Instructional Material
EduDial: Constructing a Large-scale Multi-turn Teacher-Student Dialogue Corpus
Wei, Shouang, Zhang, Min, Lin, Xin, Jiang, Bo, Dai, Zhongxiang, Kuang, Kun
Recently, several multi-turn dialogue benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate the conversational abilities of large language models (LLMs). As LLMs are increasingly recognized as a key technology for advancing intelligent education, owing to their ability to deeply understand instructional contexts and provide personalized guidance, the construction of dedicated teacher-student dialogue benchmarks has become particularly important. To this end, we present EduDial, a comprehensive multi-turn teacher-student dialogue dataset. EduDial covers 345 core knowledge points and consists of 34,250 dialogue sessions generated through interactions between teacher and student agents. Its design is guided by Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives and incorporates ten questioning strategies, including situational questioning, zone of proximal development (ZPD) questioning, and metacognitive questioning-thus better capturing authentic classroom interactions. Furthermore, we design differentiated teaching strategies for students at different cognitive levels, thereby providing more targeted teaching guidance. Building on EduDial, we further develop EduDial-LLM 32B via training and propose an 11-dimensional evaluation framework that systematically measures the teaching abilities of LLMs, encompassing both overall teaching quality and content quality. Experiments on 17 mainstream LLMs reveal that most models struggle in student-centered teaching scenarios, whereas our EduDial-LLM achieves significant gains, consistently outperforming all baselines across all metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/Mind-Lab-ECNU/EduDial/tree/main.
HealthProcessAI: A Technical Framework and Proof-of-Concept for LLM-Enhanced Healthcare Process Mining
Illueca-Fernandez, Eduardo, Chen, Kaile, Seoane, Fernando, Abtahi, Farhad
Process mining has emerged as a powerful analytical technique for understanding complex healthcare workflows. However, its application faces significant barriers, including technical complexity, a lack of standardized approaches, and limited access to practical training resources. We introduce HealthProcessAI, a GenAI framework designed to simplify process mining applications in healthcare and epidemiology by providing a comprehensive wrapper around existing Python (PM4PY) and R (bupaR) libraries. To address unfamiliarity and improve accessibility, the framework integrates multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated process map interpretation and report generation, helping translate technical analyses into outputs that diverse users can readily understand. We validated the framework using sepsis progression data as a proof-of-concept example and compared the outputs of five state-of-the-art LLM models through the OpenRouter platform. To test its functionality, the framework successfully processed sepsis data across four proof-of-concept scenarios, demonstrating robust technical performance and its capability to generate reports through automated LLM analysis. LLM evaluation using five independent LLMs as automated evaluators revealed distinct model strengths: Claude Sonnet-4 and Gemini 2.5-Pro achieved the highest consistency scores (3.79/4.0 and 3.65/4.0) when evaluated by automated LLM assessors. By integrating multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated interpretation and report generation, the framework addresses widespread unfamiliarity with process mining outputs, making them more accessible to clinicians, data scientists, and researchers. This structured analytics and AI-driven interpretation combination represents a novel methodological advance in translating complex process mining results into potentially actionable insights for healthcare applications.
Efficient Inference for Coupled Hidden Markov Models in Continuous Time and Discrete Space
Migliorini, Giosue, Smyth, Padhraic
Systems of interacting continuous-time Markov chains are a powerful model class, but inference is typically intractable in high dimensional settings. Auxiliary information, such as noisy observations, is typically only available at discrete times, and incorporating it via a Doob's $h-$transform gives rise to an intractable posterior process that requires approximation. We introduce Latent Interacting Particle Systems, a model class parameterizing the generator of each Markov chain in the system. Our inference method involves estimating look-ahead functions (twist potentials) that anticipate future information, for which we introduce an efficient parameterization. We incorporate this approximation in a twisted Sequential Monte Carlo sampling scheme. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a challenging posterior inference task for a latent SIRS model on a graph, and on a neural model for wildfire spread dynamics trained on real data.
