Automatic grading of subjective questions remains a significant challenge in examination assessment due to the diversity in question formats and the open-ended nature of student responses. Existing works primarily focus on a specific type of subjective question and lack the generality to support comprehensive exams that contain diverse question types. In this paper, we propose a unified Large Language Model (LLM)-enhanced auto-grading framework that provides human-like evaluation for all types of subjective questions across various domains. Our framework integrates four complementary modules to holistically evaluate student answers. In addition to a basic text matching module that provides a foundational assessment of content similarity, we leverage the powerful reasoning and generative capabilities of LLMs to: (1) compare key knowledge points extracted from both student and reference answers, (2) generate a pseudo-question from the student answer to assess its relevance to the original question, and (3) simulate human evaluation by identifying content-related and non-content strengths and weaknesses. Extensive experiments on both general-purpose and domain-specific datasets show that our framework consistently outperforms traditional and LLM-based baselines across multiple grading metrics. Moreover, the proposed system has been successfully deployed in real-world training and certification exams at a major e-commerce enterprise.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), as an effective alternative medicine, has been receiving increasing attention. In recent years, the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) tailored for TCM has highlighted the urgent need for an objective and comprehensive evaluation framework to assess their performance on real-world tasks. However, existing evaluation datasets are limited in scope and primarily text-based, lacking a unified and standardized multimodal question-answering (QA) benchmark. To address this issue, we introduce TCM-Ladder, the first comprehensive multimodal QA dataset specifically designed for evaluating large TCM language models. The dataset covers multiple core disciplines of TCM, including fundamental theory, diagnostics, herbal formulas, internal medicine, surgery, pharmacognosy, and pediatrics. In addition to textual content, TCM-Ladder incorporates various modalities such as images and videos. The dataset was constructed using a combination of automated and manual filtering processes and comprises over 52,000 questions. These questions include single-choice, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, diagnostic dialogue, and visual comprehension tasks. We trained a reasoning model on TCM-Ladder and conducted comparative experiments against nine state-of-the-art general domain and five leading TCM-specific LLMs to evaluate their performance on the dataset. Moreover, we propose Ladder-Score, an evaluation method specifically designed for TCM question answering that effectively assesses answer quality in terms of terminology usage and semantic expression. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically evaluate mainstream general domain and TCM-specific LLMs on a unified multimodal benchmark. The datasets and leaderboard are publicly available at https://tcmladder.com and will be continuously updated. The source code is available at https://github.com/orangeshushu/TCM-Ladder.

The output voltage of the boost converter is often compromised by unpredictable load and uncertain input voltage disturbance, making the stable control of the output voltage problematic. To address this issue, a dc voltage robust control strategy of the boost converter is proposed with considering system disturbance. First, based on the dynamic model of the boost converter, a Luenberger observer is proposed to estimate the load impedance and input voltage. Subsequently, the nonlinear model of the boost converter is transformed into a linear Brunovsky form by using the feedback linearization method, and a single-loop sliding mode controller is designed based on the system energy function. Since the proposed observer can update the system disturbances for the controller in time, the robustness and dynamic performance of the boost converter are significantly improved. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by simulation and experiment.

Multimodal sequence analysis aims to draw inferences from visual, language, and acoustic sequences. A majority of existing works focus on the aligned fusion of three modalities to explore inter-modal interactions, which is impractical in real-world scenarios. To overcome this issue, we seek to focus on analyzing unaligned sequences, which is still relatively underexplored and also more challenging. We propose Multimodal Graph, whose novelty mainly lies in transforming the sequential learning problem into graph learning problem. The graph-based structure enables parallel computation in time dimension (as opposed to recurrent neural network) and can effectively learn longer intra- and inter-modal temporal dependency in unaligned sequences. First, we propose multiple ways to construct the adjacency matrix for sequence to perform sequence to graph transformation. To learn intra-modal dynamics, a graph convolution network is employed for each modality based on the defined adjacency matrix. To learn inter-modal dynamics, given that the unimodal sequences are unaligned, the commonly considered word-level fusion does not pertain. To this end, we innovatively devise graph pooling algorithms to automatically explore the associations between various time slices from different modalities and learn high-level graph representation hierarchically. Multimodal Graph outperforms state-of-the-art models on three datasets under the same experimental setting.

Nowadays, BERT has been effective in context extraction and widely utilized in multimodal fusion. However, many multimodal learning systems with BERT consider different modalities equally important, which ignores the huge capability difference between the pre-trained models and others. Moreover, equal multimodal fusion might introduce noise and limit the performance of these systems. To this end, we propose a superposition multimodal fusion framework to strengthen the importance of language modality with nonverbal information transmission. With the superposition strategy, language information will fuse with nonverbal information at different stages, which allows the model to fully learn language modality information. Besides, to ensure that language information is the main content of the fusion, we propose a comparison loss to help the reinforced cross-modal attention module better transfer nonverbal information to language features. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare with baselines and the results demonstrate that our method achieves the superior performance.

Multimodal sentiment analysis mainly concentrates on language, acoustic and visual information. Previous work based on BERT utilizes only text (language) representation to fine-tune BERT, while ignoring the importance of nonverbal information. Due to the fact that features extracted from a single modality may contain uncertainty, it is challenging for BERT to perform well in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a multimodal fusion BERT that can explore the time-dependent interactions among different modalities. Additionally, prior BERT-based methods tend to train the models with only one optimizer to update the parameters. However, we argue that BERT has been pre-trained with a lot of corpora so it needs to be fine-tuned slightly. Therefore, an internal updating mechanism is introduced to avoid the overfitting of the model in the training process. We set two optimizers for multimodal fusion BERT and other components of the model with different learning rates, which enables the model to attain optimal parameters. The results of experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our model is superior to the baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art.

Multimodal sentiment analysis refers to inferring sentiment from language, acoustic, and visual sequences. Previous studies focus on analyzing aligned sequences, while the unaligned sequential analysis is more practical in real-world scenarios. Due to the long-time dependency hidden in the multimodal unaligned sequence and time alignment information is not provided, exploring the time-dependent interactions within unaligned sequences is more challenging. To this end, we introduce the time squeeze fusion to automatically explore the time-dependent interactions by modeling the unimodal and multimodal sequences from the perspective of compressing the time dimension. Moreover, prior methods tend to fuse unimodal features into a multimodal embedding, based on which sentiment is inferred. However, we argue that the unimodal information may be lost or the generated multimodal embedding may be redundant. Addressing this issue, we propose a unimodal reinforced Transformer to progressively attend and distill unimodal information from the multimodal embedding, which enables the multimodal embedding to highlight the discriminative unimodal information. Extensive experiments suggest that our model reaches state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and F1 score on MOSEI dataset.