Instructional Material
A Mixed User-Centered Approach to Enable Augmented Intelligence in Intelligent Tutoring Systems: The Case of MathAIde app
Guerino, Guilherme, Rodrigues, Luiz, Bianchini, Luana, Alves, Mariana, Marinho, Marcelo, Veloso, Thomaz, Macario, Valmir, Dermeval, Diego, Vieira, Thales, Bittencourt, Ig, Isotani, Seiji
This study explores the integration of Augmented Intelligence (AuI) in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to address challenges in Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), including teacher involvement, AI reliability, and resource accessibility. We present MathAIde, an ITS that uses computer vision and AI to correct mathematics exercises from student work photos and provide feedback. The system was designed through a collaborative process involving brainstorming with teachers, high-fidelity prototyping, A/B testing, and a real-world case study. Findings emphasize the importance of a teacher-centered, user-driven approach, where AI suggests remediation alternatives while teachers retain decision-making. Results highlight efficiency, usability, and adoption potential in classroom contexts, particularly in resource-limited environments. The study contributes practical insights into designing ITSs that balance user needs and technological feasibility, while advancing AIED research by demonstrating the effectiveness of a mixed-methods, user-centered approach to implementing AuI in educational technologies.
Gait-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning with Multi-Phase Curriculum for Humanoid Locomotion
Peng, Tianhu, Bao, Lingfan, Zhou, Chengxu
We present a unified gait-conditioned reinforcement learning framework that enables humanoid robots to perform standing, walking, running, and smooth transitions within a single recurrent policy. A compact reward routing mechanism dynamically activates gait-specific objectives based on a one-hot gait ID, mitigating reward interference and supporting stable multi-gait learning. Human-inspired reward terms promote biomechanically natural motions, such as straight-knee stance and coordinated arm-leg swing, without requiring motion capture data. A structured curriculum progressively introduces gait complexity and expands command space over multiple phases. In simulation, the policy successfully achieves robust standing, walking, running, and gait transitions. On the real Unitree G1 humanoid, we validate standing, walking, and walk-to-stand transitions, demonstrating stable and coordinated locomotion. This work provides a scalable, reference-free solution toward versatile and naturalistic humanoid control across diverse modes and environments.
Safety Pretraining: Toward the Next Generation of Safe AI
Maini, Pratyush, Goyal, Sachin, Sam, Dylan, Robey, Alex, Savani, Yash, Jiang, Yiding, Zou, Andy, Fredrikson, Matt, Lipton, Zacharcy C., Kolter, J. Zico
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, the risk of generating harmful or toxic content remains a central challenge. Post-hoc alignment methods are brittle: once unsafe patterns are learned during pretraining, they are hard to remove. In this work, we present a data-centric pretraining framework that builds safety into the model from the start. Our framework consists of four key steps: (i) Safety Filtering: building a safety classifier to classify webdata into safe and unsafe categories; (ii) Safety Rephrasing: we recontextualize unsafe webdata into safer narratives; (iii) Native Refusal: we develop RefuseWeb and Moral Education pretraining datasets that actively teach model to refuse on unsafe content and the moral reasoning behind it, and (iv) Harmfulness-Tag annotated pretraining: we flag unsafe content during pretraining using a special token, and use it to steer model away from unsafe generations at inference. Our safety-pretrained models reduce attack success rates from 38.8\% to 8.4\% on standard LLM safety benchmarks with no performance degradation on general tasks.
