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Self-Healing Software Systems: Lessons from Nature, Powered by AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As modern software systems grow in complexity and scale, their ability to autonomously detect, diagnose, and recover from failures becomes increasingly vital. Drawing inspiration from biological healing--where the human body detects damage, signals the brain, and activates targeted recovery--this paper explores the concept of self-healing software driven by artificial intelligence. We propose a novel framework that mimics this biological model: system observability tools serve as sensory inputs, AI models function as the cognitive core for diagnosis and repair, and healing agents apply targeted code and test modifications. By combining log analysis, static code inspection, and AI-driven generation of patches or test updates, our approach aims to reduce downtime, accelerate debugging, and enhance software resilience. We evaluate the effectiveness of this model through case studies and simulations, comparing it against traditional manual debugging and recovery workflows. This work paves the way toward intelligent, adaptive, and self-reliant software systems capable of continuous healing, akin to living organisms.


Context Selection and Rewriting for Video-based Educational Question Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Educational question generation (EQG) is a crucial component of intelligent educational systems, significantly aiding self-assessment, active learning, and personalized education. While EQG systems have emerged, existing datasets typically rely on predefined, carefully edited texts, failing to represent real-world classroom content, including lecture speech with a set of complementary slides. To bridge this gap, we collect a dataset of educational questions based on lectures from real-world classrooms. On this realistic dataset, we find that current methods for EQG struggle with accurately generating questions from educational videos, particularly in aligning with specific timestamps and target answers. Common challenges include selecting informative contexts from extensive transcripts and ensuring generated questions meaningfully incorporate the target answer. To address the challenges, we introduce a novel framework utilizing large language models for dynamically selecting and rewriting contexts based on target timestamps and answers. First, our framework selects contexts from both lecture transcripts and video keyframes based on answer relevance and temporal proximity. Then, we integrate the contexts selected from both modalities and rewrite them into answer-containing knowledge statements, to enhance the logical connection between the contexts and the desired answer. This approach significantly improves the quality and relevance of the generated questions. Our dataset and code are released in https://github.com/mengxiayu/COSER.


Theoretical Framework for Tempered Fractional Gradient Descent: Application to Breast Cancer Classification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper introduces Tempered Fractional Gradient Descent (TFGD), a novel optimization framework that synergizes fractional calculus with exponential tempering to enhance gradient-based learning. Traditional gradient descent methods often suffer from oscillatory updates and slow convergence in high-dimensional, noisy landscapes. TFGD addresses these limitations by incorporating a tempered memory mechanism, where historical gradients are weighted by fractional coefficients $|w_j| = \binomฮฑ{j}$ and exponentially decayed via a tempering parameter $ฮป$. Theoretical analysis establishes TFGD's convergence guarantees: in convex settings, it achieves an $\mathcal{O}(1/K)$ rate with alignment coefficient $d_{ฮฑ,ฮป} = (1 - e^{-ฮป})^{-ฮฑ}$, while stochastic variants attain $\mathcal{O}(1/k^ฮฑ)$ error decay. The algorithm maintains $\mathcal{O}(n)$ time complexity equivalent to SGD, with memory overhead scaling as $\mathcal{O}(d/ฮป)$ for parameter dimension $d$. Empirical validation on the Breast Cancer Wisconsin dataset demonstrates TFGD's superiority, achieving 98.25\% test accuracy (vs. 92.11\% for SGD) and 2$\times$ faster convergence. The tempered memory mechanism proves particularly effective in medical classification tasks, where feature correlations benefit from stable gradient averaging. These results position TFGD as a robust alternative to conventional optimizers in both theoretical and applied machine learning.


Toward Personalizing Quantum Computing Education: An Evolutionary LLM-Powered Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Quantum computing education faces significant challenges due to its complexity and the limitations of current tools; this paper introduces a novel Intelligent T eaching Assistant for quantum computing education and details its evolutionary design process. The system combines a knowledge-graph-augmented architecture with two specialized Large Language Model (LLM) agents: a T eaching Agent for dynamic interaction, and a Lesson Planning Agent for lesson plan generation. The system is designed to adapt to individual student needs, with interactions meticulously tracked and stored in a knowledge graph. This graph represents student actions, learning resources, and relationships, aiming to enable reasoning about effective learning pathways. We describe the implementation of the system, highlighting the challenges encountered and the solutions implemented, including introducing a dual-agent architecture where tasks are separated, all coordinated through a central knowledge graph that maintains system awareness, and a user-facing tag system intended to mitigate LLM hallucination and improve user control. Preliminary results illustrate the system's potential to capture rich interaction data, dynamically adapt lesson plans based on student feedback via a tag system in simulation, and facilitate context-aware tutoring through the integrated knowledge graph, though systematic evaluation is required. Quantum computing offers a revolutionary paradigm shift, but a significant workforce gap hinders its progress [1]. Teaching quantum computing is uniquely challenging, demanding an interdisciplinary understanding of physics, computer science, and mathematics, compounded by the counterintuitive nature of quantum principles. Traditional teaching methods and tools often fail, one of the many reasons is students' diverse background [2]. On the other hand, novel methods and tools based on generative artificial intelligence are still unproven in terms of successful teaching practices and quantifiable results.


Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Should a large language model (LLM) be used as a therapist? In this paper, we investigate the use of LLMs to *replace* mental health providers, a use case promoted in the tech startup and research space. We conduct a mapping review of therapy guides used by major medical institutions to identify crucial aspects of therapeutic relationships, such as the importance of a therapeutic alliance between therapist and client. We then assess the ability of LLMs to reproduce and adhere to these aspects of therapeutic relationships by conducting several experiments investigating the responses of current LLMs, such as `gpt-4o`. Contrary to best practices in the medical community, LLMs 1) express stigma toward those with mental health conditions and 2) respond inappropriately to certain common (and critical) conditions in naturalistic therapy settings -- e.g., LLMs encourage clients' delusional thinking, likely due to their sycophancy. This occurs even with larger and newer LLMs, indicating that current safety practices may not address these gaps. Furthermore, we note foundational and practical barriers to the adoption of LLMs as therapists, such as that a therapeutic alliance requires human characteristics (e.g., identity and stakes). For these reasons, we conclude that LLMs should not replace therapists, and we discuss alternative roles for LLMs in clinical therapy.


Bridge the Domains: Large Language Models Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) aims to extract the preference from the user's historical interactions across various domains. Despite some progress in CDSR, two problems set the barrier for further advancements, i.e., overlap dilemma and transition complexity. The former means existing CDSR methods severely rely on users who own interactions on all domains to learn cross-domain item relationships, compromising the practicability. The latter refers to the difficulties in learning the complex transition patterns from the mixed behavior sequences. With powerful representation and reasoning abilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising to address these two problems by bridging the items and capturing the user's preferences from a semantic view. Therefore, we propose an LLMs Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation model (LLM4CDSR). To obtain the semantic item relationships, we first propose an LLM-based unified representation module to represent items. Then, a trainable adapter with contrastive regularization is designed to adapt the CDSR task. Besides, a hierarchical LLMs profiling module is designed to summarize user cross-domain preferences. Finally, these two modules are integrated into the proposed tri-thread framework to derive recommendations. We have conducted extensive experiments on three public cross-domain datasets, validating the effectiveness of LLM4CDSR. We have released the code online.


Mathematics of Continual Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Continual learning is an emerging subject in machine learning that aims to solve multiple tasks presented sequentially to the learner without forgetting previously learned tasks. Recently, many deep learning based approaches have been proposed for continual learning, however the mathematical foundations behind existing continual learning methods remain underdeveloped. On the other hand, adaptive filtering is a classic subject in signal processing with a rich history of mathematically principled methods. However, its role in understanding the foundations of continual learning has been underappreciated. In this tutorial, we review the basic principles behind both continual learning and adaptive filtering, and present a comparative analysis that highlights multiple connections between them. These connections allow us to enhance the mathematical foundations of continual learning based on existing results for adaptive filtering, extend adaptive filtering insights using existing continual learning methods, and discuss a few research directions for continual learning suggested by the historical developments in adaptive filtering.


A Deep Bayesian Convolutional Spiking Neural Network-based CAD system with Uncertainty Quantification for Medical Images Classification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Computer_Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems facilitate accurate diagnosis of diseases. The development of CADs by leveraging third generation neural network, namely, Spiking Neural Network (SNN), is essential to utilize of the benefits of SNNs, such as their event_driven processing, parallelism, low power consumption, and the ability to process sparse temporal_spatial information. However, Deep SNN as a deep learning model faces challenges with unreliability. To deal with unreliability challenges due to inability to quantify the uncertainty of the predictions, we proposed a deep Bayesian Convolutional Spiking Neural Network based_CADs with uncertainty_aware module. In this study, the Monte Carlo Dropout method as Bayesian approximation is used as an uncertainty quantification method. This method was applied to several medical image classification tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model is accurate and reliable and will be a proper alternative to conventional deep learning for medical image classification.


Efficacy of a Computer Tutor that Models Expert Human Tutors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tutoring is highly effective for promoting learning. However, the contribution of expertise to tutoring effectiveness is unclear and continues to be debated. We conducted a 9-week learning efficacy study of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for biology modeled on expert human tutors with two control conditions: human tutors who were experts in the domain but not in tutoring and a no-tutoring condition. All conditions were supplemental to classroom instruction, and students took learning tests immediately before and after tutoring sessions as well as delayed tests 1-2 weeks later. Analysis using logistic mixed-effects modeling indicates significant positive effects on the immediate post-test for the ITS (d =.71) and human tutors (d =.66) which are in the 99th percentile of meta-analytic effects, as well as significant positive effects on the delayed post-test for the ITS (d =.36) and human tutors (d =.39). We discuss implications for the role of expertise in tutoring and the design of future studies.


Introduction to Quantum Machine Learning and Quantum Architecture Search

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Introduction to Quantum Machine Learning and Quantum Architecture Search Samuel Y en-Chi Chen 1 Zhiding Liang 2 1 Wells Fargo 2 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Abstract --Recent advancements in quantum computing (QC) and machine learning (ML) have fueled significant research efforts aimed at integrating these two transformative technologies. Quantum machine learning (QML), an emerging interdisciplinary field, leverages quantum principles to enhance the performance of ML algorithms. Concurrently, the exploration of systematic and automated approaches for designing high-performance quantum circuit architectures for QML tasks has gained prominence, as these methods empower researchers outside the quantum computing domain to effectively utilize quantum-enhanced tools. This tutorial will provide an in-depth overview of recent breakthroughs in both areas, highlighting their potential to expand the application landscape of QML across diverse fields. I NTRODUCTION Quantum computing (QC) offers the potential for substantial speedups in solving certain computationally challenging problems compared to classical computers. Recent advancements in quantum hardware, coupled with remarkable progress in classical AI and machine learning (ML) techniques, have sparked growing interest in merging these two technologies to further accelerate advancements in artificial intelligence.