Despite Southeast Asia’s (SEA) extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, the region remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research, resulting in AI models that inadequately capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing culturally relevant high-quality datasets for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL ensures better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages and cultural depictions in VL research. Our methodology employed three approaches: community-driven crowdsourcing with SEA contributors, automated image crawling, and synthetic image generation. We evaluated each method’s effectiveness in capturing cultural relevance. We found that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing, whereas synthetic image generation failed to accurately reflect SEA cultural nuances and contexts. Collectively, we gathered 1.28 million SEA culturally relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. This work bridges the representation gap in SEA, establishes a foundation for developing culturally aware AI systems for this region, and provides a replicable framework for addressing representation gaps in other underrepresented regions.

Large language models (LLMs) often necessitate extensive labeled datasets and training compute to achieve impressive performance across downstream tasks. This paper explores a self-training paradigm, where the LLM autonomously curates its own labels and selectively trains on unknown data samples identified through a reference-free consistency method. Empirical evaluations demonstrate significant improvements in reducing hallucination in generation across multiple subjects. Furthermore, the selective training framework mitigates catastrophic forgetting in out-of-distribution benchmarks, addressing a critical limitation in training LLMs. Our findings suggest that such an approach can substantially reduce the dependency on large labeled datasets, paving the way for more scalable and cost-effective language model training.

Humans’ emotional perception is subjective by nature, in which each individual could express different emotions regarding the same textual content. Existing datasets for emotion analysis commonly depend on a single ground truth per data sample, derived from majority voting or averaging the opinions of all annotators. In this paper, we introduce a new non-aggregated dataset, namely StudEmo, that contains 5,182 customer reviews, each annotated by 25 people with intensities of eight emotions from Plutchik’s model, extended with valence and arousal. We also propose three personalized models that use not only textual content but also the individual human perspective, providing the model with different approaches to learning human representations. The experiments were carried out as a multitask classification on two datasets: our StudEmo dataset and GoEmotions dataset, which contains 28 emotional categories. The proposed personalized methods significantly improve prediction results, especially for emotions that have low inter-annotator agreement.