Qiuchi Li’s research while affiliated with University of Copenhagen and other places

Can multi-modal large models (MLMs) that can ``see'' an image be said to ``understand'' it? Drawing inspiration from Searle's Chinese Room, we propose the \textbf{Visual Room} argument: a system may process and describe every detail of visual inputs by following algorithmic rules, without genuinely comprehending the underlying intention. This dilemma challenges the prevailing assumption that perceptual mastery implies genuine understanding. In implementation, we introduce a two-tier evaluation framework spanning perception and cognition. The perception component evaluates whether MLMs can accurately capture the surface-level details of visual contents, where the cognitive component examines their ability to infer sarcasm polarity. To support this framework, We further introduce a high-quality multi-modal sarcasm dataset comprising both 924 static images and 100 dynamic videos. All sarcasm labels are annotated by the original authors and verified by independent reviewers to ensure clarity and consistency. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art (SoTA) MLMs. Our results highlight three key findings: (1) MLMs perform well on perception tasks; (2) even with correct perception, models exhibit an average error rate of ~16.1\% in sarcasm understanding, revealing a significant gap between seeing and understanding; (3) error analysis attributes this gap to deficiencies in emotional reasoning, commonsense inference, and context alignment. This work provides empirical grounding for the proposed Visual Room argument and offers a new evaluation paradigm for MLMs.

This work introduces the first benchmark for nursing value alignment, consisting of five core value dimensions distilled from international nursing codes: Altruism, Human Dignity, Integrity, Justice, and Professionalism. The benchmark comprises 1,100 real-world nursing behavior instances collected through a five-month longitudinal field study across three hospitals of varying tiers. These instances are annotated by five clinical nurses and then augmented with LLM-generated counterfactuals with reversed ethic polarity. Each original case is paired with a value-aligned and a value-violating version, resulting in 2,200 labeled instances that constitute the Easy-Level dataset. To increase adversarial complexity, each instance is further transformed into a dialogue-based format that embeds contextual cues and subtle misleading signals, yielding a Hard-Level dataset. We evaluate 23 state-of-the-art (SoTA) LLMs on their alignment with nursing values. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) DeepSeek-V3 achieves the highest performance on the Easy-Level dataset (94.55), where Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms other models on the Hard-Level dataset (89.43), significantly surpassing the medical LLMs; (2) Justice is consistently the most difficult nursing value dimension to evaluate; and (3) in-context learning significantly improves alignment. This work aims to provide a foundation for value-sensitive LLMs development in clinical settings. The dataset and the code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Ben012345/NurValues.

Elaborating a series of intermediate reasoning steps significantly improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to solve complex problems, as such steps would evoke LLMs to think sequentially. However, human sarcasm understanding is often considered an intuitive and holistic cognitive process, in which various linguistic, contextual, and emotional cues are integrated to form a comprehensive understanding, in a way that does not necessarily follow a step-by-step fashion. To verify the validity of this argument, we introduce a new prompting framework (called SarcasmCue) containing four sub-methods, viz. chain of contradiction (CoC), graph of cues (GoC), bagging of cues (BoC) and tensor of cues (ToC), which elicits LLMs to detect human sarcasm by considering sequential and non-sequential prompting methods. Through a comprehensive empirical comparison on four benchmarks, we highlight three key findings: (1) CoC and GoC show superior performance with more advanced models like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5, with an improvement of 3.5%. (2) ToC significantly outperforms other methods when smaller LLMs are evaluated, boosting the F1 score by 29.7% over the best baseline. (3) Our proposed framework consistently pushes the state-of-the-art (i.e., ToT) by 4.2%, 2.0%, 29.7%, and 58.2% in F1 scores across four datasets. This demonstrates the effectiveness and stability of the proposed framework.

Evaluating the value alignment of large language models (LLMs) has traditionally relied on single-sentence adversarial prompts, which directly probe models with ethically sensitive or controversial questions. However, with the rapid advancements in AI safety techniques, models have become increasingly adept at circumventing these straightforward tests, limiting their effectiveness in revealing underlying biases and ethical stances. To address this limitation, we propose an upgraded value alignment benchmark that moves beyond single-sentence prompts by incorporating multi-turn dialogues and narrative-based scenarios. This approach enhances the stealth and adversarial nature of the evaluation, making it more robust against superficial safeguards implemented in modern LLMs. We design and implement a dataset that includes conversational traps and ethically ambiguous storytelling, systematically assessing LLMs' responses in more nuanced and context-rich settings. Experimental results demonstrate that this enhanced methodology can effectively expose latent biases that remain undetected in traditional single-shot evaluations. Our findings highlight the necessity of contextual and dynamic testing for value alignment in LLMs, paving the way for more sophisticated and realistic assessments of AI ethics and safety.

Polysemy is a common phenomenon in linguistics. Quantum-inspired complex word embeddings based on Semantic Hilbert Space play an important role in natural language processing, which may accurately define a genuine probability distribution over the word space. The existing quantum-inspired works manipulate on the real-valued vectors to compose the complex-valued word embeddings, which lack direct complex-valued pre-trained word representations. Motivated by quantum-inspired complex word embeddings, we propose a complex-valued pre-trained word embedding based on density matrices, called Word2State. Unlike the existing static word embeddings, our proposed model can provide non-linear semantic composition in the form of amplitude and phase, which also defines an authentic probabilistic distribution. We evaluate this model on twelve datasets from the word similarity task and six datasets from the relevant downstream tasks. The experimental results on different tasks demonstrate that our proposed pre-trained word embedding can capture richer semantic information and exhibit greater flexibility in expressing uncertainty.

The matching of competences, such as skills, occupations or knowledges, is a key desiderata for candidates to be fit for jobs. Automatic extraction of competences from CVs and Jobs can greatly promote recruiters' productivity in locating relevant candidates for job vacancies. This work presents the first model that jointly extracts and classifies competence from Danish job postings. Different from existing works on skill extraction and skill classification, our model is trained on a large volume of annotated Danish corpora and is capable of extracting a wide range of Danish competences, including skills, occupations and knowledges of different categories. More importantly, as a single BERT-like architecture for joint extraction and classification, our model is lightweight and efficient at inference. On a real-scenario job matching dataset, our model beats the state-of-the-art models in the overall performance of Danish competence extraction and classification, and saves over 50% time at inference.