Drawing on the experiences of facilitators who have overseen 43 games over a four-year period, we illuminate recurring patterns, strategies, and decision-making processes observed during gameplay. Our analysis reveals key strategic considerations about AI development trajectories in this simulated environment, including: the destabilising effects of AI races, the crucial role of international cooperation in mitigating catastrophic risks, the challenges of aligning corporate and national interests, and the potential for rapid, transformative change in AI capabilities. We highlight places where we believe the game has been effective in exposing participants to the complexities and uncertainties inherent in AI governance. Key recurring gameplay themes include the emergence of international agreements, challenges to the robustness of such agreements, the critical role of cybersecurity in AI development, and the potential for unexpected crises to dramatically alter AI trajectories. By documenting these insights, we aim to provide valuable foresight for policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers navigating the complex landscape of AI development and governance.

Introductory programming courses often emphasize mastering syntax and basic constructs before progressing to more complex and interesting programs. This bottom-up approach can be frustrating for novices, shifting the focus away from problem solving and potentially making computing less appealing to a broad range of students. The rise of generative AI for code production could partially address these issues by fostering new skills via interaction with AI models, including constructing high-level prompts and evaluating code that is automatically generated. In this experience report, we explore the inclusion of two prompt-focused activities in an introductory course, implemented across four labs in a six-week module. The first requires students to solve computational problems by writing natural language prompts, emphasizing problem-solving over syntax. The second involves students crafting prompts to generate code equivalent to provided fragments, to foster an understanding of the relationship between prompts and code. Most of the students in the course had reported finding programming difficult to learn, often citing frustrations with syntax and debugging. We found that self-reported difficulty with learning programming had a strong inverse relationship with performance on traditional programming assessments such as tests and projects, as expected. However, performance on the natural language tasks was less strongly related to self-reported difficulty, suggesting they may target different skills. Learning how to communicate with AI coding models is becoming an important skill, and natural language prompting tasks may appeal to a broad range of students.

Few-shot learning refers to understanding new concepts from only a few examples. We propose an information retrieval-inspired approach for this problem that is motivated by the increased importance of maximally leveraging all the available information in this low-data regime. We define a training objective that aims to extract as much information as possible from each training batch by effectively optimizing over all relative orderings of the batch points simultaneously. In particular, we view each batch point as a'query' that ranks the remaining ones based on its predicted relevance to them and we define a model within the framework of structured prediction to optimize mean Average Precision over these rankings. Our method achieves impressive results on the standard few-shot classification benchmarks while is also capable of few-shot retrieval.

Deductive coding is a common discourse analysis method widely used by learning science and learning analytics researchers for understanding teaching and learning interactions. It often requires researchers to manually label all discourses to be analyzed according to a theoretically guided coding scheme, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The emergence of large language models such as GPT has opened a new avenue for automatic deductive coding to overcome the limitations of traditional deductive coding. To evaluate the usefulness of large language models in automatic deductive coding, we employed three different classification methods driven by different artificial intelligence technologies, including the traditional text classification method with text feature engineering, BERT-like pretrained language model and GPT-like pretrained large language model (LLM). We applied these methods to two different datasets and explored the potential of GPT and prompt engineering in automatic deductive coding. By analyzing and comparing the accuracy and Kappa values of these three classification methods, we found that GPT with prompt engineering outperformed the other two methods on both datasets with limited number of training samples. By providing detailed prompt structures, the reported work demonstrated how large language models can be used in the implementation of automatic deductive coding.

Personalized adaptive learning (PAL) stands out by closely monitoring individual students' progress and tailoring their learning paths to their unique knowledge and needs. A crucial technique for effective PAL implementation is knowledge tracing, which models students' evolving knowledge to predict their future performance. Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly enhanced knowledge tracing through Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT). However, there is limited research on DKT for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). This study builds a comprehensive dataset to investigate DKT for implementing PAL in STEM education at HBCUs, utilizing multiple state-of-the-art (SOTA) DKT models to examine knowledge tracing performance. The dataset includes 352,148 learning records for 17,181 undergraduate students across eight colleges at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU). The SOTA DKT models employed include DKT, DKT+, DKVMN, SAKT, and KQN. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DKT models in accurately predicting students' academic outcomes. Specifically, the SAKT and KQN models outperform others in terms of accuracy and AUC. These findings have significant implications for faculty members and academic advisors, providing valuable insights for identifying students at risk of academic underperformance before the end of the semester. Furthermore, this allows for proactive interventions to support students' academic progress, potentially enhancing student retention and graduation rates.

