Although student learning satisfaction has been widely studied, modern techniques such as interpretable machine learning and neural networks have not been sufficiently explored. This study demonstrates that a recent model that combines boosting with interpretability, automatic piecewise linear regression(APLR), offers the best fit for predicting learning satisfaction among several state-of-the-art approaches. Through the analysis of APLR's numerical and visual interpretations, students' time management and concentration abilities, perceived helpfulness to classmates, and participation in offline courses have the most significant positive impact on learning satisfaction. Surprisingly, involvement in creative activities did not positively affect learning satisfaction. Moreover, the contributing factors can be interpreted on an individual level, allowing educators to customize instructions according to student profiles.

Dynamic graph representation learning has become essential for analyzing evolving networks in domains such as social network analysis, recommendation systems, and traffic analysis. However, existing continuous-time methods face three key challenges: (1) some methods depend solely on node-specific memory without effectively incorporating information from neighboring nodes, resulting in embedding staleness; (2) most fail to explicitly capture correlations between node neighborhoods, limiting contextual awareness; and (3) many fail to fully capture the structural dynamics of evolving graphs, especially in absence of rich link attributes. To address these limitations, we introduce TAWRMAC-a novel framework that integrates Temporal Anonymous Walks with Restart, Memory Augmentation, and Neighbor Co-occurrence embedding. TAWRMAC enhances embedding stability through a memory-augmented GNN with fixedtime encoding and improves contextual representation by explicitly capturing neighbor correlations. Additionally, its Temporal Anonymous Walks with Restart mechanism distinguishes between nodes exhibiting repetitive interactions and those forming new connections beyond their immediate neighborhood. This approach captures structural dynamics better and supports strong inductive learning. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that TAWRMAC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in dynamic link prediction and node classification under both transductive and inductive settings across three different negative sampling strategies. By providing stable, generalizable, and context-aware embeddings, TAWRMAC advances the state of the art in continuous-time dynamic graph learning. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/tawrmac-A253 .

Computational Thinking (CT) is a key skill set for students in higher education to thrive and adapt to an increasingly technology-driven future and workplace. While research on CT education has gained remarkable momentum in K12 over the past decade, it has remained under-explored in higher education, leaving higher education teachers with an insufficient overview, knowledge, and support regarding CT education. The proliferation and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by educational institutions have demonstrated promising potential to support instructional activities across many disciplines, including CT education. However, a comprehensive overview outlining the various aspects of integrating AI in CT education in higher education is lacking. To mitigate this gap, we conducted this systematic literature review study. The focus of our study is to identify initiatives applying AI in CT education within higher education and to explore various educational aspects of these initiatives, including the benefits and challenges of AI in CT education, instructional strategies employed, CT components covered, and AI techniques and models utilized. This study provides practical and scientific contributions to the CT education community, including an inventory of AI-based initiatives for CT education useful to educators, an overview of various aspects of integrating AI into CT education such as its benefits and challenges (e.g., AI potential to reshape CT education versus its potential to diminish students creativity) and insights into new and expanded perspectives on CT in light of AI (e.g., the decoding approach alongside the coding approach to CT).

Despite Artificial Intelligence (AI) transformative potential for public sector services, decision-making, and administrative efficiency, adoption remains uneven due to complex technical, organizational, and institutional challenges. Responsible AI frameworks emphasize fairness, accountability, and transparency, aligning with principles of trustworthy AI and fair AI, yet remain largely aspirational, overlooking technical and institutional realities, especially foundational data and governance. This study addresses this gap by developing a taxonomy of data-related challenges to responsible AI adoption in government. Based on a systematic review of 43 studies and 21 expert evaluations, the taxonomy identifies 13 key challenges across technological, organizational, and environmental dimensions, including poor data quality, limited AI-ready infrastructure, weak governance, misalignment in human-AI decision-making, economic and environmental sustainability concerns. Annotated with institutional pressures, the taxonomy serves as a diagnostic tool to surface 'symptoms' of high-risk AI deployment and guides policymakers in building the institutional and data governance conditions necessary for responsible AI adoption.

We propose FSPO (Fair Sequence Policy Optimization), a sequence-level reinforcement learning method for LLMs that enforces length-fair clipping on the importance-sampling (IS) weight. We study RL methods with sequence-level IS and identify a mismatch when PPO/GRPO-style clipping is transplanted to sequences: a fixed clip range systematically reweights short vs. long responses, distorting the optimization direction. FSPO introduces a simple remedy: we clip the sequence log-IS ratio with a band that scales as $\sqrt{L}$. Theoretically, we formalize length fairness via a Length Reweighting Error (LRE) and prove that small LRE yields a cosine directional guarantee between the clipped and true updates. Empirically, FSPO flattens clip rates across length bins, stabilizes training, and outperforms baselines across model sizes and evaluation datasets, with the largest gains on the Qwen3-8B-Base model.

