In recent years, peer learning has gained attention as a method that promotes spontaneous thinking among learners, and its effectiveness has been confirmed by numerous studies. This study aims to develop an AI Agent as a learning companion that enables peer learning anytime and anywhere. However, peer learning between humans has various limitations, and it is not always effective. Effective peer learning requires companions at the same proficiency levels. In this study, we assume that a learner's peers with the same proficiency level as the learner make the same mistakes as the learner does and focus on English composition as a specific example to validate this approach.

The growing ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI), in particular large language models (LLMs), has profoundly altered the way in which learners gain knowledge and interact with learning material, with many claiming that AI positively influences their learning achievements. Despite this advancement, current AI tutoring systems face limitations associated with their reactive nature, often providing direct answers without encouraging deep reflection or incorporating structured pedagogical tools and strategies. This limitation is most apparent in the field of mathematics, in which AI tutoring systems remain underdeveloped. This research addresses the question: How can AI tutoring systems move beyond providing reactive assistance to enable structured, individualized, and tool-assisted learning experiences? We introduce a novel multi-agent AI tutoring platform that combines adaptive and personalized feedback, structured course generation, and textbook knowledge retrieval to enable modular, tool-assisted learning processes. This system allows students to learn new topics while identifying and targeting their weaknesses, revise for exams effectively, and practice on an unlimited number of personalized exercises. This article contributes to the field of artificial intelligence in education by introducing a novel platform that brings together pedagogical agents and AI-driven components, augmenting the field with modular and effective systems for teaching mathematics.

The data privacy constraint in online continual learning (OCL), where the data can be seen only once, complicates the catastrophic forgetting problem in streaming data. A common approach applied by the current SOTAs in OCL is with the use of memory saving exemplars or features from previous classes to be replayed in the current task. On the other hand, the prompt-based approach performs excellently in continual learning but with the cost of a growing number of trainable parameters. The first approach may not be applicable in practice due to data openness policy, while the second approach has the issue of throughput associated with the streaming data. In this study, we propose a novel prompt-based method for online continual learning that includes 4 main components: (1) single light-weight prompt generator as a general knowledge, (2) trainable scaler-and-shifter as specific knowledge, (3) pre-trained model (PTM) generalization preserving, and (4) hard-soft updates mechanism. Our proposed method achieves significantly higher performance than the current SOTAs in CI-F AR100, ImageNet-R, ImageNet-A, and CUB dataset. Our complexity analysis shows that our method requires a relatively smaller number of parameters and achieves moderate training time, inference time, and throughput.

ELOQUENT is a set of shared tasks that aims to create easily testable high-level criteria for evaluating generative language models. Sensemaking is one such shared task. In Sensemaking, we try to assess how well generative models ``make sense out of a given text'' in three steps inspired by exams in a classroom setting: (1) Teacher systems should prepare a set of questions, (2) Student systems should answer these questions, and (3) Evaluator systems should score these answers, all adhering rather strictly to a given set of input materials. We report on the 2025 edition of Sensemaking, where we had 7 sources of test materials (fact-checking analyses of statements, textbooks, transcribed recordings of a lecture, and educational videos) spanning English, German, Ukrainian, and Czech languages. This year, 4 teams participated, providing us with 2 Teacher submissions, 2 Student submissions, and 2 Evaluator submissions. We added baselines for Teacher and Student using commercial large language model systems. We devised a fully automatic evaluation procedure, which we compare to a minimalistic manual evaluation. We were able to make some interesting observations. For the first task, the creation of questions, better evaluation strategies will still have to be devised because it is difficult to discern the quality of the various candidate question sets. In the second task, question answering, the LLMs examined overall perform acceptably, but restricting their answers to the given input texts remains problematic. In the third task, evaluation of question answers, our adversarial tests reveal that systems using the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm erroneously rate both garbled question-answer pairs and answers to mixed-up questions as acceptable.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has rapidly emerged as a transformative force in aquaculture, enabling intelligent synthesis of multimodal data, including text, images, audio, and simulation outputs for smarter, more adaptive decision-making. As the aquaculture industry shifts toward data-driven, automation and digital integration operations under the Aquaculture 4.0 paradigm, GAI models offer novel opportunities across environmental monitoring, robotics, disease diagnostics, infrastructure planning, reporting, and market analysis. This review presents the first comprehensive synthesis of GAI applications in aquaculture, encompassing foundational architectures (e.g., diffusion models, transformers, and retrieval augmented generation), experimental systems, pilot deployments, and real-world use cases. We highlight GAI's growing role in enabling underwater perception, digital twin modeling, and autonomous planning for remotely operated vehicle (ROV) missions. We also provide an updated application taxonomy that spans sensing, control, optimization, communication, and regulatory compliance. Beyond technical capabilities, we analyze key limitations, including limited data availability, real-time performance constraints, trust and explainability, environmental costs, and regulatory uncertainty. This review positions GAI not merely as a tool but as a critical enabler of smart, resilient, and environmentally aligned aquaculture systems.

