Instructional Material
LyriCAR: A Difficulty-Aware Curriculum Reinforcement Learning Framework For Controllable Lyric Translation
Ren, Le, Zeng, Xiangjian, Wu, Qingqiang, Liang, Ruoxuan
Lyric translation is a challenging task that requires balancing multiple musical constraints. Existing methods often rely on hand-crafted rules and sentence-level modeling, which restrict their ability to internalize musical-linguistic patterns and to generalize effectively at the paragraph level, where cross-line coherence and global rhyme are crucial. In this work, we propose LyriCAR, a novel framework for controllable lyric translation that operates in a fully unsupervised manner. LyriCAR introduces a difficulty-aware curriculum designer and an adaptive curriculum strategy, ensuring efficient allocation of training resources, accelerating convergence, and improving overall translation quality by guiding the model with increasingly complex challenges. Extensive experiments on the EN-ZH lyric translation task show that LyriCAR achieves state-of-the-art results across both standard translation metrics and multi-dimensional reward scores, surpassing strong baselines. Notably, the adaptive curriculum strategy reduces training steps by nearly 40% while maintaining superior performance. Code, data and model can be accessed at https://github.com/rle27/LyriCAR.
AI-Driven Personalized Learning: Predicting Academic Per-formance Through Leadership Personality Traits
Herzog, Nitsa J, Sulaiman, Rejwan Bin, Herzog, David J, Fong, Rose
The study explores the potential of AI technologies in personalized learning, suggesting the prediction of academic success through leadership personality traits and machine learning modelling. The primary data were obtained from 129 master's students in the Environmental Engineering Department, who underwent five leadership personality tests with 23 characteristics. Students used self-assessment tools that included Personality Insight, Workplace Culture, Motivation at Work, Management Skills, and Emotion Control tests. The test results were combined with the average grade obtained from academic reports. The study employed exploratory data analysis and correlation analysis. Feature selection utilized Pearson correlation coefficients of personality traits. The average grades were separated into three categories: fail, pass, and excellent. The modelling process was performed by tuning seven ML algorithms, such as SVM, LR, KNN, DT, GB, RF, XGBoost and LightGBM. The highest predictive performance was achieved with the RF classifier, which yielded an accuracy of 87.50% for the model incorporating 17 personality trait features and the leadership mark feature, and an accuracy of 85.71% for the model excluding this feature. In this way, the study offers an additional opportunity to identify students' strengths and weaknesses at an early stage of their education process and select the most suitable strategies for personalized learning.
An Evaluation of the Pedagogical Soundness and Usability of AI-Generated Lesson Plans Across Different Models and Prompt Frameworks in High-School Physics
This study evaluates the pedagogical soundness and usability of AI-generated lesson plans across five leading large language models: ChatGPT (GPT-5), Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, DeepSeek V3.2, and Grok 4. Beyond model choice, three structured prompt frameworks were tested: TAG (Task, Audience, Goal), RACE (Role, Audience, Context, Execution), and COSTAR (Context, Objective, Style, Tone, Audience, Response Format). Fifteen lesson plans were generated for a single high-school physics topic, The Electromagnetic Spectrum. The lesson plans were analyzed through four automated computational metrics: (1) readability and linguistic complexity, (2) factual accuracy and hallucination detection, (3) standards and curriculum alignment, and (4) cognitive demand of learning objectives. Results indicate that model selection exerted the strongest influence on linguistic accessibility, with DeepSeek producing the most readable teaching plan (FKGL = 8.64) and Claude generating the densest language (FKGL = 19.89). The prompt framework structure most strongly affected the factual accuracy and pedagogical completeness, with the RACE framework yielding the lowest hallucination index and the highest incidental alignment with NGSS curriculum standards. Across all models, the learning objectives in the fifteen lesson plans clustered at the Remember and Understand tiers of Bloom's taxonomy. There were limited higher-order verbs in the learning objectives extracted. Overall, the findings suggest that readability is significantly governed by model design, while instructional reliability and curricular alignment depend more on the prompt framework. The most effective configuration for lesson plans identified in the results was to combine a readability-optimized model with the RACE framework and an explicit checklist of physics concepts, curriculum standards, and higher-order objectives.
