Instructional Material
Can the current trends of AI handle a full course of mathematics?
Alsayyad, Mariam, Kadhem, Fayadh
This paper addresses the question of how able the current trends of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are in managing to take the responsibility of a full course of mathematics at a college level. The study evaluates this ability in four significant aspects, namely, creating a course syllabus, presenting selected material, answering student questions, and creating an assessment. It shows that even though the AI is strong in some important parts like organization and accuracy, there are still some human aspects that are far away from the current abilities of AI. There is still a hidden emotional part, even in science, that cannot be fulfilled by the AI in its current state. This paper suggests some recommendations to integrate the human and AI potentials to create better outcomes in terms of reaching the target of creating a full course of mathematics, at a university level, as best as possible.
AI Literacy as a Key Driver of User Experience in AI-Powered Assessment: Insights from Socratic Mind
Soylu, Meryem Yilmaz, Lee, Jeonghyun, Hung, Jui-Tse, Cui, Christopher Zhang, Joyner, David A.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools become increasingly embedded in higher education, understanding how students interact with these systems is essential to supporting effective learning. This study examines how students' AI literacy and prior exposure to AI technologies shape their perceptions of Socratic Mind, an interactive AI-powered formative assessment tool. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and user experience research, we analyze relationships among AI literacy, perceived usability, satisfaction, engagement, and perceived learning effectiveness. Data from 309 undergraduates in Computer Science and Business courses were collected through validated surveys. Partial least squares structural equation modeling showed that AI literacy - especially self-efficacy, conceptual understanding, and application skills - significantly predicts usability, satisfaction, and engagement. Usability and satisfaction, in turn, strongly predict perceived learning effectiveness, while prior AI exposure showed no significant effect. These findings highlight that AI literacy, rather than exposure alone, shapes student experiences. Designers should integrate adaptive guidance and user-centered features to support diverse literacy levels, fostering inclusive, motivating, and effective AI-based learning environments.
Data-Driven and Participatory Approaches toward Neuro-Inclusive AI
Biased data representation in AI marginalizes up to 75 million autistic people worldwide through medical applications viewing autism as a deficit of neurotypical social skills rather than an aspect of human diversity, and this perspective is grounded in research questioning the humanity of autistic people. Turing defined artificial intelligence as the ability to mimic human communication, and as AI development increasingly focuses on human-like agents, this benchmark remains popular. In contrast, we define Neuro-Inclusive AI as datasets and systems that move away from mimicking humanness as a benchmark for machine intelligence. Then, we explore the origins, prevalence, and impact of anti-autistic biases in current research. Our work finds that 90% of human-like AI agents exclude autistic perspectives, and AI creators continue to believe ethical considerations are beyond the scope of their work. To improve the autistic representation in data, we conduct empirical experiments with annotators and LLMs, finding that binary labeling schemes sufficiently capture the nuances of labeling anti-autistic hate speech. Our benchmark, AUTALIC, can be used to evaluate or fine-tune models, and was developed to serve as a foundation for more neuro-inclusive future work.
Technical Report of TeleChat2, TeleChat2.5 and T1
Wang, Zihan, Liu, Xinzhang, Yao, Yitong, Wang, Chao, Zhao, Yu, Yang, Zhihao, Deng, Wenmin, Jia, Kaipeng, Peng, Jiaxin, Huang, Yuyao, Xiong, Sishi, Jiang, Zhuo, Yu, Kaidong, Hu, Xiaohui, Yao, Fubei, Fang, Ruiyu, Jiang, Zhuoru, Song, Ruiting, Xie, Qiyi, Xue, Rui, He, Xuewei, Xue, Yanlei, Yuan, Zhu, Zhang, Zhaoxi, Huang, Zilu, Wang, Shiquan, Wang, Xin, Wu, Hanming, Wang, Mingyuan, Zhan, Xufeng, Sun, Yuhan, Xing, Zhaohu, Jiang, Yuhao, Yang, Bingkai, Song, Shuangyong, Li, Yongxiang, He, Zhongjiang, Li, Xuelong
We introduce the latest series of TeleChat models: \textbf{TeleChat2}, \textbf{TeleChat2.5}, and \textbf{T1}, offering a significant upgrade over their predecessor, TeleChat. Despite minimal changes to the model architecture, the new series achieves substantial performance gains through enhanced training strategies in both pre-training and post-training stages. The series begins with \textbf{TeleChat2}, which undergoes pretraining on 10 trillion high-quality and diverse tokens. This is followed by Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to further enhance its capabilities. \textbf{TeleChat2.5} and \textbf{T1} expand the pipeline by incorporating a continual pretraining phase with domain-specific datasets, combined with reinforcement learning (RL) to improve performance in code generation and mathematical reasoning tasks. The \textbf{T1} variant is designed for complex reasoning, supporting long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and demonstrating substantial improvements in mathematics and coding. In contrast, \textbf{TeleChat2.5} prioritizes speed, delivering rapid inference. Both flagship models of \textbf{T1} and \textbf{TeleChat2.5} are dense Transformer-based architectures with 115B parameters, showcasing significant advancements in reasoning and general task performance compared to the original TeleChat. Notably, \textbf{T1-115B} outperform proprietary models such as OpenAI's o1-mini and GPT-4o. We publicly release \textbf{TeleChat2}, \textbf{TeleChat2.5} and \textbf{T1}, including post-trained versions with 35B and 115B parameters, to empower developers and researchers with state-of-the-art language models tailored for diverse applications.
