Harry Rogers, Sally Shiels, Ashley Tomlinson +5cs.AI
Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are the gold standard for assessing clinical competence, yet scoring remains vulnerable to examiner subjectivity, fatigue, and cognitive bias. Standard examiner validation via inter-rater statistics lacks explanatory power regarding the source of errors, as it neither analyzes examiner reasoning nor verifies examiner claims against actual events. Thus, we introduce Quality Action Assurance (QAA), a multimodal framework that verifies examiner claims in Virtual Reality (VR) pediatric OSCEs by comparing actions claimed by examiners against the true sequence of events, constructed from video, VR logs, and actor data. QAA combines a constrained temporal action alignment model, which performs action localization and actor source attribution, with a large language model that extracts examiner claims and checks them against the record. Across a 5-fold cross-validation, QAA achieves 99.2% $\pm$ 0.7% Actor F1 and 93.4% $\pm$ 1.9% W@16 for temporal alignment. Overall, QAA detects examiner errors with 70.0% precision and 76.7% recall, improving factual correctness from 39.2% to 79.2%, enabling fairer OSCE assessment.
Ying Xie, Yi Zheng, Zehui Xiao +2cs.HC cs.AI cs.LG
With the advancement of science and technology, the importance of emotion research has become increasingly evident. Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition has emerged as an active research area in recent years, owing to its objectivity and high temporal resolution. However, most existing methods focus on optimizing encoder structures to enhance feature extraction capabilities, while paying relatively little attention to similarity calculation strategies, particularly overlooking the potential temporal misalignment of responses among different subjects. To address these shortcomings, this paper draws inspiration from the late interaction mechanism of ColBERT in natural language processing (NLP) and proposes a Temporal Asynchronous Alignment-based Contrastive Learning (TA2CL) framework. This method transforms the traditional global "hard alignment" similarity calculation approach into a fine-grained local matching mechanism, enabling the model to adaptively search for and align "locally highly correlated" segments between two EEG signals, thereby effectively mitigating the effects of inter-subject differences and temporal delays. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves strong performance across multiple public datasets. Specifically, on the FACED dataset, it achieves an accuracy of 64.5% for the nine-class classification task and 79.5% for the binary classification task, while on the SEED and SEED-V datasets, it achieves accuracies of 86.4% and 70.1%, respectively, validating the method's effectiveness and generalization capability.