Education
Humanizing LLMs: A Survey of Psychological Measurements with Tools, Datasets, and Human-Agent Applications
Dong, Wenhan, Zhao, Yuemeng, Sun, Zhen, Liu, Yule, Peng, Zifan, Zheng, Jingyi, Zhang, Zongmin, Zhang, Ziyi, Wu, Jun, Wang, Ruiming, Xu, Shengmin, Huang, Xinyi, He, Xinlei
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in human-centered tasks, assessing their psychological traits is crucial for understanding their social impact and ensuring trustworthy AI alignment. While existing reviews have covered some aspects of related research, several important areas have not been systematically discussed, including detailed discussions of diverse psychological tests, LLM-specific psychological datasets, and the applications of LLMs with psychological traits. To address this gap, we systematically review six key dimensions of applying psychological theories to LLMs: (1) assessment tools; (2) LLM-specific datasets; (3) evaluation metrics (consistency and stability); (4) empirical findings; (5) personality simulation methods; and (6) LLM-based behavior simulation. Our analysis highlights both the strengths and limitations of current methods. While some LLMs exhibit reproducible personality patterns under specific prompting schemes, significant variability remains across tasks and settings. Recognizing methodological challenges such as mismatches between psychological tools and LLMs' capabilities, as well as inconsistencies in evaluation practices, this study aims to propose future directions for developing more interpretable, robust, and generalizable psychological assessment frameworks for LLMs.
Jailbreak Detection in Clinical Training LLMs Using Feature-Based Predictive Models
Nguyen, Tri, Pentapalli, Lohith Srikanth, Sieverding, Magnus, Turner, Laurah, Overla, Seth, Zheng, Weibing, Zhou, Chris, Furniss, David, Weber, Danielle, Gharib, Michael, Kelleher, Matt, Shukis, Michael, Pawlik, Cameron, Cohen, Kelly
Jailbreaking in Large Language Models (LLMs) threatens their safe use in sensitive domains like education by allowing users to bypass ethical safeguards. This study focuses on detecting jailbreaks in 2-Sigma, a clinical education platform that simulates patient interactions using LLMs. We annotated over 2,300 prompts across 158 conversations using four linguistic variables shown to correlate strongly with jailbreak behavior. The extracted features were used to train several predictive models, including Decision Trees, Fuzzy Logic-based classifiers, Boosting methods, and Logistic Regression. Results show that feature-based predictive models consistently outperformed Prompt Engineering, with the Fuzzy Decision Tree achieving the best overall performance. Our findings demonstrate that linguistic-feature-based models are effective and explainable alternatives for jailbreak detection. We suggest future work explore hybrid frameworks that integrate prompt-based flexibility with rule-based robustness for real-time, spectrum-based jailbreak monitoring in educational LLMs.
LangVAE and LangSpace: Building and Probing for Language Model VAEs
Carvalho, Danilo S., Zhang, Yingji, Unsworth, Harriet, Freitas, André
We present LangVAE, a novel framework for modular construction of variational autoencoders (VAEs) on top of pre-trained large language models (LLMs). Such language model VAEs can encode the knowledge of their pre-trained components into more compact and semantically disentangled representations. The representations obtained in this way can be analysed with the LangVAE companion framework: LangSpace, which implements a collection of probing methods, such as vector traversal and interpolation, disentanglement measures, and cluster visualisations. LangVAE and LangSpace offer a flexible, efficient and scalable way of building and analysing textual representations, with simple integration for models available on the HuggingFace Hub. Additionally, we conducted a set of experiments with different encoder and decoder combinations, as well as annotated inputs, revealing a wide range of interactions across architectural families and sizes w.r.t. generalisation and disentanglement. Our findings demonstrate a promising framework for systematising the experimentation and understanding of textual representations.
