This paper presents the design, synthetic generation, and automated evaluation of ArtGenEval-GPT++, an advanced dataset for training and fine-tuning conversational agents with artificial awareness capabilities targeting to the art domain. Building on the foundation of a previously released dataset (ArtGenEval-GPT), the new version introduces enhancements for greater personalization (e.g., gender, ethnicity, age, and knowledge) while addressing prior limitations, including low-quality dialogues and hallucinations. The dataset comprises approximately 12,500 dyadic, multi-turn dialogues generated using state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). These dialogues span diverse museum scenarios, incorporating varied visitor profiles, emotional states, interruptions, and chatbot behaviors. Objective evaluations confirm the dataset’s quality and contextual coherence. Ethical considerations, including biases and hallucinations, are analyzed, with proposed directions for improving the dataset utility. This work contributes to the development of personalized, context-aware conversational agents capable of navigating complex, real-world environments, such as museums, to enhance visitor engagement and satisfaction.

Recent studies suggest that increasing the context window of language models could outperform retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods in certain tasks. However, in domains such as art and museums, where information is inherently multimodal, combining images and detailed textual descriptions, this assumption needs closer examination. To explore this, we compare RAG techniques with direct large-context input approaches for answering questions about artworks. Using a dataset of painting images paired with textual information, we develop a synthetic database of question-answer (QA) pairs for evaluating these methods. The focus is on assessing the efficiency and accuracy of RAG in retrieving and using relevant information compared to passing the entire textual context to a language model. Additionally, we experiment with various strategies for segmenting and retrieving text to optimise the RAG pipeline. The results aim to clarify the trade-offs between these approaches and provide valuable insights for interactive systems designed for art and museum contexts.

Recent developments in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have provided novel insights into Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). However, combining high-dimensional speech signals with textual tokens can lead to a rapid growth in input tokens, increasing computational costs and inference times. This “token overload” also risks shadowing essential textual cues, affecting the reasoning capabilities of the language model and diluting emotional information crucial to accurate SER. In this paper, we explore different token drop methods that mitigate excessive token counts while preserving both emotional nuances and the core linguistic capabilities of the model. Specifically, we compare various pooling approaches to produce a compact representation. Our preliminary findings suggest that these techniques can reduce computational costs without decreasing SER accuracy.