ERA: Transforming VLMs into Embodied Agents via Embodied Prior Learning and Online Reinforcement Learning
Chen, Hanyang, Zhao, Mark, Yang, Rui, Ma, Qinwei, Yang, Ke, Yao, Jiarui, Wang, Kangrui, Bai, Hao, Wang, Zhenhailong, Pan, Rui, Zhang, Mengchao, Barreiros, Jose, Onol, Aykut, Zhai, ChengXiang, Ji, Heng, Li, Manling, Zhang, Huan, Zhang, Tong
Recent advances in embodied AI highlight the potential of vision language models (VLMs) as agents capable of perception, reasoning, and interaction in complex environments. However, top-performing systems rely on large-scale models that are costly to deploy, while smaller VLMs lack the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed. To bridge this gap, we present \textit{Embodied Reasoning Agent (ERA)}, a two-stage framework that integrates prior knowledge learning and online reinforcement learning (RL). The first stage, \textit{Embodied Prior Learning}, distills foundational knowledge from three types of data: (1) Trajectory-Augmented Priors, which enrich existing trajectory data with structured reasoning generated by stronger models; (2) Environment-Anchored Priors, which provide in-environment knowledge and grounding supervision; and (3) External Knowledge Priors, which transfer general knowledge from out-of-environment datasets. In the second stage, we develop an online RL pipeline that builds on these priors to further enhance agent performance. To overcome the inherent challenges in agent RL, including long horizons, sparse rewards, and training instability, we introduce three key designs: self-summarization for context management, dense reward shaping, and turn-level policy optimization. Extensive experiments on both high-level planning (EB-ALFRED) and low-level control (EB-Manipulation) tasks demonstrate that ERA-3B surpasses both prompting-based large models and previous training-based baselines. Specifically, it achieves overall improvements of 8.4\% on EB-ALFRED and 19.4\% on EB-Manipulation over GPT-4o, and exhibits strong generalization to unseen tasks. Overall, ERA offers a practical path toward scalable embodied intelligence, providing methodological insights for future embodied AI systems.
Few Shot Semi-Supervised Learning for Abnormal Stop Detection from Sparse GPS Trajectories
Sabir, Muhammad Ayub, Pang, Junbiao, Wu, Jiaqi, Ashraf, Fatima
Abnormal stop detection (ASD) in intercity coach transportation is critical for ensuring passenger safety, operational reliability, and regulatory compliance. However, two key challenges hinder ASD effectiveness: sparse GPS trajectories, which obscure short or unauthorized stops, and limited labeled data, which restricts supervised learning. Existing methods often assume dense sampling or regular movement patterns, limiting their applicability. To address data sparsity, we propose a Sparsity-Aware Segmentation (SAS) method that adaptively defines segment boundaries based on local spatial-temporal density. Building upon these segments, we introduce three domain-specific indicators to capture abnormal stop behaviors. To further mitigate the impact of sparsity, we develop Locally Temporal-Indicator Guided Adjustment (LTIGA), which smooths these indicators via local similarity graphs. To overcome label scarcity, we construct a spatial-temporal graph where each segment is a node with LTIGA-refined features. We apply label propagation to expand weak supervision across the graph, followed by a GCN to learn relational patterns. A final self-training module incorporates high-confidence pseudo-labels to iteratively improve predictions. Experiments on real-world coach data show an AUC of 0.854 and AP of 0.866 using only 10 labeled instances, outperforming prior methods. The code and dataset are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/pangjunbiao/Abnormal-Stop-Detection-SSL.git}
Multi-Action Self-Improvement for Neural Combinatorial Optimization
Self-improvement has emerged as a state-of-the-art paradigm in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO), where models iteratively refine their policies by generating and imitating high-quality solutions. Despite strong empirical performance, existing methods face key limitations. Training is computationally expensive, as policy updates require sampling numerous candidate solutions per instance to extract a single expert trajectory. More fundamentally, these approaches fail to exploit the structure of combinatorial problems involving the coordination of multiple agents, such as vehicles in min-max routing or machines in scheduling. By supervising on single-action trajectories, they fail to exploit agent-permutation symmetries, where distinct sequences of actions yield identical solutions, hindering generalization and the ability to learn coordinated behavior. We address these challenges by extending self-improvement to operate over joint multi-agent actions. Our model architecture predicts complete agent-task assignments jointly at each decision step. To explicitly leverage symmetries, we employ a set-prediction loss, which supervises the policy on multiple expert assignments for any given state. This approach enhances sample efficiency and the model's ability to learn coordinated behavior. Furthermore, by generating multi-agent actions in parallel, it drastically accelerates the solution generation phase of the self-improvement loop. Empirically, we validate our method on several combinatorial problems, demonstrating consistent improvements in the quality of the final solution and a reduced generation latency compared to standard self-improvement.