Bag of Tricks for Subverting Reasoning-based Safety Guardrails
Chen, Shuo, Han, Zhen, Chen, Haokun, He, Bailan, Si, Shengyun, Wu, Jingpei, Torr, Philip, Tresp, Volker, Gu, Jindong
Recent reasoning-based safety guardrails for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as deliberative alignment, have shown strong defense against jailbreak attacks. By leveraging LRMs' reasoning ability, these guardrails help the models to assess the safety of user inputs before generating final responses. The powerful reasoning ability can analyze the intention of the input query and will refuse to assist once it detects the harmful intent hidden by the jailbreak methods. Such guardrails have shown a significant boost in defense, such as the near-perfect refusal rates on the open-source gpt-oss series. Unfortunately, we find that these powerful reasoning-based guardrails can be extremely vulnerable to subtle manipulation of the input prompts, and once hijacked, can lead to even more harmful results. Specifically, we first uncover a surprisingly fragile aspect of these guardrails: simply adding a few template tokens to the input prompt can successfully bypass the seemingly powerful guardrails and lead to explicit and harmful responses. To explore further, we introduce a bag of jailbreak methods that subvert the reasoning-based guardrails. Our attacks span white-, gray-, and black-box settings and range from effortless template manipulations to fully automated optimization. Along with the potential for scalable implementation, these methods also achieve alarmingly high attack success rates (e.g., exceeding 90% across 5 different benchmarks on gpt-oss series on both local host models and online API services). Evaluations across various leading open-source LRMs confirm that these vulnerabilities are systemic, underscoring the urgent need for stronger alignment techniques for open-sourced LRMs to prevent malicious misuse. Code is open-sourced at https://chenxshuo.github.io/bag-of-tricks.
CE-Nav: Flow-Guided Reinforcement Refinement for Cross-Embodiment Local Navigation
Yang, Kai, Zhang, Tianlin, Wang, Zhengbo, Chu, Zedong, Wu, Xiaolong, Cai, Yang, Xu, Mu
Generalizing local navigation policies across diverse robot morphologies is a critical challenge. Progress is often hindered by the need for costly and embodiment-specific data, the tight coupling of planning and control, and the "disastrous averaging" problem where deterministic models fail to capture multi-modal decisions (e.g., turning left or right). We introduce CE-Nav, a novel two-stage (IL-then-RL) framework that systematically decouples universal geometric reasoning from embodiment-specific dynamic adaptation. First, we train an embodiment-agnostic General Expert offline using imitation learning. This expert, a conditional normalizing flow model named VelFlow, learns the full distribution of kinematically-sound actions from a large-scale dataset generated by a classical planner, completely avoiding real robot data and resolving the multi-modality issue. Second, for a new robot, we freeze the expert and use it as a guiding prior to train a lightweight, Dynamics-Aware Refiner via online reinforcement learning. This refiner rapidly learns to compensate for the target robot's specific dynamics and controller imperfections with minimal environmental interaction. Extensive experiments on quadrupeds, bipeds, and quadrotors show that CE-Nav achieves state-of-the-art performance while drastically reducing adaptation cost. Successful real-world deployments further validate our approach as an efficient and scalable solution for building generalizable navigation systems. Code is available at https://github.com/amap-cvlab/CE-Nav.
Looking ahead to #ECAI2025
The 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2025) will take place in Bologna, Italy, from 25-30 October 2025. The first two days will be dedicated to tutorials, workshops, and the doctoral consortium. The main conference will run from 27-30, and will include the 14th Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS-2025). The idea is to highlight important new results, techniques, and trends. The panel will be chaired by Shihan Wang and Vahid Yazdanpanah.
MLR-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents on Open-Ended Machine Learning Research
Chen, Hui, Xiong, Miao, Lu, Yujie, Han, Wei, Deng, Ailin, He, Yufei, Wu, Jiaying, Li, Yibo, Liu, Yue, Hooi, Bryan
Recent advancements in AI agents have demonstrated their growing potential to drive and support scientific discovery. In this work, we introduce MLR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI agents on open-ended machine learning research. MLR-Bench includes three key components: (1) 201 research tasks sourced from NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML workshops covering diverse ML topics; (2) MLR-Judge, an automated evaluation framework combining LLM-based reviewers with carefully designed review rubrics to assess research quality; and (3) MLR-Agent, a modular agent scaffold capable of completing research tasks through four stages: idea generation, proposal formulation, experimentation, and paper writing. Our framework supports both stepwise assessment across these distinct research stages, and end-to-end evaluation of the final research paper. We then use MLR-Bench to evaluate six frontier LLMs and an advanced coding agent, finding that while LLMs are effective at generating coherent ideas and well-structured papers, current coding agents frequently (e.g., in 80% of the cases) produce fabricated or invalidated experimental results--posing a major barrier to scientific reliability. We validate MLR-Judge through human evaluation, showing high agreement with expert reviewers, supporting its potential as a scalable tool for research evaluation. We open-source MLR-Bench to help the community benchmark, diagnose, and improve AI research agents toward trustworthy and transparent scientific discovery.
