Zhenzhen Qin

Lana Do, Shasta Ihorn, Charity M. Pitcher-Cooper et al.

Audio description (AD) narrates visual elements in video for blind and low-vision audiences. Recent work has shown that giving novice describers an AI-generated draft to start from helps produce higher-quality AD and lowers the barrier to entry. What remains an open question is how draft quality shapes the editing process. We investigate this through GenAD, an AD generation pipeline that incorporates accessibility guidelines and contextual video information, and RefineAD, an editing interface for human revisions. Human-AI contributions are measured across text, timing, and delivery. In a within-subjects study, we compared authoring from scratch against editing AI drafts of varying quality. GenAD drafts cut completion time by more than half and significantly reduced cognitive load. In contrast, baseline drafts generated from simple, unguided prompts offered only modest benefits, pointing to a minimum quality threshold for effectiveness. Qualitative findings suggest this threshold is content-dependent; as visual complexity increases, so does the quality needed from AI drafts. We propose this as a design principle: effective AI assistance should clear a quality threshold suited to the target content, rather than simply be present.

Pufan Zeng, Yilun Liu, Mingchen Dai et al.

Achieving cultural alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly depends on synthetic data generation. For such synthesis, the most vital initial step is seed curation; however, current methods lack quantifiable standards for selecting these seeds. Existing approaches rely on unscalable manual curation or bias-prone LLM extraction, treating cultural specificity as an abstract concept rather than a measurable signal. In this paper, we address this "quantification gap" by proposing C-Mining, an unsupervised framework that transforms the discovery of cultural seeds from a subjective selection process into a computable data mining formulation. Our approach exploits a novel geometric insight, leveraging the cross-lingual misalignment of cultural concepts within pre-trained embedding spaces as a quantifiable discovery signal. By systematically identifying these regions characterized by pronounced linguistic exclusivity and geometric isolation, while actively filtering out noise, C-Mining automatically extracts high-fidelity Culture Points (CPs) from raw multilingual corpora without reliance on human or LLM supervision, reducing preparation costs by more than 150-fold. We further leverage the mined knowledge to steer the synthesis of diverse instruction-tuning datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this seed-centric approach significantly enhances cultural understanding and reasoning capabilities, achieving a +6.03 point improvement on CulturalBench-Hard and surpassing state-of-the-art baselines, providing a scalable, quantifiable solution for high-quality cultural data synthesis.

Yuqi Hu, Qiwen Xiong, Zhenzhen Qin et al.

Patient safety training is essential for preparing healthcare professionals to identify, investigate, and prevent adverse events. However, conventional simulation-based approaches often require substantial faculty time, physical resources, and standardized facilitation. This paper presents a prototype AI-powered simulation platform designed to support more scalable patient safety training through root cause analysis (RCA). The system provides a Unity-based 3D simulation environment, which allows trainees to investigate an ICU adverse event by interviewing five virtual team members represented as AI-powered avatars. Each avatar is driven by a large language model (LLM) agent with role-specific knowledge and variable states of mind. Moreover, emotional text-to-speech and AI-supported facial and body animation enable more realistic and immersive interactions. After completing the simulation, trainees submit a written RCA report and receive rubric-guided formative and summative feedback automatically generated by an LLM-based assessment component. The prototype is built to support patient safety training for healthcare professionals, focusing on skills in communication, investigation, thinking, and analysis, with low recurring instructional burden. We describe the design of the platform, its core technical components, and an RCA case based on a published ICU scenario. This work demonstrates the feasibility of integrating generative AI into immersive simulation for scalable patient safety education.