Masaki Asada

Shusaku Egami, Aoi Ohta, Tomoki Tsujimura et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) provide flexible natural language processing capabilities, while knowledge graphs (KGs) offer explicit and structured knowledge. Integrating these two in a complementary manner enables the development of reliable and verifiable AI systems. In particular, knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) has attracted attention as a means to reduce LLM hallucinations and to leverage knowledge beyond the training data. However, existing KGQA benchmark datasets are biased toward encyclopedic knowledge, limited to a single modality, and lack fine-grained spatiotemporal data, which limits their applicability to real-world scenarios targeted by Embodied AI. We introduce HOME-KGQA, a novel KGQA benchmark dataset built on a multimodal KG of daily household activities. HOME-KGQA consists of complex, multi-hop natural language questions paired with graph database query languages. Compared to existing benchmarks, it includes more challenging questions that involve multi-level spatiotemporal reasoning, multimodal grounding, and aggregate functions. Experimental results show that the LLM-based KGQA methods fail to achieve performance comparable to that on existing datasets when evaluated on HOME-KGQA. This highlights significant challenges that should be addressed for the real-world deployment of KGQA systems. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/aistairc/home-kgqa

Masaki Asada

The development of deep neural networks has improved representation learning in various domains, including textual, graph structural, and relational triple representations. This development opened the door to new relation extraction beyond the traditional text-oriented relation extraction. However, research on the effectiveness of considering multiple heterogeneous domain information simultaneously is still under exploration, and if a model can take an advantage of integrating heterogeneous information, it is expected to exhibit a significant contribution to many problems in the world. This thesis works on Drug-Drug Interactions (DDIs) from the literature as a case study and realizes relation extraction utilizing heterogeneous domain information. First, a deep neural relation extraction model is prepared and its attention mechanism is analyzed. Next, a method to combine the drug molecular structure information and drug description information to the input sentence information is proposed, and the effectiveness of utilizing drug molecular structures and drug descriptions for the relation extraction task is shown. Then, in order to further exploit the heterogeneous information, drug-related items, such as protein entries, medical terms and pathways are collected from multiple existing databases and a new data set in the form of a knowledge graph (KG) is constructed. A link prediction task on the constructed data set is conducted to obtain embedding representations of drugs that contain the heterogeneous domain information. Finally, a method that integrates the input sentence information and the heterogeneous KG information is proposed. The proposed model is trained and evaluated on a widely used data set, and as a result, it is shown that utilizing heterogeneous domain information significantly improves the performance of relation extraction from the literature.

Kimihiro Hasegawa, Wiradee Imrattanatrai, Zhi-Qi Cheng et al.

Multimodal systems have great potential to assist humans in procedural activities, where people follow instructions to achieve their goals. Despite diverse application scenarios, systems are typically evaluated on traditional classification tasks, e.g., action recognition or temporal action segmentation. In this paper, we present a novel evaluation dataset, ProMQA, to measure system advancements in application-oriented scenarios. ProMQA consists of 401 multimodal procedural QA pairs on user recording of procedural activities, i.e., cooking, coupled with their corresponding instructions/recipes. For QA annotation, we take a cost-effective human-LLM collaborative approach, where the existing annotation is augmented with LLM-generated QA pairs that are later verified by humans. We then provide the benchmark results to set the baseline performance on ProMQA. Our experiment reveals a significant gap between human performance and that of current systems, including competitive proprietary multimodal models. We hope our dataset sheds light on new aspects of models' multimodal understanding capabilities.

Kimihiro Hasegawa, Wiradee Imrattanatrai, Masaki Asada et al.

Assistants on assembly tasks have a large potential to benefit humans from everyday tasks to industrial settings. However, no testbeds support application-oriented system evaluation in a practical setting, especially in assembly. To foster the development, we propose a new multimodal QA dataset on assembly activities. Our dataset, ProMQA-Assembly, consists of 391 QA pairs that require the multimodal understanding of human-activity recordings and their instruction manuals in an online-style manner. In the development, we adopt a semi-automated QA annotation approach, where LLMs generate candidates and humans verify them, as a cost-effective method, and further improve it by integrating fine-grained action labels to diversify question types. Furthermore, we create instruction task graphs for the target tasks of assembling toy vehicles. These newly created task graphs are used in our benchmarking experiment, as well as to facilitate the human verification process in the QA annotation. Utilizing our dataset, we benchmark models, including competitive proprietary multimodal models. Our results suggest great room for improvement for the current models. We believe our new evaluation dataset can contribute to the further development of procedural-activity assistants.

Kimihiro Hasegawa, Wiradee Imrattanatrai, Masaki Asada et al.

Procedural activity assistants potentially support humans in a variety of settings, from our daily lives, e.g., cooking or assembling flat-pack furniture, to professional situations, e.g., manufacturing or biological experiments. Despite its potential use cases, the system development tailored for such an assistant is still underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, called TAMA, a Tool-Augmented Multimodal Agent, for procedural activity understanding. TAMA enables interleaved multimodal reasoning by making use of multimedia-returning tools in a training-free setting. Our experimental result on the multimodal procedural QA dataset, ProMQA-Assembly, shows that our approach can improve the performance of vision-language models, especially GPT-5 and MiMo-VL. Furthermore, our ablation studies provide empirical support for the effectiveness of two features that characterize our framework, multimedia-returning tools and agentic flexible tool selection. We believe our proposed framework and experimental results facilitate the thinking with images paradigm for video and multimodal tasks, let alone the development of procedural activity assistants.

Wiradee Imrattanatrai, Masaki Asada, Kimihiro Hasegawa et al.

This paper presents VDAct, a dataset for a Video-grounded Dialogue on Event-driven Activities, alongside VDEval, a session-based context evaluation metric specially designed for the task. Unlike existing datasets, VDAct includes longer and more complex video sequences that depict a variety of event-driven activities that require advanced contextual understanding for accurate response generation. The dataset comprises 3,000 dialogues with over 30,000 question-and-answer pairs, derived from 1,000 videos with diverse activity scenarios. VDAct displays a notably challenging characteristic due to its broad spectrum of activity scenarios and wide range of question types. Empirical studies on state-of-the-art vision foundation models highlight their limitations in addressing certain question types on our dataset. Furthermore, VDEval, which integrates dialogue session history and video content summaries extracted from our supplementary Knowledge Graphs to evaluate individual responses, demonstrates a significantly higher correlation with human assessments on the VDAct dataset than existing evaluation metrics that rely solely on the context of single dialogue turns.

Masaki Asada, Makoto Miwa, Yutaka Sasaki

We propose a novel neural method to extract drug-drug interactions (DDIs) from texts using external drug molecular structure information. We encode textual drug pairs with convolutional neural networks and their molecular pairs with graph convolutional networks (GCNs), and then we concatenate the outputs of these two networks. In the experiments, we show that GCNs can predict DDIs from the molecular structures of drugs in high accuracy and the molecular information can enhance text-based DDI extraction by 2.39 percent points in the F-score on the DDIExtraction 2013 shared task data set.