Trace-of-Thought Prompting: Investigating Prompt-Based Knowledge Distillation Through Question Decomposition
Knowledge distillation allows smaller neural networks to emulate the performance of larger, teacher models with reduced computational demands. Traditional methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) often necessitate extensive fine-tuning, which limits their accessibility. To address this, we introduce Trace-of-Thought Prompting, a novel framework designed to distill critical reasoning capabilities from high-resource teacher models (over 8 billion parameters) to low-resource student models (up to 8 billion parameters). This approach leverages problem decomposition to enhance interpretability and facilitate human-in-the-loop interventions. Empirical evaluations on the GSM8K and MATH datasets show that student models achieve accuracy gains of up to 113% on GSM8K and 21% on MATH, with significant improvements particularly notable in smaller models like Llama 2 and Zephyr. Our results suggest a promising pathway for open-source, low-resource models to eventually serve both as both students and teachers, potentially reducing our reliance on high-resource, proprietary models.
Efficient Reinforcement Finetuning via Adaptive Curriculum Learning
Shi, Taiwei, Wu, Yiyang, Song, Linxin, Zhou, Tianyi, Zhao, Jieyu
Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) has shown great potential for enhancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it is often sample- and compute-inefficient, requiring extensive training. In this work, we introduce AdaRFT (Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Finetuning), a method that significantly improves both the efficiency and final accuracy of RFT through adaptive curriculum learning. AdaRFT dynamically adjusts the difficulty of training problems based on the model's recent reward signals, ensuring that the model consistently trains on tasks that are challenging but solvable. This adaptive sampling strategy accelerates learning by maintaining an optimal difficulty range, avoiding wasted computation on problems that are too easy or too hard. AdaRFT requires only a lightweight extension to standard RFT algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), without modifying the reward function or model architecture. Experiments on competition-level math datasets-including AMC, AIME, and IMO-style problems-demonstrate that AdaRFT significantly improves both training efficiency and reasoning performance. We evaluate AdaRFT across multiple data distributions and model sizes, showing that it reduces training time by up to 2x and improves accuracy by a considerable margin, offering a more scalable and effective RFT framework.
Characterizing Human Actions in the Digital Platform by Temporal Context
Matsui, Akira, Ferrara, Emilio
However, most human dynamic-behavior models focus only on the sequence of users' actions, abstracting the intervals between actions (i.e., inter-temporal information). Statistical time-series models, for instance, study the variation of values in the data over time; however, such models do not explicitly capture the interdependence between actions and their intervals. While some point-process models incorporate intervals, they use them to predict only a single or a few event types rather than to characterize diverse human actions enriched with temporal information from massive data (Zhao et al., 2015; Mei and Eisner, 2017). Therefore, in contrast with the sophisticated advancement of statistical behavior models, understanding human behavior from the perspective of inter-temporal context remains a difficult and often elusive goal. W e perform actions in many different contexts--from using smartphones to walking across campus. Studying these situations can help us understand what human actions are like. Even the same action can differ depending on when and where it happens. Time intervals between actions provide crucial contextual information, and much literature shows that they can reveal human cognitive states (Stanovich and W est, 2000; 1 arXiv:2206.09535v2
LLM-based Interactive Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation
Werner, Jonas, Chu, Kun, Weber, Cornelius, Wermter, Stefan
Recent advancements in machine learning provide methods to train autonomous agents capable of handling the increasing complexity of sequential decision-making in robotics. Imitation Learning (IL) is a prominent approach, where agents learn to control robots based on human demonstrations. However, IL commonly suffers from violating the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) assumption in robotic tasks. Interactive Imitation Learning (IIL) achieves improved performance by allowing agents to learn from interactive feedback from human teachers. Despite these improvements, both approaches come with significant costs due to the necessity of human involvement. Leveraging the emergent capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning and generating human-like responses, we introduce LLM-iTeach -- a novel IIL framework that utilizes an LLM as an interactive teacher to enhance agent performance while alleviating the dependence on human resources. Firstly, LLM-iTeach uses a hierarchical prompting strategy that guides the LLM in generating a policy in Python code. Then, with a designed similarity-based feedback mechanism, LLM-iTeach provides corrective and evaluative feedback interactively during the agent's training. We evaluate LLM-iTeach against baseline methods such as Behavior Cloning (BC), an IL method, and CEILing, a state-of-the-art IIL method using a human teacher, on various robotic manipulation tasks. Our results demonstrate that LLM-iTeach surpasses BC in the success rate and achieves or even outscores that of CEILing, highlighting the potential of LLMs as cost-effective, human-like teachers in interactive learning environments. We further demonstrate the method's potential for generalization by evaluating it on additional tasks. The code and prompts are provided at: https://github.com/Tubicor/LLM-iTeach.
