Th e new educational models such as Smart Learning environments use of digita l and context - aware devices to facilitate the learning process . In this new educational scenario, a huge quantity of multimodal students' data from a variety of different sources can be captured, fused and analyze. It offers to researchers and educators a unique opportunity of being able to discover new knowledge to better understand the learning process and to intervene if necessary. However, it is necessary t o apply correctly d ata f usion approaches and techniques in order to combine various sources of Multimodal Learning Data (MLA) . The se sources or modalities in MLA include audio, video, electrodermal activity data, eye - tracking, user logs and click - stream data, but also learning artifacts and more natural human signals such as gestures, gaze, speech or writing. This survey introduces data fusion in Learning Analytics (LA) and Educational Data Mining (EDM) and how these data fusion techniques have been applied in Smart Learning. It shows the current state of the art by reviewing the main publications, the main type of fused educational data, and the data fusion approaches and techniques used in EDM/LA, as well as the main open problems, trends and challenges in th is specific research area.

Statefulness is essential for large language model (LLM) agents to perform long-term planning and problem-solving. This makes memory a critical component, yet its management and evolution remain largely underexplored. Existing evaluations mostly focus on static conversational settings, where memory is passively retrieved from dialogue to answer queries, overlooking the dynamic ability to accumulate and reuse experience across evolving task streams. In real-world environments such as interactive problem assistants or embodied agents, LLMs are required to handle continuous task streams, yet often fail to learn from accumulated interactions, losing valuable contextual insights, a limitation that calls for test-time evolution, where LLMs retrieve, integrate, and update memory continuously during deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Evo-Memory, a comprehensive streaming benchmark and framework for evaluating self-evolving memory in LLM agents. Evo-Memory structures datasets into sequential task streams, requiring LLMs to search, adapt, and evolve memory after each interaction. We unify and implement over ten representative memory modules and evaluate them across 10 diverse multi-turn goal-oriented and single-turn reasoning and QA datasets. To better benchmark experience reuse, we provide a baseline method, ExpRAG, for retrieving and utilizing prior experience, and further propose ReMem, an action-think-memory refine pipeline that tightly integrates reasoning, task actions, and memory updates to achieve continual improvement.

Visual content memorability has intrigued the scientific community for decades, with applications ranging widely, from understanding nuanced aspects of human memory to enhancing content design. A significant challenge in progressing the field lies in the expensive process of collecting memorability annotations from humans. This limits the diversity and scalability of datasets for modeling visual content memorability. Most existing datasets are limited to collecting aggregate memorability scores for visual content, not capturing the nuanced memorability signals present in natural, open-ended recall descriptions. In this work, we introduce the first large-scale unsupervised dataset designed explicitly for modeling visual memorability signals, containing over 82,000 videos, accompanied by descriptive recall data. We leverage tip-of-the-tongue (ToT) retrieval queries from online platforms such as Reddit. We demonstrate that our unsupervised dataset provides rich signals for two memorability-related tasks: recall generation and ToT retrieval. Large vision-language models fine-tuned on our dataset outperform state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o in generating open-ended memorability descriptions for visual content. We also employ a contrastive training strategy to create the first model capable of performing multimodal ToT retrieval. Our dataset and models present a novel direction, facilitating progress in visual content memorability research.

We introduce a new tokenizer for language models that minimizes the average tokens per character, thereby reducing the number of tokens needed to represent text during training and to generate text during inference. Our method, which we refer to as the Length-MAX tokenizer, obtains its vocabulary by casting a length-weighted objective maximization as a graph partitioning problem and developing a greedy approximation algorithm. On FineWeb and diverse domains, it yields 14--18\% fewer tokens than Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) across vocabulary sizes from 10K to 50K, and the reduction is 13.0\% when the size is 64K. Training GPT-2 models at 124M, 355M, and 1.3B parameters from scratch with five runs each shows 18.5\%, 17.2\%, and 18.5\% fewer steps, respectively, to reach a fixed validation loss, and 13.7\%, 12.7\%, and 13.7\% lower inference latency, together with a 16\% throughput gain at 124M, while consistently improving on downstream tasks including reducing LAMBADA perplexity by 11.7\% and enhancing HellaSwag accuracy by 4.3\%. Moreover, the Length-MAX tokenizer achieves 99.62\% vocabulary coverage and the out-of-vocabulary rate remains low at 0.12\% on test sets. These results demonstrate that optimizing for average token length, rather than frequency alone, offers an effective approach to more efficient language modeling without sacrificing -- and often improving -- downstream performance. The tokenizer is compatible with production systems and reduces embedding and KV-cache memory by 18\% at inference.

Training deep networks with noisy labels leads to poor generalization and degraded accuracy due to overfitting to label noise. Existing approaches for learning with noisy labels often rely on the availability of a clean subset of data. By pre-training a feature extractor backbone without labels using self-supervised learning (SSL), followed by standard supervised training on the noisy dataset, we can train a more noise robust model without requiring a subset with clean labels. We evaluate the use of SimCLR and Barlow~Twins as SSL methods on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 under synthetic and real world noise. Across all noise rates, self-supervised pre-training consistently improves classification accuracy and enhances downstream label-error detection (F1 and Balanced Accuracy). The performance gap widens as the noise rate increases, demonstrating improved robustness. Notably, our approach achieves comparable results to ImageNet pre-trained models at low noise levels, while substantially outperforming them under high noise conditions.