We introduce ExRec, a general framework for personalized exercise recommendation with semantically-grounded knowledge tracing. Our method builds on the observation that existing exercise recommendation approaches simulate student performance via knowledge tracing (KT) but they often overlook two key aspects: (a) the semantic content of questions and (b) the sequential, structured progression of student learning. To address this, our ExRec presents an end-to-end pipeline, from annotating the KCs of questions and learning their semantic representations to training KT models and optimizing several reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Moreover, we improve standard Q-learning-based continuous RL methods via a tailored model-based value estimation (MVE) approach that directly leverages the components of KT model in estimating cumulative knowledge improvement. We validate the effectiveness of our ExRec using various RL methods across four real-world tasks with different educational goals in online math learning. We further show that ExRec generalizes robustly to new, unseen questions and that it produces interpretable student learning trajectories. Together, our findings highlight the promise of KT-guided RL for effective personalization in education.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for time series analytics, leveraging their massive parameters and the shared sequential nature of textual and time series data. However, a cross-modality gap exists between time series and textual data, as LLMs are pre-trained on textual corpora and are not inherently optimized for time series. In this tutorial, we provide an up-to-date overview of LLM-based cross-modal time series analytics. We introduce a taxonomy that classifies existing approaches into three groups based on cross-modal modeling strategies, e.g., conversion, alignment, and fusion, and then discuss their applications across a range of downstream tasks. In addition, we summarize several open challenges. This tutorial aims to expand the practical application of LLMs in solving real-world problems in cross-modal time series analytics while balancing effectiveness and efficiency. Participants will gain a thorough understanding of current advancements, methodologies, and future research directions in cross-modal time series analytics.

The ability to transfer knowledge from prior experiences to novel tasks stands as a pivotal capability of intelligent agents, including both humans and computational models. This principle forms the basis of transfer learning, where large pre-trained neural networks are fine-tuned to adapt to downstream tasks. Transfer learning has demonstrated tremendous success, both in terms of task adaptation speed and performance. However there are several domains where, due to lack of data, training such large pre-trained models or foundational models is not a possibility - computational chemistry, computational immunology, and medical imaging are examples. To address these challenges, our work focuses on designing architectures to enable efficient acquisition of priors when large amounts of data are unavailable. In particular, we demonstrate that we can use neural memory to enable adaptation on non-stationary distributions with only a few samples. Then we demonstrate that our hypernetwork designs (a network that generates another network) can acquire more generalizable priors than standard networks when trained with Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). Subsequently, we apply hypernetworks to 3D scene generation, demonstrating that they can acquire priors efficiently on just a handful of training scenes, thereby leading to faster text-to-3D generation. We then extend our hypernetwork framework to perform 3D segmentation on novel scenes with limited data by efficiently transferring priors from earlier viewed scenes. Finally, we repurpose an existing molecular generative method as a pre-training framework that facilitates improved molecular property prediction, addressing critical challenges in computational immunology.

School dropout is a serious problem in distance learning, where early detection is crucial for effective intervention and student perseverance. Predicting student dropout using available educational data is a widely researched topic in learning analytics. Our partner's distance learning platform highlights the importance of integrating diverse data sources, including socio-demographic data, behavioral data, and sentiment analysis, to accurately predict dropout risks. In this paper, we introduce a novel model that combines sentiment analysis of student comments using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model with socio-demographic and behavioral data analyzed through Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). We fine-tuned BERT on student comments to capture nuanced sentiments, which were then merged with key features selected using feature importance techniques in XGBoost. Our model was tested on unseen data from the next academic year, achieving an accuracy of 84%, compared to 82% for the baseline model. Additionally, the model demonstrated superior performance in other metrics, such as precision and F1-score. The proposed method could be a vital tool in developing personalized strategies to reduce dropout rates and encourage student perseverance.

Student dropout in distance learning remains a critical challenge, with profound societal and economic consequences. While classical machine learning models leverage structured socio-demographic and behavioral data, they often fail to capture the nuanced emotional and contextual factors embedded in unstructured student interactions. This paper introduces a transformative AI framework that redefines dropout prediction through three synergistic innovations: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for domain-specific sentiment analysis, prompt engineering to decode academic stressors,and cross-modal attention fusion to dynamically align textual, behavioral, and socio-demographic insights. By grounding sentiment analysis in a curated knowledge base of pedagogical content, our RAG-enhanced BERT model interprets student comments with unprecedented contextual relevance, while optimized prompts isolate indicators of academic distress (e.g., "isolation," "workload anxiety"). A cross-modal attention layer then fuses these insights with temporal engagement patterns, creating holistic risk pro-files. Evaluated on a longitudinal dataset of 4 423 students, the framework achieves 89% accuracy and an F1-score of 0.88, outperforming conventional models by 7% and reducing false negatives by 21%. Beyond prediction, the system generates interpretable interventions by retrieving contextually aligned strategies (e.g., mentorship programs for isolated learners). This work bridges the gap between predictive analytics and actionable pedagogy, offering a scalable solution to mitigate dropout risks in global education systems