Zero-order optimization techniques are becoming increasingly popular in robotics due to their ability to handle non-differentiable functions and escape local minima. These advantages make them particularly useful for trajectory optimization and policy optimization. In this work, we propose a mathematical tutorial on random search. It offers a simple and unifying perspective for understanding a wide range of algorithms commonly used in robotics. Leveraging this viewpoint, we classify many trajectory optimization methods under a common framework and derive novel competitive RL algorithms.

Retrieving relevant instructional videos from multilingual medical archives is crucial for answering complex, multi-hop questions across language boundaries. However, existing systems either compress hour-long videos into coarse embeddings or incur prohibitive costs for fine-grained matching. We tackle the Multilingual Video Corpus Retrieval (mVCR) task in the NLPCC-2025 M4IVQA challenge with a multi-stage framework that integrates multilingual semantics, domain terminology, and efficient long-form processing. Video subtitles are divided into semantically coherent chunks, enriched with concise knowledge-graph (KG) facts, and organized into a hierarchical tree whose node em-beddings are generated by a language-agnostic multilingual encoder. At query time, the same encoder embeds the input question; a coarse-to-fine tree search prunes irrelevant branches, and only the top-ranked chunks are re-scored by a lightweight large language model (LLM). This design avoids exhaustive cross-encoder scoring while preserving chunk-level precision. Experiments on the mVCR test set demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, and ablation studies confirm the complementary contributions of KG enrichment, hierarchical indexing, and targeted LLM re-ranking. The proposed method offers an accurate and scalable solution for multilingual retrieval in specialized medical video collections.

However, existing CL approaches for emotion recognition often rely on heuristic, data-driven, or model-based definitions of sample difficulty, neglecting the difficulty for human perception, a critical factor in subjective tasks like emotion recognition. We propose CHUCKLE (Crowdsourced Human Understanding Curriculum for Knowledge Led Emotion Recognition), a perception-driven CL framework that leverages annotator agreement and alignment in crowd-sourced datasets to define sample difficulty, under the assumption that clips challenging for humans are similarly hard for machine learning models. Empirical results suggest that CHUCKLE increases the relative mean accuracy by 6.56% for LSTMs and 1.61% for Transformers over non-curriculum baselines, while reducing the number of gradient updates, thereby enhancing both training efficiency and model robustness. Index T erms-- emotion recognition, curriculum learning, intended label, human perception, computational efficiency, deep neural networks 1. INTRODUCTION Emotions shape human experience, influencing communication, decision-making, and social interaction. Automatic emotion recognition seeks to infer human affective states from multi-modal signals such as speech [1, 2, 3], text [3], facial expressions [3, 4], gestures [5, 6], and physiological signals [7, 8].

A prompt is a natural language instruction that defines a specific task for a large language model (LLM) and serves as the primary interface for human-LLM interaction. With the growing deployment of LLMs, diverse prompt datasets are emerging from platforms such as GitHub and social media. These datasets span a wide array of applications and content types, facilitating both broader LLM utilization and improved prompt engineering. In this work, we--for the first time--have compiled an extensive list of prompt datasets sourced from various channels, representing a spectrum of downstream tasks, languages, engineering techniques, attributes, and modalities. We select key representative datasets for systematic analysis, revealing commonalities and differences in prompt construction across categories, distinguishing them from other text corpora like literature and web. We further propose a prompt optimization approach that leverages syntactic embeddings of part-of-speech and dependency structures. By identifying a centroid representation of prompts and guiding LLMs to rewrite prompts toward this centroid, our method improves the meaningfulness of model outputs. We have made our datasets and code available.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has made unprecedented advances in vision language models over the past two years. During the generative process, new samples (images) are generated from an unknown high-dimensional distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are particularly effective in drawing samples from such complex, high-dimensional distributions. This makes MCMC methods an integral component for models like EBMs, ensuring accurate sample generation. Gradient-based optimization is at the core of modern generative models. The update step during the optimization forms a Markov chain where the new update depends only on the current state. This allows exploration of the parameter space in a memoryless manner, thus combining the benefits of gradient-based optimization and MCMC sampling. MCMC methods have shown an equally important role in physically based rendering where complex light paths are otherwise quite challenging to sample from simple importance sampling techniques. A lot of research is dedicated towards bringing physical realism to samples (images) generated from diffusion-based generative models in a data-driven manner, however, a unified framework connecting these techniques is still missing. In this course, we take the first steps toward understanding each of these components and exploring how MCMC could potentially serve as a bridge, linking these closely related areas of research. Our course aims to provide necessary theoretical and practical tools to guide students, researchers and practitioners towards the common goal of generative physically based rendering. All Jupyter notebooks with demonstrations associated to this tutorial can be found on the project webpage: https://sinbag.github.io/mcmc/