Towards scalable robotic intervention of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder using LLMs

In this paper, we propose a social robot capable of verbally interacting with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This communication is meant to teach perspective-taking using text generated using a Large Language Model (LLM) pipeline. The social robot NAO acts as a stimulator (verbally describes a social situation and asks a question), prompter (presents three options to choose from), and reinforcer (praises when the answer is correct). For the role of the stimulator, the social situation, questions, and options are generated using our LLM pipeline. We compare two approaches: GPT-2 + BART and GPT-2 + GPT-2, where the first GPT-2 common between the pipelines is used for unsupervised social situation generation. We use the SOCIALIQA dataset to fine-tune all of our LLM pipelines. We found that the GPT-2 + BART pipeline had a better BERTscore for generating the questions and the options by combining their individual loss functions. This observation was also consistent with the human evaluations. Lastly, the unsupervised generation of social situations was visualized using T-SNE plots, and the entire pipeline was evaluated for appropriateness for children with ASD by human experts.