Sandro Pezzelle

Aditya K Surikuchi, Raquel Fernández, Sandro Pezzelle

Foundation models are used for many real-world applications involving language generation from temporally-ordered multimodal events. In this work, we study the ability of models to identify the most important sub-events in a video, which is a fundamental prerequisite for narrating or summarizing multimodal events. Specifically, we focus on football games and evaluate models on their ability to distinguish between important and non-important sub-events in a game. To this end, we construct a new dataset by leveraging human preferences for importance implicit in football game highlight reels, without any additional annotation costs. Using our dataset, we compare several state-of-the-art multimodal models and show that they are not far from chance level performance. Analyses of models beyond standard evaluation metrics reveal their tendency to rely on a single dominant modality and their ineffectiveness in synthesizing necessary information from multiple sources. Our findings underline the importance of modular architectures that can handle sample-level heterogeneity in multimodal data and the need for complementary training procedures that can maximize cross-modal synergy.

Kumiko Nakajima, Jan Zuiderveld, Sandro Pezzelle

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in verbal creative tasks. However, previous assessments of the creative capabilities of LLMs remain weakly grounded in human creativity theory and are thus hard to interpret. The widely used Divergent Association Task (DAT) focuses on novelty, ignoring appropriateness, a core component of creativity. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art LLMs on DAT and show that their scores on the task are lower than those of two baselines that do not possess any creative abilities, undermining its validity for model evaluation. Grounded in human creativity theory, which defines creativity as the combination of novelty and appropriateness, we introduce Conditional Divergent Association Task (CDAT). CDAT evaluates novelty conditional on contextual appropriateness, separating noise from creativity better than DAT, while remaining simple and objective. Under CDAT, smaller model families often show the most creativity, whereas advanced families favor appropriateness at lower novelty. We hypothesize that training and alignment likely shift models along this frontier, making outputs more appropriate but less creative. We release the dataset and code.