Daily Papers

Gaze behaviors such as eye-contact or shared attention are important markers for diagnosing developmental disorders in children. While previous studies have looked at some of these elements, the analysis is usually performed on private datasets and is restricted to lab settings. Furthermore, all publicly available gaze target prediction benchmarks mostly contain instances of adults, which makes models trained on them less applicable to scenarios with young children. In this paper, we propose the first study for predicting the gaze target of children and interacting adults. To this end, we introduce the ChildPlay dataset: a curated collection of short video clips featuring children playing and interacting with adults in uncontrolled environments (e.g. kindergarten, therapy centers, preschools etc.), which we annotate with rich gaze information. We further propose a new model for gaze target prediction that is geometrically grounded by explicitly identifying the scene parts in the 3D field of view (3DFoV) of the person, leveraging recent geometry preserving depth inference methods. Our model achieves state of the art results on benchmark datasets and ChildPlay. Furthermore, results show that looking at faces prediction performance on children is much worse than on adults, and can be significantly improved by fine-tuning models using child gaze annotations. Our dataset and models will be made publicly available.

Jokes are intentionally written to be funny, but not all jokes are created the same. Some jokes may be fit for a classroom of kindergarteners, but others are best reserved for a more mature audience. While recent work has shown impressive results on humor detection in text, here we instead investigate the more nuanced task of detecting humor subtypes, especially of the less innocent variety. To that end, we introduce a novel jokes dataset filtered from Reddit and solve the subtype classification task using a finetuned Transformer dubbed the Naughtyformer. Moreover, we show that our model is significantly better at detecting offensiveness in jokes compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Question answering (QA) is a fundamental means to facilitate assessment and training of narrative comprehension skills for both machines and young children, yet there is scarcity of high-quality QA datasets carefully designed to serve this purpose. In particular, existing datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. Drawing on the reading education research, we introduce FairytaleQA, a dataset focusing on narrative comprehension of kindergarten to eighth-grade students. Generated by educational experts based on an evidence-based theoretical framework, FairytaleQA consists of 10,580 explicit and implicit questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. Our dataset is valuable in two folds: First, we ran existing QA models on our dataset and confirmed that this annotation helps assess models' fine-grained learning skills. Second, the dataset supports question generation (QG) task in the education domain. Through benchmarking with QG models, we show that the QG model trained on FairytaleQA is capable of asking high-quality and more diverse questions.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual mathematical reasoning across various existing benchmarks. However, these benchmarks are predominantly based on clean or processed multimodal inputs, without incorporating the images provided by real-world Kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) educational users. To address this gap, we introduce MathReal, a meticulously curated dataset comprising 2,000 mathematical questions with images captured by handheld mobile devices in authentic scenarios. Each question is an image, containing the question text and visual element. We systematically classify the real images into three primary categories: image quality degradation, perspective variation, and irrelevant content interference, which are further delineated into 14 subcategories. Additionally, MathReal spans five core knowledge and ability categories, which encompass three question types and are divided into three difficulty levels. To comprehensively evaluate the multimodal mathematical reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art MLLMs in real-world scenarios, we design six experimental settings that enable a systematic analysis of their performance. Through extensive experimentation, we find that the problem-solving abilities of existing MLLMs are significantly challenged in realistic educational contexts. Based on this, we conduct a thorough analysis of their performance and error patterns, providing insights into their recognition, comprehension, and reasoning capabilities, and outlining directions for future improvements. Data and code: https://github.com/junfeng0288/MathReal.

Speech-based AI educational applications have gained significant interest in recent years, particularly for children. However, children speech research remains limited due to the lack of publicly available datasets, especially for low-resource languages such as Arabic.This paper presents Abjad-Kids, an Arabic speech dataset designed for kindergarten and primary education, focusing on fundamental learning of alphabets, numbers, and colors. The dataset consists of 46397 audio samples collected from children aged 3 - 12 years, covering 141 classes. All samples were recorded under controlled specifications to ensure consistency in duration, sampling rate, and format. To address high intra-class similarity among Arabic phonemes and the limited samples per class, we propose a hierarchical audio classification based on CNN-LSTM architectures. Our proposed methodology decomposes alphabet recognition into a two-stage process: an initial grouping classification model followed by specialized classifiers for each group. Both strategies: static linguistic-based grouping and dynamic clustering-based grouping, were evaluated. Experimental results demonstrate that static linguistic-based grouping achieves superior performance. Comparisons between traditional machine learning with deep learning approaches, highlight the effectiveness of CNN-LSTM models combined with data augmentation. Despite achieving promising results, most of our experiments indicate a challenge with overfitting, which is likely due to the limited number of samples, even after data augmentation and model regularization. Thus, future work may focus on collecting additional data to address this issue. Abjad-Kids will be publicly available. We hope that Abjad-Kids enrich children representation in speech dataset, and be a good resource for future research in Arabic speech classification for kids.

This paper introduces the Balanced Arabic Readability Evaluation Corpus (BAREC), a large-scale, fine-grained dataset for Arabic readability assessment. BAREC consists of 69,441 sentences spanning 1+ million words, carefully curated to cover 19 readability levels, from kindergarten to postgraduate comprehension. The corpus balances genre diversity, topical coverage, and target audiences, offering a comprehensive resource for evaluating Arabic text complexity. The corpus was fully manually annotated by a large team of annotators. The average pairwise inter-annotator agreement, measured by Quadratic Weighted Kappa, is 81.8%, reflecting a high level of substantial agreement. Beyond presenting the corpus, we benchmark automatic readability assessment across different granularity levels, comparing a range of techniques. Our results highlight the challenges and opportunities in Arabic readability modeling, demonstrating competitive performance across various methods. To support research and education, we make BAREC openly available, along with detailed annotation guidelines and benchmark results.