Instructional Material
Multidimensional classification of posts for online course discussion forum curation
Candido, Antonio Leandro Martins, Maia, Jose Everardo Bessa
The automatic curation of discussion forums in online courses requires constant updates, making frequent retraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) a resource-intensive process. To circumvent the need for costly fine-tuning, this paper proposes and evaluates the use of Bayesian fusion. The approach combines the multidimensional classification scores of a pre-trained generic LLM with those of a classifier trained on local data. The performance comparison demonstrated that the proposed fusion improves the results compared to each classifier individually, and is competitive with the LLM fine-tuning approach
From Answers to Questions: EQGBench for Evaluating LLMs' Educational Question Generation
Zhou, Chengliang, Wang, Mei, Zhang, Ting, Zhu, Qiannan, Li, Jian, Huang, Hua
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in mathematical problem-solving. However, the transition from providing answers to generating high-quality educational questions presents significant challenges that remain underexplored. To advance Educational Question Generation (EQG) and facilitate LLMs in generating pedagogically valuable and educationally effective questions, we introduce EQGBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLMs' performance in Chinese EQG. EQGBench establishes a five-dimensional evaluation framework supported by a dataset of 900 evaluation samples spanning three fundamental middle school disciplines: mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The dataset incorporates user queries with varying knowledge points, difficulty gradients, and question type specifications to simulate realistic educational scenarios. Through systematic evaluation of 46 mainstream large models, we reveal significant room for development in generating questions that reflect educational value and foster students' comprehensive abilities.
Thematic and Task-Based Categorization of K-12 GenAI Usages with Hierarchical Topic Modeling
Schneider, Johannes, Hasler, Bรฉatrice S., Varrone, Michaela, Hoya, Fabian, Schroffenegger, Thomas, Mah, Dana-Kristin, Pebรถck, Karl
We analyze anonymous interaction data of minors in class-rooms spanning several months, schools, and subjects employing a novel, simple topic modeling approach. Specifically, we categorize more than 17,000 messages generated by students, teachers, and ChatGPT in two dimensions: content (such as nature and people) and tasks (such as writing and explaining). Our hierarchical categorization done separately for each dimension includes exemplary prompts, and provides both a high-level overview as well as tangible insights. Prior works mostly lack a content or thematic categorization. While task categorizations are more prevalent in education, most have not been supported by real-world data for K-12. In turn, it is not surprising that our analysis yielded a number of novel applications. In deriving these insights, we found that many of the well-established classical and emerging computational methods, i.e., topic modeling, for analysis of large amounts of texts underperform, leading us to directly apply state-of-the-art LLMs with adequate pre-processing to achieve hierarchical topic structures with better human alignment through explicit instructions than prior approaches. Our findings support fellow researchers, teachers and students in enriching the usage of GenAI, while our discussion also highlights a number of concerns and open questions for future research.
PromptTSS: A Prompting-Based Approach for Interactive Multi-Granularity Time Series Segmentation
Chang, Ching, Lo, Ming-Chih, Peng, Wen-Chih, Chen, Tien-Fu
Multivariate time series data, collected across various fields such as manufacturing and wearable technology, exhibit states at multiple levels of granularity, from coarse-grained system behaviors to fine-grained, detailed events. Effectively segmenting and integrating states across these different granularities is crucial for tasks like predictive maintenance and performance optimization. However, existing time series segmentation methods face two key challenges: (1) the inability to handle multiple levels of granularity within a unified model, and (2) limited adaptability to new, evolving patterns in dynamic environments. To address these challenges, we propose PromptTSS, a novel framework for time series segmentation with multi-granularity states. PromptTSS uses a unified model with a prompting mechanism that leverages label and boundary information to guide segmentation, capturing both coarse- and fine-grained patterns while adapting dynamically to unseen patterns. Experiments show PromptTSS improves accuracy by 24.49% in multi-granularity segmentation, 17.88% in single-granularity segmentation, and up to 599.24% in transfer learning, demonstrating its adaptability to hierarchical states and evolving time series dynamics. Our code is available at https://github.com/blacksnail789521/PromptTSS.
Impression learning Online representation learning with synaptic plasticity Appendices
Our derivation of the update for IL (Eq. 3) is based on an expansion of log We examine the consequences of this bias formula for our specific model. Note that the update term in Eq. (S1) is However, we will show in Appendix C that these updates may have high variance. 'reparameterization trick,' in which a change of variables allows the use of stochastic gradient descent It is worth noting that this'reparameterization' will work only for additive Gaussian noise. As already mentioned, WS can be viewed as a special case of IL. Since WS is a special case of IL, the bias properties of its individual samples are identical.
A Provably Efficient Sample Collection Strategy for Reinforcement Learning
One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample complexity, state-space coverage or model estimation, we need to strike a different exploration-exploitation trade-off.