Learning to Optimize Multi-Objective Alignment Through Dynamic Reward Weighting
Lu, Yining, Wang, Zilong, Li, Shiyang, Liu, Xin, Yu, Changlong, Yin, Qingyu, Shi, Zhan, Zhang, Zixuan, Jiang, Meng
Prior works in multi-objective reinforcement learning typically use linear reward scalarization with fixed weights, which provably fail to capture non-convex Pareto fronts and thus yield suboptimal results. This limitation becomes especially critical in online preference alignment for large language models. Here, stochastic trajectories generated by parameterized policies create highly non-linear and non-convex mappings from parameters to objectives that no single static weighting scheme can find optimal trade-offs. We address this limitation by introducing dynamic reward weighting, which adap-tively adjusts reward weights during the online reinforcement learning process. Unlike existing approaches that rely on fixed-weight interpolation, our dynamic weighting continuously balances and prioritizes objectives in training, facilitating effective exploration of Pareto fronts in objective space. We introduce two approaches of increasing sophistication and generalizability: (1) hypervolume-guided weight adaptation and (2) gradient-based weight optimization, offering a versatile toolkit for online multi-objective alignment. Our extensive experiments demonstrate their compatibility with commonly used online reinforcement learning algorithms (including GRPO, REINFORCE, and RLOO), effectiveness across multiple mathematical reasoning datasets, and applicability to different model families, consistently achieving Pareto dominant solutions with fewer training steps than fixed-weight linear scalarization baselines.Figure 1: Pareto fronts obtained by our gradient-based weight optimization compared to three baselines using fixed-weight reward interpolation.
AI-Generated Content in Cross-Domain Applications: Research Trends, Challenges and Propositions
Li, Jianxin, Qu, Liang, Cai, Taotao, Zhao, Zhixue, Haldar, Nur Al Hasan, Krishna, Aneesh, Kong, Xiangjie, Macau, Flavio Romero, Chakraborty, Tanmoy, Deroy, Aniket, Lin, Binshan, Blackmore, Karen, Noman, Nasimul, Cheng, Jingxian, Cui, Ningning, Xu, Jianliang
Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has rapidly emerged with the capability to generate different forms of content, including text, images, videos, and other modalities, which can achieve a quality similar to content created by humans. As a result, AIGC is now widely applied across various domains such as digital marketing, education, and public health, and has shown promising results by enhancing content creation efficiency and improving information delivery. However, there are few studies that explore the latest progress and emerging challenges of AIGC across different domains. To bridge this gap, this paper brings together 16 scholars from multiple disciplines to provide a cross-domain perspective on the trends and challenges of AIGC. Specifically, the contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) It first provides a broader overview of AIGC, spanning the training techniques of Generative AI, detection methods, and both the spread and use of AI-generated content across digital platforms. (2) It then introduces the societal impacts of AIGC across diverse domains, along with a review of existing methods employed in these contexts. (3) Finally, it discusses the key technical challenges and presents research propositions to guide future work. Through these contributions, this vision paper seeks to offer readers a cross-domain perspective on AIGC, providing insights into its current research trends, ongoing challenges, and future directions.
Bridging Cultural Distance Between Models Default and Local Classroom Demands: How Global Teachers Adopt GenAI to Support Everyday Teaching Practices
Xiao, Ruiwei, Xiao, Qing, Hou, Xinying, Li, Hanqi Jane, Moletsane, Phenyo Phemelo, Shen, Hong, Stamper, John
Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly entering K-12 classrooms, offering teachers new ways for teaching practices. Yet GenAI models are often trained on culturally uneven datasets, embedding a "default culture" that often misaligns with local classrooms. To understand how teachers navigate this gap, we defined the new concept Cultural Distance (the gap between GenAI's default cultural repertoire and the situated demands of teaching practice) and conducted in-depth interviews with 30 K-12 teachers, 10 each from South Africa, Taiwan, and the United States, who had integrated AI into their teaching practice. These teachers' experiences informed the development of our three-level cultural distance framework. This work contributes the concept and framework of cultural distance, six illustrative instances spanning in low, mid, high distance levels with teachers' experiences and strategies for addressing them. Empirically, we offer implications to help AI designers, policymakers, and educators create more equitable and culturally responsive GenAI tools for education.
