Chinese literary classics hold significant cultural and educational value, offering deep insights into morality, history, and human nature. These works often include classical Chinese and complex narratives, making them difficult for children to read. To bridge this gap, we introduce a child-friendly literary adaptation (CLA) task to adapt the Chinese literary classic into engaging and accessible text for children. However, recent large language models (LLMs) overlook children’s reading preferences (i.e., vivid character portrayals, concise narrative structures, and appropriate readability with simpler words and sentences), which poses challenges in CLA. In this paper, we propose a method called InstructChild, which augments the LLM with these preferences for adaptation. Specifically, we first obtain the characters’ personalities and narrative structure as additional information for fine-grained instruction tuning. Then, we devise a readability metric as the reward to align the LLM with the children’s reading level. Finally, a lookahead decoding strategy is applied to improve the readability of the generated text during inference. To support the evaluation of CLA task, we construct the Classic4Children dataset, which comprises both the original and child-friendly versions of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Experimental results show that our InstructChild significantly improves performance in automatic and human evaluation.

Visual question generation (VQG) task aims to generate high-quality questions based on the input image. Current methods primarily focus on generating questions containing specified content utilizing answers or question types as constraints. However, these constraints make it challenging to control the topic of generated questions (e.g., conversation or test subject topics) for various applications. Thus, it is necessary to utilize topics as constraints to guide question generation. Considering that there are many topics and it is almost impossible for human annotations to cover them, we propose the cross-topic learning VQG (CTL-VQG) task, which aims to generate questions related to unseen topics in cross-topic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-guided cross-topic visual question generation (KC-VQG) model to extract unseen topic-related information for question generation. Specifically, an image-topic feature extractor is introduced in our model to extract topic-related intuitive visual features; an image-topic knowledge extractor is used to extract and select the most appropriate topic-related implicit knowledge from large language models for generating questions. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms baselines and can effectively generate unseen topic-related questions in cross-topic scenarios.