Knowledge tracing (KT) is a popular approach for modeling students' learning progress over time, which can enable more personalized and adaptive learning. However, existing KT approaches face two major limitations: (1) they rely heavily on expert-defined knowledge concepts (KCs) in questions, which is timeconsuming and prone to errors; and (2) KT methods tend to overlook the semantics of both questions and the given KCs. In this work, we address these challenges and present KCQRL, a framework for automated knowledge concept annotation and question representation learning that can improve the effectiveness of any existing KT model. First, we propose an automated KC annotation process using large language models (LLMs), which generates question solutions and then annotates KCs in each solution step of the questions. Second, we introduce a contrastive learning approach to generate semantically rich embeddings for questions and solution steps, aligning them with their associated KCs via a tailored false negative elimination approach. These embeddings can be readily integrated into existing KT models, replacing their randomly initialized embeddings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of KCQRL across 15 KT models on two large real-world Math learning datasets, where we achieve consistent performance improvements. The recent years have witnessed a surge in online learning platforms (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2023; Gros & García-Peñalvo, 2023), where students learn new knowledge concepts, which are then tested through exercises. Needless to say, personalization is crucial for effective learning: it allows that new knowledge concepts are carefully tailored to the current knowledge state of the student, which is more effective than one-size-fits-all approaches to learning (Cui & Sachan, 2023; Xu et al., 2024). However, such personalization requires that the knowledge of students is continuously assessed, which highlights the need for knowledge tracing (KT). In KT, one models the temporal dynamics of students' learning processes (Corbett & Anderson, 1994) in terms of a core set of skills, which are called knowledge concepts (KCs). KT models are typically time-series models that receive the past interactions of the learner as input (e.g., her previous exercises) in order to predict response of the learner to the next exercise. Yet, existing KT models have two main limitations that hinder their applicability in practice (see Figure 1). They require a comprehensive mapping between KCs and questions, which is typically done through manual annotations by experts. However, such KC annotation is both time-intensive and prone to errors (Clark, 2014; Bier et al., 2019). KT models overlook the semantics of both questions and KCs.

The unification of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) has emerged as a hot topic. At the LLM+KG'24 workshop, held in conjunction with VLDB 2024 in Guangzhou, China, one of the key themes explored was important data management challenges and opportunities due to the effective interaction between LLMs and KGs. This report outlines the major directions and approaches presented by various speakers during the LLM+KG'24 workshop.

We introduce FabricDiffusion, a method for transferring fabric textures from a single clothing image to 3D garments of arbitrary shapes. Existing approaches typically synthesize textures on the garment surface through 2D-to-3D texture mapping or depth-aware inpainting via generative models. Unfortunately, these methods often struggle to capture and preserve texture details, particularly due to challenging occlusions, distortions, or poses in the input image. Inspired by the observation that in the fashion industry, most garments are constructed by stitching sewing patterns with flat, repeatable textures, we cast the task of clothing texture transfer as extracting distortion-free, tileable texture materials that are subsequently mapped onto the UV space of the garment. Building upon this insight, we train a denoising diffusion model with a large-scale synthetic dataset to rectify distortions in the input texture image. This process yields a flat texture map that enables a tight coupling with existing Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) material generation pipelines, allowing for realistic relighting of the garment under various lighting conditions. We show that FabricDiffusion can transfer various features from a single clothing image including texture patterns, material properties, and detailed prints and logos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-to-the-art methods on both synthetic data and real-world, in-the-wild clothing images while generalizing to unseen textures and garment shapes.

Amortized inference is the task of training a parametric model, such as a neural network, to approximate a distribution with a given unnormalized density where exact sampling is intractable. When sampling is implemented as a sequential decision-making process, reinforcement learning (RL) methods, such as generative flow networks, can be used to train the sampling policy. Off-policy RL training facilitates the discovery of diverse, high-reward candidates, but existing methods still face challenges in efficient exploration. We propose to use an adaptive training distribution (the Teacher) to guide the training of the primary amortized sampler (the Student) by prioritizing high-loss regions. The Teacher, an auxiliary behavior model, is trained to sample high-error regions of the Student and can generalize across unexplored modes, thereby enhancing mode coverage by providing an efficient training curriculum. We validate the effectiveness of this approach in a synthetic environment designed to present an exploration challenge, two diffusion-based sampling tasks, and four biochemical discovery tasks demonstrating its ability to improve sample efficiency and mode coverage.

Logical reasoning systems are essential for rigorous automatic reasoning. The focus of the 2024 Logic and Practice of Programming workshop is integrating reasoning systems for trustworthy AI, especially including integrating diverse models of programming with rules and constraints. Trustworthy AI requires programming with rules and constraints for expressing and solving knowledge-intensive inference and combinatorial problems. A wide range of programming models have been proposed, including but not limited to the following, and essentially all of them require or support imperative programming for use in practical applications.