A Human-Centered Approach to Identifying Promises, Risks, & Challenges of Text-to-Image Generative AI in Radiology
Morrison, Katelyn, Mathur, Arpit, Bradshaw, Aidan, Wartmann, Tom, Lundi, Steven, Zandifar, Afrooz, Dai, Weichang, Batmanghelich, Kayhan, Eslami, Motahhare, Perer, Adam
As text-to-image generative models rapidly improve, AI researchers are making significant advances in developing domain-specific models capable of generating complex medical imagery from text prompts. Despite this, these technical advancements have overlooked whether and how medical professionals would benefit from and use text-to-image generative AI (GenAI) in practice. By developing domain-specific GenAI without involving stakeholders, we risk the potential of building models that are either not useful or even more harmful than helpful. In this paper, we adopt a human-centered approach to responsible model development by involving stakeholders in evaluating and reflecting on the promises, risks, and challenges of a novel text-to-CT Scan GenAI model. Through exploratory model prompting activities, we uncover the perspectives of medical students, radiology trainees, and radiologists on the role that text-to-CT Scan GenAI can play across medical education, training, and practice. This human-centered approach additionally enabled us to surface technical challenges and domain-specific risks of generating synthetic medical images. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of medical text-to-image GenAI.
AgentDynEx: Nudging the Mechanics and Dynamics of Multi-Agent Simulations
Ma, Jenny, Sahni, Riya, Sreedhar, Karthik, Chilton, Lydia B.
Multi-agent large language model simulations have the potential to model complex human behaviors and interactions. If the mechanics are set up properly, unanticipated and valuable social dynamics can surface. However, it is challenging to consistently enforce simulation mechanics while still allowing for notable and emergent dynamics. We present AgentDynEx, an AI system that helps set up simulations from user-specified mechanics and dynamics. AgentDynEx uses LLMs to guide users through a Configuration Matrix to identify core mechanics and define milestones to track dynamics. It also introduces a method called \textit{nudging}, where the system dynamically reflects on simulation progress and gently intervenes if it begins to deviate from intended outcomes. A technical evaluation found that nudging enables simulations to have more complex mechanics and maintain its notable dynamics compared to simulations without nudging. We discuss the importance of nudging as a technique for balancing mechanics and dynamics of multi-agent simulations.
A Computable Measure of Suboptimality for Entropy-Regularised Variational Objectives
Chazal, Clémentine, Kanagawa, Heishiro, Shen, Zheyang, Korba, Anna, Oates, Chris. J.
Several emerging post-Bayesian methods target a probability distribution for which an entropy-regularised variational objective is minimised. This increased flexibility introduces a computational challenge, as one loses access to an explicit unnormalised density for the target. To mitigate this difficulty, we introduce a novel measure of suboptimality called 'gradient discrepancy', and in particular a 'kernel gradient discrepancy' (KGD) that can be explicitly computed. In the standard Bayesian context, KGD coincides with the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD), and we obtain a novel charasterisation of KSD as measuring the size of a variational gradient. Outside this familiar setting, KGD enables novel sampling algorithms to be developed and compared, even when unnormalised densities cannot be obtained. To illustrate this point several novel algorithms are proposed, including a natural generalisation of Stein variational gradient descent, with applications to mean-field neural networks and prediction-centric uncertainty quantification presented. On the theoretical side, our principal contribution is to establish sufficient conditions for desirable properties of KGD, such as continuity and convergence control.
Integrating Diffusion-based Multi-task Learning with Online Reinforcement Learning for Robust Quadruped Robot Control
Qin, Xinyao, Ma, Xiaoteng, Qi, Yang, Liu, Qihan, Xue, Chuanyi, Gui, Ning, Dong, Qinyu, Yang, Jun, Liang, Bin
Abstract-- Recent research has highlighted the powerful capabilities of imitation learning in robotics. Leveraging generative models, particularly diffusion models, these approaches offer notable advantages such as strong multi-task generalization, effective language conditioning, and high sample efficiency. While their application has been successful in manipulation tasks, their use in legged locomotion remains relatively underexplored, mainly due to compounding errors that affect stability and difficulties in task transition under limited data. Online reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated promising results in legged robot control in the past years, which can provide valuable insights to address these challenges. In this work, we propose DMLoco, a diffusion-based framework for quadruped robots that integrates multi-task pretraining with online PPO finetuning to enable language-conditioned control and robust task transitions. Then, the policy is finetuned in simulation to ensure robustness and stable task transition for real-world deployment. By utilizing Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) for efficient sampling and T ensorRT for optimized deployment, our policy runs onboard at 50Hz, offering a scalable and efficient solution for adaptive, language-guided locomotion on resource-constrained robotic platforms.