The home space for optimal control is a Sobolev space. The home space for pseudospectral theory is also a Sobolev space. It thus seems natural to combine pseudospectral theory with optimal control theory and construct ``pseudospectral optimal control theory,'' a term coined by Ross. In this paper, we review key theoretical results in pseudospectral optimal control that have proven to be critical for a successful flight. Implementation details of flight demonstrations onboard NASA spacecraft are discussed along with emerging trends and techniques in both theory and practice. The 2011 launch of pseudospectral optimal control in embedded platforms is changing the way in which we see solutions to challenging control problems in aerospace and autonomous systems.

To manipulate objects in novel, unstructured environments, robots need task-oriented grasps that target object parts based on the given task. Geometry-based methods often struggle with visually defined parts, occlusions, and unseen objects. We introduce OVAL-Grasp, a zero-shot open-vocabulary approach to task-oriented, affordance based grasping that uses large-language models (LLM) and vision-language models (VLM) to allow a robot to grasp objects at the correct part according to a given task. Given an RGB image and a task, OVAL-Grasp identifies parts to grasp or avoid with an LLM, segments them with a VLM, and generates a 2D heatmap of actionable regions on the object. During our evaluations, we found that our method outperformed two task oriented grasping baselines on experiments with 20 household objects with 3 unique tasks for each. OVAL-Grasp successfully identifies and segments the correct object part 95% of the time and grasps the correct actionable area 78.3% of the time in real-world experiments with the Fetch mobile manipulator. Additionally, OVAL-Grasp finds correct object parts under partial occlusions, demonstrating a part selection success rate of 80% in cluttered scenes. We also demonstrate OVAL-Grasp's efficacy in scenarios that rely on visual features for part selection, and show the benefit of a modular design through our ablation experiments. Our project webpage is available at https://ekjt.github.io/OVAL-Grasp/.

Untrained large neural networks, just after random initialization, tend to favour a small subset of classes, assigning high predicted probabilities to these few classes and approximately zero probability to all others. This bias, termed Initial Guessing Bias, affects the early training dynamics, when the model is fitting to the coarse structure of the data. The choice of loss function against which to train the model has a large impact on how these early dynamics play out. Two recent loss functions, Blurry and Piecewise-zero loss, were designed for robustness to label errors but can become unable to steer the direction of training when exposed to this initial bias. Results indicate that the choice of loss function has a dramatic effect on the early phase training of networks, and highlights the need for careful consideration of how Initial Guessing Bias may interact with various components of the training scheme.

Tubular trees, such as blood vessels and lung airways, are essential for material transport within the human body. Accurately detecting their centerlines with correct tree topology is critical for clinical tasks such as diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical navigation. In these applications, maintaining high recall is crucial, as missing small branches can result in fatal mistakes caused by incomplete assessments or undetected abnormalities. We present RefTr, a 3D image-to-graph model for centerline generation of vascular trees via recurrent refinement of confluent trajectories. RefTr uses a Producer-Refiner architecture based on a Transformer decoder, where the Producer proposes a set of initial confluent trajectories that are recurrently refined by the Refiner to produce final trajectories, which forms the centerline graph. The confluent trajectory representation enables refinement of complete trajectories while explicitly enforcing a valid tree topology. The recurrent refinement scheme improves precision and reuses the same Refiner block across multiple steps, yielding a 2.4x reduction in decoder parameters compared to previous SOTA. We also introduce an efficient non-maximum suppression algorithm for spatial tree graphs to merge duplicate branches and boost precision. Across multiple public centerline datasets, RefTr achieves superior recall and comparable precision to previous SOTA, while offering faster inference and substantially fewer parameters, demonstrating its potential as a new state-of-the-art framework for vascular tree analysis in 3D medical imaging.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque, posing a significant challenge to their safe and reliable deployment. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for decomposing LLM representations into more interpretable features, but explaining the features captured by SAEs remains a challenging task. In this work, we propose SAGE (SAE AGentic Explainer), an agent-based framework that recasts feature interpretation from a passive, single-pass generation task into an active, explanation-driven process. SAGE implements a rigorous methodology by systematically formulating multiple explanations for each feature, designing targeted experiments to test them, and iteratively refining explanations based on empirical activation feedback. Experiments on features from SAEs of diverse language models demonstrate that SAGE produces explanations with significantly higher generative and predictive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art baselines.an agent-based framework that recasts feature interpretation from a passive, single-pass generation task into an active, explanationdriven process. SAGE implements a rigorous methodology by systematically formulating multiple explanations for each feature, designing targeted experiments to test them, and iteratively refining explanations based on empirical activation feedback. Experiments on features from SAEs of diverse language models demonstrate that SAGE produces explanations with significantly higher generative and predictive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art baselines.