NAACL2025 Tutorial: Adaptation of Large Language Models
Ke, Zixuan, Ming, Yifei, Joty, Shafiq
This tutorial on adaptation of LLMs is designed to address the growing demand for models that go beyond the static capabilities of generic LLMs by providing an overview of dynamic, domain-specific, and task-adaptive LLM adaptation techniques. While general LLMs have demonstrated strong generalization across a variety of tasks, they often struggle to perform well in specialized domains such as finance, healthcare, and code generation for underrepresented languages. Additionally, their static nature limits their ability to evolve with the changing world, and they are often extremely large in size, making them impractical and costly to deploy at scale. As a result, the adaptation of LLMs has drawn much attention since the birth of LLMs and is of core importance, both for industry, which focuses on serving its targeted users, and academia, which can greatly benefit from small but powerful LLMs. To address this gap, this tutorial aims to provide an overview of the LLM adaptation techniques. We start with an introduction to LLM adaptation, from both the data perspective and the model perspective. We then emphasize how the evaluation metrics and benchmarks are different from other techniques. After establishing the problems, we explore various adaptation techniques. We categorize adaptation techniques into two main families. The first is parametric knowledge adaptation, which focuses on updating the parametric knowledge within LLMs. Additionally, we will discuss real-time adaptation techniques, including model editing, which allows LLMs to be updated dynamically in production environments. The second kind of adaptation is semi-parametric knowledge adaptation, where the goal is to update LLM parameters to better leverage external knowledge or tools through techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agent-based systems.
VideoAgentTrek: Computer Use Pretraining from Unlabeled Videos
Lu, Dunjie, Xu, Yiheng, Wang, Junli, Wu, Haoyuan, Wang, Xinyuan, Wang, Zekun, Yang, Junlin, Su, Hongjin, Chen, Jixuan, Chen, Junda, Mao, Yuchen, Zhou, Jingren, Lin, Junyang, Hui, Binyuan, Yu, Tao
Training computer-use agents requires massive amounts of GUI interaction data, but manually annotating action trajectories at scale is prohibitively expensive. We present VideoAgentTrek, a scalable pipeline that automatically mines training data from publicly available screen-recorded videos at web scale, eliminating the need for manual annotation. Our approach addresses a key challenge: raw videos contain implicit demonstrations but lack explicit action labels. To solve this, we develop Video2Action, an inverse dynamics module (IDM) with two components: (1) a video grounding model that detects and localizes GUI actions with precise temporal boundaries and context, and (2) an action-content recognizer that extracts structured parameters like click coordinates and typed text with high fidelity. Applied to 39,000 YouTube tutorial videos, our pipeline generates 1.52 million interaction steps automatically. We leverage this data through continued pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning. On OSWorld-Verified, our approach improves task success rates from 9.3% (SFT-only baseline) to 15.8%, a 70% relative improvement. On AgentNetBench, step accuracy increases from 64.1% to 69.3%. Our results demonstrate that passive internet videos can be transformed into high-quality supervision for computer-use agents, providing a scalable alternative to expensive manual annotation.
A Justice Lens on Fairness and Ethics Courses in Computing Education: LLM-Assisted Multi-Perspective and Thematic Evaluation
Andrews, Kenya S., Kanubala, Deborah Dormah, Aruleba, Kehinde, Castro, Francisco Enrique Vicente, Revelo, Renata A
Course syllabi set the tone and expectations for courses, shaping the learning experience for both students and instructors. In computing courses, especially those addressing fairness and ethics in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and algorithmic design it is imperative that we understand how approaches to navigating barriers to fair outcomes are being addressed.These expectations should be inclusive, transparent, and grounded in promoting critical thinking. Syllabus analysis offers a way to evaluate the coverage, depth, practices, and expectations within a course. Manual syllabus evaluation, however, is time-consuming and prone to inconsistency. To address this, we developed a justice-oriented scoring rubric and asked a large language model (LLM) to review syllabi through a multi-perspective role simulation. Using this rubric, we evaluated 24 syllabi from four perspectives: instructor, departmental chair, institutional reviewer, and external evaluator. We also prompted the LLM to identify thematic trends across the courses. Findings show that multi-perspective evaluation aids us in noting nuanced, role-specific priorities, leveraging them to fill hidden gaps in curricula design of AI/ML and related computing courses focused on fairness and ethics. These insights offer concrete directions for improving the design and delivery of fairness, ethics, and justice content in such courses.