atmospheric carbon dioxide level and provide the corresponding numerical fitting. Finally, corresponding discussions and suggestions were put forward with the help of the results of the theoretical analysis and numerical fitting.

In this paper, we revisit the model of bosonic matter in the form of a free complex scalar field with a nontrivial wormhole spacetime topology supported by a free phantom field. We obtain a new type of boson star with wormhole solutions, in which the complex scalar field possess full parity-odd symmetry with respect to the two asymptotically flat spacetime regions. When the size of the throat is small, The behavior of boson stars with wormhole approaches that of boson stars. When the size of the throat is intermediate, the typical spiraling dependence of the mass and the particle number on the frequency of the boson stars is replaced by a loop structure. However, as the size becomes relatively large, the loop structure will also disappear. In particular, The complex scalar field could form two boson stars with opposite phase differences with respect to the two spacetime regions in the limit of vanishing throat size. We analyze the properties of this new type of boson stars with wormhole and further show that the wormhole spacetime geometry.

In August 2020, the World Health Assembly approved the Global Strategy to eliminate cervical cancer, marking the first time that numerous countries committed to eliminating a form of cancer. China introduced the HPV vaccine in 2016 and has made significant advancements in both prevention and treatment strategies. However, due to the relatively late introduction of the vaccine, the burden of cervical cancer in China continues to rise. In light of this, we develop a compartmental model to assess the impact of the WHO's 90-70-90 strategy, along with adult catch-up vaccination, on the control of HPV-induced cervical cancer in China. We analyze the basic properties of the model and provide proofs of the local and global asymptotic stability of the equilibrium points. Additionally, a sensitivity analysis is performed, and we use the MCMC algorithm to fit the number of new cervical cancer cases and deaths in China from 1990 to 2021. The estimated basic reproduction number before and after the introduction of the HPV vaccine in China is 1.5026 (95% CI: 1.4051-1.6002) and 1.0726 (95% CI: 0.9384-1.2067), respectively. The sensitivity analysis reveals that screening, as a non-pharmaceutical intervention, plays a crucial role in controlling the spread of the disease. We apply the 90-70-90 strategy to predict the future number of new cervical cancer cases and deaths in China. The results indicate that prioritizing the 70-90 target combination is the most cost-effective approach and can achieve the goal of zero new cervical cancer cases by 2061. Finally, an optimal control model is developed to explore the best implementation strategies for HPV vaccination and screening under various plausible scenarios.

The classification of news headlines is an important direction in the field of NLP, and its data has the characteristics of compactness, uniqueness and various forms. Aiming at the problem that the traditional neural network model cannot adequately capture the underlying feature information of the data and cannot jointly extract key global features and deep local features, a dual-channel network model DC-EBAD based on the ERNIE pre-training model is proposed. Use ERNIE to extract the lexical, semantic and contextual feature information at the bottom of the text, generate dynamic word vector representations fused with context, and then use the BiLSTM-AT network channel to secondary extract the global features of the data and use the attention mechanism to give key parts higher The weight of the DPCNN channel is used to overcome the long-distance text dependence problem and obtain deep local features. The local and global feature vectors are spliced, and finally passed to the fully connected layer, and the final classification result is output through Softmax. The experimental results show that the proposed model improves the accuracy, precision and F1-score of news headline classification compared with the traditional neural network model and the single-channel model under the same conditions. It can be seen that it can perform well in the multi-classification application of news headline text under large data volume.

Accurate layout analysis without subsequent text-line segmentation remains an ongoing challenge, especially when facing the Kangyur, a kind of historical Tibetan document featuring considerable touching components and mottled background. Aiming at identifying different regions in document images, layout analysis is indispensable for subsequent procedures such as character recognition. However, there was only a little research being carried out to perform line-level layout analysis which failed to deal with the Kangyur. To obtain the optimal results, a fine-grained sub-line level layout analysis approach is presented. Firstly, we introduced an accelerated method to build the dataset which is dynamic and reliable. Secondly, enhancement had been made to the SOLOv2 according to the characteristics of the Kangyur. Then, we fed the enhanced SOLOv2 with the prepared annotation file during the training phase. Once the network is trained, instances of the text line, sentence, and titles can be segmented and identified during the inference stage. The experimental results show that the proposed method delivers a decent 72.7% average precision on our dataset. In general, this preliminary research provides insights into the fine-grained sub-line level layout analysis and testifies the SOLOv2-based approaches. We also believe that the proposed methods can be adopted on other language documents with various layouts.

Adaptive guaranteed-performance consensus control problems for multi-agent systems are investigated, where the adjustable convergence speed is discussed. This paper firstly proposes a novel adaptive guaranteed-performance consensus protocol, where the communication weights can be adaptively regulated. By the state space decomposition method and the stability theory, sufficient conditions for guaranteed-performance consensus are obtained, as well as the guaranteed-performance cost. Moreover, since the convergence speed is usually adjusted by changing the algebraic connectivity in existing works, which increases the communication burden and the load of the controller, and the system topology is always given in practical applications, the lower bound of the convergence coefficient for multi-agent systems with the adaptive guaranteed-performance consensus protocol is deduced, which is linearly adjustable approximately by changing the adaptive control gain. Finally, simulation examples are introduced to demonstrate theoretical results.

Dunhuang murals suffer from fading, breakage, surface brittleness and extensive peeling affected by prolonged environmental erosion. Image inpainting techniques are widely used in the field of digital mural inpainting. Generally speaking, for mural inpainting tasks with large area damage, it is challenging for any image inpainting method. In this paper, we design a multi-stage progressive reasoning network (MPR-Net) containing global to local receptive fields for murals inpainting. This network is capable of recursively inferring the damage boundary and progressively tightening the regional texture constraints. Moreover, to adaptively fuse plentiful information at various scales of murals, a multi-scale feature aggregation module (MFA) is designed to empower the capability to select the significant features. The execution of the model is similar to the process of a mural restorer (i.e., inpainting the structure of the damaged mural globally first and then adding the local texture details further). Our method has been evaluated through both qualitative and quantitative experiments, and the results demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art image inpainting methods.