Kristian Fenech

Maria Tsfasman, Bernd Dudzik, Kristian Fenech et al.

Conversational memory is the process by which humans encode, retain and retrieve verbal, non-verbal and contextual information from a conversation. Since human memory is selective, differing recollections of the same events can lead to misunderstandings and misalignments within a group. Yet, conversational facilitation systems, aimed at advancing the quality of group interactions, usually focus on tracking users' states within an individual session, ignoring what remains in each participant's memory after the interaction. Understanding conversational memory can be used as a source of information on the long-term development of social connections within a group. This paper introduces the MeMo corpus, the first conversational dataset annotated with participants' memory retention reports, aimed at facilitating computational modelling of human conversational memory. The MeMo corpus includes 31 hours of small-group discussions on Covid-19, repeated 3 times over the term of 2 weeks. It integrates validated behavioural and perceptual measures, audio, video, and multimodal annotations, offering a valuable resource for studying and modelling conversational memory and group dynamics. By introducing the MeMo corpus, analysing its validity, and demonstrating its usefulness for future research, this paper aims to pave the way for future research in conversational memory modelling for intelligent system development.

Kristian Fenech, Ádám Fodor, Sean P. Bergeron et al.

Dyadic and small group collaboration is an evolutionary advantageous behaviour and the need for such collaboration is a regular occurrence in day to day life. In this paper we estimate the perceived personality traits of individuals in dyadic and small groups over thin-slices of interaction on four multimodal datasets. We find that our transformer based predictive model performs similarly to human annotators tasked with predicting the perceived big-five personality traits of participants. Using this model we analyse the estimated perceived personality traits of individuals performing tasks in small groups and dyads. Permutation analysis shows that in the case of small groups undergoing collaborative tasks, the perceived personality of group members clusters, this is also observed for dyads in a collaborative problem solving task, but not in dyads under non-collaborative task settings. Additionally, we find that the group level average perceived personality traits provide a better predictor of group performance than the group level average self-reported personality traits.

Zsolt Csibi, Mónika Sándor, Mónika Serfőző et al.

Reflective thinking is a key competency in education, but assessing reflective writing remains a time-consuming and subjective task for education experts. While automated reflective analysis has been explored in several languages, Hungarian language was not researched extensively. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study on automatic reflection level classification in Hungarian student essays. We used a large, expert-annotated Hungarian dataset consisting of 1,954 reflective essays collected over multiple academic years and labeled on a four-level reflection scale. We investigate two approaches: (1) classical machine learning models using TF-IDF and semantic embedding features, and (2) Hungarian-specific transformer models fine-tuned for document-level reflection classification. To address the strong class imbalance in the dataset, we systematically examine class weighting, oversampling, data augmentation, and alternative loss functions. An extensive ablation study is conducted to analyze the contribution of each modeling and balancing strategy. Our results show that shallow machine learning models with appropriate feature engineering achieve strong overall performance, reaching up to 71% overall score averaged over accuracy, F1-score, and ROC AUC metrics, while transformer-based models achieve slightly lower overall score (68%) averaged over the same metrics, but demonstrate better generalization on minority reflection classes. These findings highlight the continued relevance of classical methods for low-resource settings and the robustness of transformer models for imbalanced classification. The proposed dataset and experimental insights provide a solid foundation for future research on automated reflective analysis in Hungarian and other morphologically rich languages.

Attila Miklós Ámon, Kristian Fenech, Péter Kovács et al.

In this paper we consider the continuous wavelet transform using Gaussian wavelets multiplied by an appropriate rational term. The zeros and poles of this rational modifier act as free parameters and their choice highly influences the shape of the mother wavelet. This allows the proposed construction to approximate signals with complex morphology using only a few wavelet coefficients. We show that the proposed rational Gaussian wavelets are admissible and provide numerical approximations of the wavelet coefficients using variable projection operators. In addition, we show how the proposed variable projection based rational Gaussian wavelet transform can be used in neural networks to obtain a highly interpretable feature learning layer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through a biomedical application, namely, the detection of ventricular ectopic beats (VEBs) in real ECG measurements.

Gábor Baranyi, Zsolt Csibi, Kristian Fenech et al.

This paper introduces the Ambient Intelligence Rehabilitation Support (AIRS) framework, an advanced artificial intelligence-based solution tailored for home rehabilitation environments. AIRS integrates cutting-edge technologies, including Real-Time 3D Reconstruction (RT-3DR), intelligent navigation, and large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), to create a comprehensive system for machine-guided physical rehabilitation. The general AIRS framework is demonstrated in rehabilitation scenarios following total knee replacement (TKR), utilizing a database of 263 video recordings for evaluation. A smartphone is employed within AIRS to perform RT-3DR of living spaces and has a body-matched avatar to provide visual feedback about the excercise. This avatar is necessary in (a) optimizing exercise configurations, including camera placement, patient positioning, and initial poses, and (b) addressing privacy concerns and promoting compliance with the AI Act. The system guides users through the recording process to ensure the collection of properly recorded videos. AIRS employs two feedback mechanisms: (i) visual 3D feedback, enabling direct comparisons between prerecorded clinical exercises and patient home recordings and (ii) VLM-generated feedback, providing detailed explanations and corrections for exercise errors. The framework also supports people with visual and hearing impairments. It also features a modular design that can be adapted to broader rehabilitation contexts. AIRS software components are available for further use and customization.

Aron Fóthi, Bence Fazekas, Natabara Máté Gyöngyössy et al.

In this paper, we present an approach for monocular open-set novel view synthesis (NVS) that leverages object skeletons to guide the underlying diffusion model. Building upon a baseline that utilizes a pre-trained 2D image generator, our method takes advantage of the Objaverse dataset, which includes animated objects with bone structures. By introducing a skeleton guide layer following the existing ray conditioning normalization (RCN) layer, our approach enhances pose accuracy and multi-view consistency. The skeleton guide layer provides detailed structural information for the generative model, improving the quality of synthesized views. Experimental results demonstrate that our skeleton-guided method significantly enhances consistency and accuracy across diverse object categories within the Objaverse dataset. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art NVS techniques both quantitatively and qualitatively, without relying on explicit 3D representations.

Ellák Somfai, Benjámin Baffy, Kristian Fenech et al.

Our goal is to bridge human and machine intelligence in melanoma detection. We develop a classification system exploiting a combination of visual pre-processing, deep learning, and ensembling for providing explanations to experts and to minimize false negative rate while maintaining high accuracy in melanoma detection. Source images are first automatically segmented using a U-net CNN. The result of the segmentation is then used to extract image sub-areas and specific parameters relevant in human evaluation, namely center, border, and asymmetry measures. These data are then processed by tailored neural networks which include structure searching algorithms. Partial results are then ensembled by a committee machine. Our evaluation on the largest skin lesion dataset which is publicly available today, ISIC-2019, shows improvement in all evaluated metrics over a baseline using the original images only. We also showed that indicative scores computed by the feature classifiers can provide useful insight into the various features on which the decision can be based.