Quantum Boltzmann Machines using Parallel Annealing for Medical Image Classification
Schuman, Daniëlle, Seebode, Mark V., Rohe, Tobias, Mansky, Maximilian Balthasar, Schroedl-Baumann, Michael, Stein, Jonas, Linnhoff-Popien, Claudia, Krellner, Florian
Exploiting the fact that samples drawn from a quantum annealer inherently follow a Boltzmann-like distribution, annealing-based Quantum Boltzmann Machines (QBMs) have gained increasing popularity in the quantum research community. While they harbor great promises for quantum speed-up, their usage currently stays a costly endeavor, as large amounts of QPU time are required to train them. This limits their applicability in the NISQ era. Following the idea of Noè et al. (2024), who tried to alleviate this cost by incorporating parallel quantum annealing into their unsupervised training of QBMs, this paper presents an improved version of parallel quantum annealing that we employ to train QBMs in a supervised setting. Saving qubits to encode the inputs, the latter setting allows us to test our approach on medical images from the MedMNIST data set (Yang et al., 2023), thereby moving closer to real-world applicability of the technology. Our experiments show that QBMs using our approach already achieve reasonable results, comparable to those of similarly-sized Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), with markedly smaller numbers of epochs than these classical models. Our parallel annealing technique leads to a speed-up of almost 70 % compared to regular annealing-based BM executions.
Enhancing Student Learning with LLM-Generated Retrieval Practice Questions: An Empirical Study in Data Science Courses
An, Yuan, Liu, John, Acharya, Niyam, Hashmi, Ruhma
Retrieval practice is a well-established pedagogical technique known to significantly enhance student learning and knowledge retention. However, generating high-quality retrieval practice questions is often time-consuming and labor intensive for instructors, especially in rapidly evolving technical subjects. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential to automate this process by generating questions in response to prompts, yet the effectiveness of LLM-generated retrieval practice on student learning remains to be established. In this study, we conducted an empirical study involving two college-level data science courses, with approximately 60 students. We compared learning outcomes during one week in which students received LLM-generated multiple-choice retrieval practice questions to those from a week in which no such questions were provided. Results indicate that students exposed to LLM-generated retrieval practice achieved significantly higher knowledge retention, with an average accuracy of 89%, compared to 73% in the week without such practice. These findings suggest that LLM-generated retrieval questions can effectively support student learning and may provide a scalable solution for integrating retrieval practice into real-time teaching. However, despite these encouraging outcomes and the potential time-saving benefits, cautions must be taken, as the quality of LLM-generated questions can vary. Instructors must still manually verify and revise the generated questions before releasing them to students. K eywords Retrieval practice large language models generative AI student learning multiple-choice questions STEM education data science higher education 1 Introduction Retrieval practice [30], frequently termed the "testing effect" [3], is a teaching technique that has been extensively studied. Empirical evidence has clearly indicated its ability to enhance long-term memory retention and overall learning [29, 3, 24, 27, 18, 2]. This technique involves the active recall of information from memory, a process that inherently strengthens neural connections and improves the future retrieval of that information.
Failure Risk Prediction in a MOOC: A Multivariate Time Series Analysis Approach
Ayady, Anass El, Devanne, Maxime, Forestier, Germain, Mawas, Nour El
MOOCs offer free and open access to a wide audience, but completion rates remain low, often due to a lack of personalized content. To address this issue, it is essential to predict learner performance in order to provide tailored feedback. Behavioral traces-such as clicks and events-can be analyzed as time series to anticipate learners' outcomes. This work compares multivariate time series classification methods to identify at-risk learners at different stages of the course (after 5, 10 weeks, etc.). The experimental evaluation, conducted on the Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD), focuses on three courses: two in STEM and one in SHS. Preliminary results show that the evaluated approaches are promising for predicting learner failure in MOOCs. The analysis also suggests that prediction accuracy is influenced by the amount of recorded interactions, highlighting the importance of rich and diverse behavioral data.
