Curriculum analytics (CA) studies curriculum structure and student data to ensure the quality of educational programs. An essential aspect is studying course properties, which involves assigning each course a representative difficulty value. This is critical for several aspects of CA, such as quality control (e.g., monitoring variations over time), course comparisons (e.g., articulation), and course recommendation (e.g., advising). Measuring course difficulty requires careful consideration of multiple factors: First, when difficulty measures are sensitive to the performance level of enrolled students, it can bias interpretations by overlooking student diversity. By assessing difficulty independently of enrolled students' performances, we can reduce the risk of bias and enable fair, representative assessments of difficulty. Second, from a measurement theoretic perspective, the measurement must be reliable and valid to provide a robust basis for subsequent analyses. Third, difficulty measures should account for covariates, such as the characteristics of individual students within a diverse populations (e.g., transfer status). In recent years, various notions of difficulty have been proposed. This paper provides the first comprehensive review and comparison of existing approaches for assessing course difficulty based on grade point averages and latent trait modeling. It further offers a hands-on tutorial on model selection, assumption checking, and practical CA applications. These applications include monitoring course difficulty over time and detecting courses with disparate outcomes between distinct groups of students (e.g., dropouts vs. graduates), ultimately aiming to promote high-quality, fair, and equitable learning experiences. To support further research and application, we provide an open-source software package and artificial datasets, facilitating reproducibility and adoption.

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Such promise is especially appealing in domains where data collection is expensive or dangerous, but large amounts of data may already exists (e.g., robotics, autonomous driving, task-oriented dialog systems).

H2O introduces a dynamics-aware policy evaluation scheme, which adaptively penalizes the Q-function learning on simulated state-action pairs with large dynamics gaps, while also simultaneously allowing learning from a fixed real-world dataset.

One approach toward automatic grading is to learn an agent that interacts with a student's program and explores states indicative of errors via reinforcement learning. However, existing work on this approach only provides binary feedback of whether a program is correct or not, while students require finer-grained feedback on the specific errors in their programs to understand their mistakes. In this work, we show that exploring to discover errors can be cast as a meta-exploration problem.

A central challenge in many areas of science and engineering is to identify model parameters that are consistent with prior knowledge and empirical data. Bayesian inference offers a principled framework for this task, but can be computationally prohibitive when models are defined by stochastic simulators. Simulation-based Inference (SBI) is a suite of methods developed to overcome this limitation, which has enabled scientific discoveries in fields such as particle physics, astrophysics, and neuroscience. The core idea of SBI is to train neural networks on data generated by a simulator, without requiring access to likelihood evaluations. Once trained, inference is amortized: The neural network can rapidly perform Bayesian inference on empirical observations without requiring additional training or simulations. In this tutorial, we provide a practical guide for practitioners aiming to apply SBI methods. We outline a structured SBI workflow and offer practical guidelines and diagnostic tools for every stage of the process -- from setting up the simulator and prior, choosing and training inference networks, to performing inference and validating the results. We illustrate these steps through examples from astrophysics, psychophysics, and neuroscience. This tutorial empowers researchers to apply state-of-the-art SBI methods, facilitating efficient parameter inference for scientific discovery.

Image set classification (ISC), which can be viewed as a task of comparing similarities between sets consisting of unordered heterogeneous images with variable quantities and qualities, has attracted growing research attention in recent years. How to learn effective feature representations and how to explore the similarities between different image sets are two key yet challenging issues in this field. However, existing traditional ISC methods classify image sets based on raw pixel features, ignoring the importance of feature learning. Existing deep ISC methods can learn deep features, but they fail to adaptively adjust the features when measuring set distances, resulting in limited performance in few-shot ISC. To address the above issues, this paper combines traditional ISC methods with deep models and proposes a novel few-shot ISC approach called Deep Class-specific Collaborative Representation (DCSCR) network to simultaneously learn the frame- and concept-level feature representations of each image set and the distance similarities between different sets. Specifically, DCSCR consists of a fully convolutional deep feature extractor module, a global feature learning module, and a class-specific collaborative representation-based metric learning module. The deep feature extractor and global feature learning modules are used to learn (local and global) frame-level feature representations, while the class-specific collaborative representation-based metric learning module is exploit to adaptively learn the concept-level feature representation of each image set and thus obtain the distance similarities between different sets by developing a new CSCR-based contrastive loss function. Extensive experiments on several well-known few-shot ISC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with some state-of-the-art image set classification algorithms.

This paper introduces RLNVR (Reinforcement Learning from Non-Verified Rewards), a framework for training language models using noisy, real-world feedback signals without requiring explicit human verification. Traditional RLHF requires expensive, verified reward signals that are impractical in many real-world domains. RLNVR addresses this challenge through baseline normalization and semantic similarity-based reward transfer. We demonstrate RLNVR through Walter, a prototype system that optimizes social media content generation using actual engagement data from Bluesky. Our experimental results show significant improvements in content quality and training stability, with comprehensive evaluation planned for future work. Positioning: We present a practical framework that combines RLNVR with GSPO (Group Sequence Policy Optimization) and an optional UED (Unsupervised Environment Design) curriculum to improve stability and diversity under noisy, implicit rewards. To our knowledge, combining GSPO-style normalization with a UED-style curriculum for LLM content generation from implicit social engagement has not been previously documented in this applied setting; we frame this as an applied integration rather than a new algorithm.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) agents--autonomous systems capable of perceiving their surroundings, reasoning about possible courses of action, and executing decisions--has evolved significantly in recent decades. Early AI agents, rooted in the symbolic reasoning systems of the 1950s and 1960s, relied on hand-crafted rules and logic-based methods, excelling in constrained domains but struggling with adaptability and uncertainty[1, 2]. The introduction of statistical learning and probabilistic reasoning in the 1980s and 1990s enhanced reliability, while the rise of reinforcement learning (RL) allowed agents to learn policies through trial-and-error interactions [3, 4, 5, 6]. The integration of deep neural networks with RL (DeepRL) led to breakthroughs such as superhuman performance in Atari games and Go [7, 8]. With growing computational power, recent advancements in statistical methods and machine learning, AI agents have incorporated advanced perception, natural language sequence modeling, and cognitive-inspired principles, enabling them to adapt, collaborate, and mirror aspects of human reasoning in dynamic environments [2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. Contemporary AI agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes, real-world contexts: self-driving cars navigating congested urban environments [15, 16], autonomous laboratories accelerating scientific discovery [17, 18], virtual assistants managing complex user queries [19], and automated trading agents operating in financial markets [20].

In practical teaching, we observe that few students thoroughly read or fully comprehend the information provided in traditional, text-based course syllabi. As a result, essential details, such as course policies and learning outcomes, are frequently overlooked. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel approach leveraging AI-generated singing and virtual avatars to present syllabi in a format that is more visually appealing, engaging, and memorable. Especially, we leveraged the open-source tool, HeyGem, to transform textual syllabi into audiovisual presentations, in which digital avatars perform the syllabus content as songs. The proposed approach aims to stimulate students' curiosity, foster emotional connection, and enhance retention of critical course information. Student feedback indicated that AI-sung syllabi significantly improved awareness and recall of key course information.