LangWBC: Language-directed Humanoid Whole-Body Control via End-to-end Learning
Shao, Yiyang, Huang, Xiaoyu, Zhang, Bike, Liao, Qiayuan, Gao, Yuman, Chi, Yufeng, Li, Zhongyu, Shao, Sophia, Sreenath, Koushil
Figure 1: We propose a language-directed humanoid whole-body control framework that translates natural language commands into continuous robot actions through a Conditional V ariational Autoencoder (CV AE). The structured latent space brought by the CV AE enables smooth transitions between diverse and agile behaviors, as shown in the sequence where the robot seamlessly transitions from walking to running, concluding with a hand-waving motion prompted by the corresponding text commands. See more experiments at https://youtu.be/9AN0GulqWwc Abstract --General-purpose humanoid robots are expected to interact intuitively with humans, enabling seamless integration into daily life. Natural language provides the most accessible medium for this purpose. However, translating language into humanoid whole-body motion remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the gap between linguistic understanding and physical actions. In this work, we present an end-to-end, language-directed policy for real-world humanoid whole-body control. Our approach combines reinforcement learning with policy distillation, allowing a single neural network to interpret language commands and execute corresponding physical actions directly. T o enhance motion diversity and compositionality, we incorporate a Conditional V ariational Autoencoder (CV AE) structure. The resulting policy achieves agile and versatile whole-body behaviors conditioned on language inputs, with smooth transitions between various motions, enabling adaptation to linguistic variations and the emergence of novel motions. Please see our website at Lang-WBC.github.io
Meta knowledge assisted Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search
Li, Yangyang, Liu, Guanlong, Shang, Ronghua, Jiao, Licheng
Evolutionary computation (EC)-based neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved remarkable performance in the automatic design of neural architectures. However, the high computational cost associated with evaluating searched architectures poses a challenge for these methods, and a fixed form of learning rate (LR) schedule means greater information loss on diverse searched architectures. This paper introduces an efficient EC-based NAS method to solve these problems via an innovative meta-learning framework. Specifically, a meta-learning-rate (Meta-LR) scheme is used through pretraining to obtain a suitable LR schedule, which guides the training process with lower information loss when evaluating each individual. An adaptive surrogate model is designed through an adaptive threshold to select the potential architectures in a few epochs and then evaluate the potential architectures with complete epochs. Additionally, a periodic mutation operator is proposed to increase the diversity of the population, which enhances the generalizability and robustness. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet1K datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high performance comparable to that of many state-of-the-art peer methods, with lower computational cost and greater robustness.
Advancing Arabic Reverse Dictionary Systems: A Transformer-Based Approach with Dataset Construction Guidelines
Sibaee, Serry, Ahmed, Samar, Harbi, Abdullah Al, Nacar, Omer, Ammar, Adel, Habashi, Yasser, Boulila, Wadii
This study addresses the critical gap in Arabic natural language processing by developing an effective Arabic Reverse Dictionary (RD) system that enables users to find words based on their descriptions or meanings. We present a novel transformer-based approach with a semi-encoder neural network architecture featuring geometrically decreasing layers that achieves state-of-the-art results for Arabic RD tasks. Our methodology incorporates a comprehensive dataset construction process and establishes formal quality standards for Arabic lexicographic definitions. Experiments with various pre-trained models demonstrate that Arabic-specific models significantly outperform general multilingual embeddings, with ARBERTv2 achieving the best ranking score (0.0644). Additionally, we provide a formal abstraction of the reverse dictionary task that enhances theoretical understanding and develop a modular, extensible Python library (RDTL) with configurable training pipelines. Our analysis of dataset quality reveals important insights for improving Arabic definition construction, leading to eight specific standards for building high-quality reverse dictionary resources. This work contributes significantly to Arabic computational linguistics and provides valuable tools for language learning, academic writing, and professional communication in Arabic.