R-WoM: Retrieval-augmented World Model For Computer-use Agents
Mei, Kai, Guo, Jiang, Chang, Shuaichen, Dong, Mingwen, Lee, Dongkyu, Niu, Xing, Jiang, Jiarong
Large Language Models (LLMs) can serve as world models to enhance agent decision-making in digital environments by simulating future states and predicting action outcomes, potentially eliminating costly trial-and-error exploration. However, this capability is fundamentally limited by LLM's tendency to hallucination and their reliance on static training knowledge, which could lead to compounding errors that inhibit long-horizon simulations. To systematically investigate whether LLMs are appropriate for world modeling, we probe two core capabilities of world models - future state prediction and reward estimation - through three tasks: next-state identification, full-procedure planning alignment, and milestone transition recognition. Our analysis shows that while LLMs effectively capture immediate next states and identify meaningful state transitions, their performance rapidly degrades in full-procedure planning. This highlights LLMs' limitations in reliably modeling environment dynamics over long horizons. To address these limitations, we propose the Retrieval-augmented World Model (R-WoM), which grounds LLM simulations by incorporating factual, up-to-date knowledge retrieved from external tutorials. Experiments show that R-WoM achieves substantial improvements of up to 25.3% (OSWorld) and 18.1% (WebArena) compared to baselines, with particular advantage in longer-horizon simulations. World models have evolved from early symbolic planning systems to sophisticated neural architectures that learn latent representations of environment dynamics. Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) approaches, such as Dreamer v1-3 (Hafner et al., 2019; 2020; 2023) and MuZero (Schrittwieser et al., 2020), learn latent world models to "imagine" trajectories before selecting actions. More recently, Large Language Model (LLM)-based world models (Hao et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2024) have emerged as a new paradigm, leveraging large-scale pre-training to reason about action consequences in realistic digital environments.
GAR: Generative Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Formal Theorem Proving
Wang, Ruida, Yao, Jiarui, Pan, Rui, Diao, Shizhe, Zhang, Tong
Solving math problems through verifiable languages such as Lean has significantly impacted both the mathematics and computer science communities. Current state-of-the-art models are often trained with expensive online Reinforcement Learning (RL) or expert iteration. However, these approaches rely on fixed problem sets, which causes inefficient training and limits the model to tackle complex problems. To overcome these limitations, we propose GAR: Generative Adversarial Reinforcement learning, a comprehensive RL training framework that jointly trains the problem composer and solver in an adversarial loop. GAR introduces an implicit curriculum learning mechanism, which aligns task difficulty with the prover's evolving capability. It thereby improves the training efficiency and enables stronger performance of proving advanced theorems. Experiments show that with GAR training, Goedel-Prover-V2-8B and DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B achieve an average relative improvement in pass@32 of 4.20% on MiniF2F-Test benchmark, while DeepSeek-Prover-V2's pass@32 on ProofNet-Test increases from 22.58% to 25.81%. Beyond formal proving, GAR establishes a general RL paradigm for co-evolution of problem generation and solving under verifiable environments.
Artificial Intelligence for Optimal Learning: A Comparative Approach towards AI-Enhanced Learning Environments
In the rapidly evolving educational landscape, the integration of technology has shifted from an enhancement to a cornerstone of educational strategy worldwide. This transition is propelled by advancements in digital technology, especially the emergence of artificial intelligence as a crucial tool in learning environments. This research project critically evaluates the impact of three distinct educational settings: traditional educational methods without technological integration, those enhanced by non-AI technology, and those utilising AI-driven technologies. This comparison aims to assess how each environment influences educational outcomes, engagement, pedagogical methods, and equity in access to learning resources, and how each contributes uniquely to the learning experience. The ultimate goal of this research is to synthesise the strengths of each model to create a more holistic educational approach. By integrating the personal interaction and tested pedagogical techniques of traditional classrooms, the enhanced accessibility and collaborative tools offered by non-AI technology, and the personalised, adaptive learning strategies enabled by AI-driven technologies, education systems can develop richer, more effective learning environments. This hybrid approach aims to leverage the best elements of each setting, thereby enhancing educational outcomes, engagement, and inclusiveness, while also addressing the distinct challenges and limitations inherent in each model. The intention is to create an educational framework deeply attentive to the diverse needs of students, ensuring equitable access to high-quality education for all.
Near-Optimal Second-Order Guarantees for Model-Based Adversarial Imitation Learning
Li, Shangzhe, Zhou, Dongruo, Zhang, Weitong
We study online adversarial imitation learning (AIL), where an agent learns from offline expert demonstrations and interacts with the environment online without access to rewards. Despite strong empirical results, the benefits of online interaction and the impact of stochasticity remain poorly understood. We address these gaps by introducing a model-based AIL algorithm (MB-AIL) and establish its horizon-free, second-order sample-complexity guarantees under general function approximations for both expert data and reward-free interactions. These second-order bounds provide an instance-dependent result that can scale with the variance of returns under the relevant policies and therefore tighten as the system approaches determinism. Together with second-order, information-theoretic lower bounds on a newly constructed hard-instance family, we show that MB-AIL attains minimax-optimal sample complexity for online interaction (up to logarithmic factors) with limited expert demonstrations and matches the lower bound for expert demonstrations in terms of the dependence on horizon $H$, precision $ε$ and the policy variance $σ^2$. Experiments further validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that a practical implementation of MB-AIL matches or surpasses the sample efficiency of existing methods.