Psychiatric clinical interviewing is a core yet challenging skill for psychiatric residents, requiring clinicians to navigate open-ended dialogue, interpret emotional cues, and manage diagnostic uncertainty. However, existing simulation-based education (SBE) tools often fail to provide sufficient opportunities for realistic and autonomous interview practice, largely due to their reliance on scripted and rigid interactions. In this paper, we explore how large language model (LLM) agents can be leveraged to support SBE systems for psychiatric clinical interview training. We first conducted a formative study to identify the psychiatry-specific learning needs and interactional challenges that should shape system design. Based on these insights, we developed PsyMooc, an LLM-enhanced SBE system designed to support open-ended interview interactions and deliver context-aware, competency-oriented feedback through LLM-driven agents. We then evaluated PsyMooc through a small-scale between-subjects user study to examine usability and learning-related outcomes. The results provide preliminary evidence that PsyMooc was perceived as usable and engaging, and was associated with improvements in residents’ clinical confidence, interview performance proxies, and patient-centered communication behaviors.

Rapid creation of novel product appearance designs that align with consumer emotional requirements poses a significant challenge. Text-to-image models, with their excellent image generation capabilities, have demonstrated potential in providing inspiration to designers. However, designers still encounter issues including aligning emotional needs, expressing design intentions, and comprehending generated outcomes in practical applications. To address these challenges, we introduce AutoSpark, an interactive system that integrates Kansei Engineering and generative AI to provide creativity support for designers in creating automobile appearance designs that meet emotional needs. AutoSpark employs a Kansei Engineering engine powered by generative AI and a semantic network to assist designers in emotional need alignment, design intention expression, and prompt crafting. It also facilitates designers’ understanding and iteration of generated results through fine-grained image-image similarity comparisons and text-image relevance assessments. The design-thinking map within its interface aids in managing the design process. Our user study indicates that AutoSpark effectively aids designers in producing designs that are more aligned with emotional needs and of higher quality compared to a baseline system, while also enhancing the designers’ experience in the human-AI co-creation process.

Abstract The continuous application of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in online education has led to significant progress, especially in the field of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), online courses and learning management systems (LMS). An important research direction of the field is to provide students with customised learning trajectories via student modelling. Previous studies have shown that customisation of learning trajectories could effectively improve students’ learning experiences and outcomes. However, training an ITS that can customise students’ learning trajectories suffers from cold-start, time-consumption, human labour-intensity, and cost problems. One feasible approach is to simulate real students’ behaviour trajectories through algorithms, to generate data that could be used to train the ITS. Nonetheless, implementing high-accuracy student modelling methods that effectively address these issues remains an ongoing challenge. Traditional simulation methods, in particular, encounter difficulties in ensuring the quality and diversity of the generated data, thereby limiting their capacity to provide intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) with high-fidelity and diverse training data. We thus propose Sim-GAIL, a novel student modelling method based on generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL). To the best of our knowledge, it is the first method using GAIL to address the challenge of lacking training data, resulting from the issues mentioned above. We analyse and compare the performance of Sim-GAIL with two traditional Reinforcement Learning-based and Imitation Learning-based methods using action distribution evaluation, cumulative reward evaluation, and offline-policy evaluation. The experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional ones on most metrics. Moreover, we apply our method to a domain plagued by the cold-start problem, knowledge tracing (KT), and the results show that our novel method could effectively improve the KT model’s prediction accuracy in a cold-start scenario.

Predicting visual attention facilitates an adaptive virtual museum environment and provides a context-aware and interactive user experience. Explorations toward development of a visual attention mechanism using eye-tracking data have so far been limited to 2D cases, and researchers are yet to approach this topic in a 3D virtual environment and from a spatiotemporal perspective. We present the first 3D Eye-tracking Dataset for Visual Attention modeling in a virtual Museum, known as the EDVAM. In addition, a deep learning model is devised and tested with the EDVAM to predict a user’s subsequent visual attention from previous eye movements. This work provides a reference for visual attention modeling and context-aware interaction in the context of virtual museums.

Recently, methods enabling humans and Artificial Intelligent (AI) agents to collaborate towards improving the efficiency of Reinforcement Learning - also called Collaborative Reinforcement Learning (CRL) - have been receiving increasing attention. In this paper, we provide a long-term, in-depth survey, investigating human-AI collaborative methods based on both interactive reinforcement learning algorithms and human-AI collaborative frameworks, between 2011 and 2020. We elucidate and discuss synergistic analysis methods of both the growth of the field and the state-of-the-art; we suggest novel technical directions and new collaboration design ideas. Specifically, we provide a new CRL classification taxonomy, as a systematic modelling tool for selecting and improving new CRL designs. Furthermore, we propose generic CRL challenges providing the research community with a guide towards effective implementation of human-AI collaboration. The aim is to empower researchers to develop more efficient and natural human-AI collaborative methods that could utilise the different strengths of humans and AI.