What Can Grokking Teach Us About Learning Under Nonstationarity?
Lyle, Clare, Sokar, Gharda, Pascanu, Razvan, Gyorgy, Andras
In continual learning problems, it is often necessary to overwrite components of a neural network's learned representation in response to changes in the data stream; however, neural networks often exhibit primacy bias, whereby early training data hinders the network's ability to generalize on later tasks. While feature-learning dynamics of nonstationary learning problems are not well studied, the emergence of feature-learning dynamics is known to drive the phenomenon of grokking, wherein neural networks initially memorize their training data and only later exhibit perfect generalization. This work conjectures that the same feature-learning dynamics which facilitate generalization in grokking also underlie the ability to overwrite previous learned features as well, and methods which accelerate grokking by facilitating feature-learning dynamics are promising candidates for addressing primacy bias in non-stationary learning problems. We then propose a straightforward method to induce feature-learning dynamics as needed throughout training by increasing the effective learning rate, i.e. the ratio between parameter and update norms. We show that this approach both facilitates feature-learning and improves generalization in a variety of settings, including grokking, warm-starting neural network training, and reinforcement learning tasks. Non-stationarity is ubiquitous in real-world applications of AI systems: datasets may grow over time, correlations may appear and then disappear as trends evolve, and AI systems themselves may take an active role in the generation of their own training data. In this paper, we will propose a framework for understanding and mitigating this degradation in generalization performance which connects three previously disparate phenomena: primacy bias, grokking, and feature-learning dynamics. Primacy bias: A neural network initially trained on one task is trained on a different data distribution and/or objective, and achieves worse performance than a randomly initialized network on the new task (Achille et al., 2017; Ash & Adams, 2020; Nikishin et al., 2022). Grokking: A model suddenly closes the generalization gap as a result of (possibly prolonged) further training after it has initially achieved perfect training accuracy (memorization) with poor test-time performance (Power et al., 2022). Feature learning: a network's ability to make nontrivial changes to its learned representation (a.k.a.
Debunking Optimization Myths in Federated Learning for Medical Image Classification
Lee, Youngjoon, Lee, Hyukjoon, Gong, Jinu, Cao, Yang, Kang, Joonhyuk
Federated Learning (FL) is a collaborative learning method that enables decentralized model training while preserving data privacy. Despite its promise in medical imaging, recent FL methods are often sensitive to local factors such as optimizers and learning rates, limiting their robustness in practical deployments. In this work, we revisit vanilla FL to clarify the impact of edge device configurations, benchmarking recent FL methods on colorectal pathology and blood cell classification task. We numerically show that the choice of local optimizer and learning rate has a greater effect on performance than the specific FL method. Moreover, we find that increasing local training epochs can either enhance or impair convergence, depending on the FL method. These findings indicate that appropriate edge-specific configuration is more crucial than algorithmic complexity for achieving effective FL.
DOA: A Degeneracy Optimization Agent with Adaptive Pose Compensation Capability based on Deep Reinforcement Learning
Li, Yanbin, Xiao, Canran, He, Hongyang, Yuan, Shenghai, Ke, Zong, Yu, Jiajie, Qin, Zixiong, Zhang, Zhiguo, Chi, Wenzheng, Zhang, Wei
Particle filter-based 2D-SLAM is widely used in indoor localization tasks due to its efficiency. However, indoor environments such as long straight corridors can cause severe degeneracy problems in SLAM. In this paper, we use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to train an adaptive degeneracy optimization agent (DOA) to address degeneracy problem. We propose a systematic methodology to address three critical challenges in traditional supervised learning frameworks: (1) data acquisition bottlenecks in degenerate dataset, (2) inherent quality deterioration of training samples, and (3) ambiguity in annotation protocol design. We design a specialized reward function to guide the agent in developing perception capabilities for degenerate environments. Using the output degeneracy factor as a reference weight, the agent can dynamically adjust the contribution of different sensors to pose optimization. Specifically, the observation distribution is shifted towards the motion model distribution, with the step size determined by a linear interpolation formula related to the degeneracy factor. In addition, we employ a transfer learning module to endow the agent with generalization capabilities across different environments and address the inefficiency of training in degenerate environments. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to demonstrate the rationality of our model design and the role of transfer learning. We also compare the proposed DOA with SOTA methods to prove its superior degeneracy detection and optimization capabilities across various environments.