Maha Elgarf

Jialin Li, Maha Elgarf, Alia Waleed et al.

In personalized machine learning, the aim of personalization is to train a model that caters to a specific individual or group of individuals by optimizing one or more performance metrics and adhering to specific constraints. In this paper, we discuss the need for personalization in affective computing and present the first survey of existing approaches for personalization in affective computing. Our review spans training techniques and objectives towards the personalization of affective computing models across various interaction modes and contexts. We develop a taxonomy that clusters existing approaches into Data-level and Model-level approaches. Across the Data-Level and Model-Level broad categories, we group existing approaches into seven sub-categories: (1) User-Specific Models, (2) Group-Specific Models, (3) Weighting-Based Approaches, (4) Feature Augmentation, (5) Generative-Based Models which fall into the Data-Level approaches, (6) Fine-Tuning Approaches, and (7) Multitask Learning Approaches falling under the model-level approaches. We provide a problem formulation for personalized affective computing, and to each of the identified sub-categories. Additionally, we provide a statistical analysis of the surveyed literature, analyzing the prevalence of different affective computing tasks, interaction modes (i.e. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Human-Human interaction (HHI), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)), interaction contexts (e.g. educative, social, gaming, etc.), and the level of personalization among the surveyed works. Based on our analysis, we provide a road-map for researchers interested in exploring this direction.

Sneheel Sarangi, Maha Elgarf, Hanan Salam

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to understand and reflect on the mental states of others. Although this capability is crucial for human interaction, testing on Large Language Models (LLMs) reveals that they possess only a rudimentary understanding of it. Although the most capable closed-source LLMs have come close to human performance on some ToM tasks, they still perform poorly on complex variations of the task that involve more structured reasoning. In this work, we utilize the concept of "pretend-play", or ``Simulation Theory'' from cognitive psychology to propose ``Decompose-ToM'': an LLM-based inference algorithm that improves model performance on complex ToM tasks. We recursively simulate user perspectives and decompose the ToM task into a simpler set of functions: subject identification, question-reframing, world model updation, and knowledge availability. We test the algorithm on higher-order ToM tasks and a task testing for ToM capabilities in a conversational setting, demonstrating that our approach shows significant improvement across models compared to baseline methods while requiring minimal prompt tuning across tasks and no additional model training.