American Sign Language (ASL) has long enabled real-time conversations for English-speaking people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. But discussions often face significant lags when one or more conversants aren't fluent in the language system. But by combining deep learning artificial intelligence and micro-sonar technologies, researchers at Cornell University are developing a new wearable to help overcome the communication barriers. With further refinement, SpellRing may one day facilitate entire conversations regardless of your ASL comprehension skills. ASL's earliest iterations developed in the early 18th century at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut.

Large language models (LLMs) have been one of the most important discoveries in machine learning in recent years. LLM-based artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, such as ChatGPT, have consistently attracted the attention from researchers, investors, and the general public, driving the rapid growth of this industry. With the frequent introduction of new LLMs to the market, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between them, creating a demand for new LLM comparison methods. In this research, the Consistency-focused Similarity Comparison Framework (ConSCompF) for generative large language models is proposed. It compares texts generated by two LLMs and produces a similarity score, indicating the overall degree of similarity between their responses. The main advantage of this framework is that it can operate on a small number of unlabeled data, such as chatbot instruction prompts, and does not require LLM developers to disclose any information about their product. To evaluate the efficacy of ConSCompF, two experiments aimed at identifying similarities between multiple LLMs are conducted. Additionally, these experiments examine the correlation between the similarity scores generated by ConSCompF and the differences in the outputs produced by other benchmarking techniques, such as ROUGE-L. Finally, a series of few-shot LLM comparison experiments is conducted to evaluate the performance of ConSCompF in a few-shot LLM comparison scenario. The proposed framework can be used for calculating similarity matrices of multiple LLMs, which can be effectively visualized using principal component analysis (PCA). The ConSCompF output may provide useful insights into data that might have been used during LLM training and help detect possible investment fraud attempts.

Quizzes play a crucial role in education by reinforcing students' understanding of key concepts and encouraging self-directed exploration. However, compiling high-quality quizzes can be challenging and require deep expertise and insight into specific subject matter. Although LLMs have greatly enhanced the efficiency of quiz generation, concerns remain regarding the quality of these AI-generated quizzes and their educational impact on students. To address these issues, we introduce ConQuer, a concept-based quiz generation framework that leverages external knowledge sources. We employ comprehensive evaluation dimensions to assess the quality of the generated quizzes, using LLMs as judges. Our experiment results demonstrate a 4.8% improvement in evaluation scores and a 77.52% win rate in pairwise comparisons against baseline quiz sets. Ablation studies further underscore the effectiveness of each component in our framework. Code available at https://github.com/sofyc/ConQuer.

While research on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) through various applications to enhance foreign language pronunciation is expanding, it has primarily focused on aspects such as comprehensibility and intelligibility, largely neglecting the improvement of individual speech sounds in both perception and production. This study seeks to address this gap by examining the impact of training with an AI-powered mobile application on nonnative sound perception and production. Participants completed a pretest assessing their ability to discriminate the second language English heed-hid contrast and produce these vowels in sentence contexts. The intervention involved training with the Speakometer mobile application, which incorporated recording tasks featuring the English vowels, along with pronunciation feedback and practice. The posttest mirrored the pretest to measure changes in performance. The results revealed significant improvements in both discrimination accuracy and production of the target contrast following the intervention. However, participants did not achieve native-like competence. These findings highlight the effectiveness of AI-powered applications in facilitating speech acquisition and support their potential use for personalized, interactive pronunciation training beyond the classroom.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming scientific research, with deep learning methods playing a central role in data analysis, simulations, and signal detection across particle, nuclear, and astroparticle physics. Within the JENA communities-ECFA, NuPECC, and APPEC-and as part of the EuCAIF initiative, AI integration is advancing steadily. However, broader adoption remains constrained by challenges such as limited computational resources, a lack of expertise, and difficulties in transitioning from research and development (R&D) to production. This white paper provides a strategic roadmap, informed by a community survey, to address these barriers. It outlines critical infrastructure requirements, prioritizes training initiatives, and proposes funding strategies to scale AI capabilities across fundamental physics over the next five years.

Social platforms have expanded opportunities for deliberation with the comments being used to inform one's opinion. However, using such information to form opinions is challenged by unsubstantiated or false content. To enhance the quality of opinion formation and potentially confer resistance to misinformation, we developed Iffy-Or-Not (ION), a browser extension that seeks to invoke critical thinking when reading texts. With three features guided by argumentation theory, ION highlights fallacious content, suggests diverse queries to probe them with, and offers deeper questions to consider and chat with others about. From a user study (N=18), we found that ION encourages users to be more attentive to the content, suggests queries that align with or are preferable to their own, and poses thought-provoking questions that expands their perspectives. However, some participants expressed aversion to ION due to misalignments with their information goals and thinking predispositions. Potential backfiring effects with ION are discussed.

Providing effective feedback is important for student learning in programming problem-solving. In this sense, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as potential tools to automate feedback generation. However, their reliability and ability to identify reasoning errors in student code remain not well understood. This study evaluates the performance of four LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4-Turbo, and Gemini-1.5-pro) on a benchmark dataset of 45 student solutions. We assessed the models' capacity to provide accurate and insightful feedback, particularly in identifying reasoning mistakes. Our analysis reveals that 63\% of feedback hints were accurate and complete, while 37\% contained mistakes, including incorrect line identification, flawed explanations, or hallucinated issues. These findings highlight the potential and limitations of LLMs in programming education and underscore the need for improvements to enhance reliability and minimize risks in educational applications.

Score distillation sampling is an effective technique to generate 3D models from text prompts, utilizing pre-trained large-scale text-to-image diffusion models as guidance. However, the produced 3D assets tend to be over-saturating, over-smoothing, with limited diversity. These issues are results from a reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence objective, which makes the optimization unstable and results in mode-seeking behavior. In this paper, we derive a bounded score distillation objective based on Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD), which stabilizes the optimization process and produces high-quality 3D generation. JSD can match well generated and target distribution, therefore mitigating mode seeking. We provide a practical implementation of JSD by utilizing the theory of generative adversarial networks to define an approximate objective function for the generator, assuming the discriminator is well trained. By assuming the discriminator following a log-odds classifier, we propose a minority sampling algorithm to estimate the gradients of our proposed objective, providing a practical implementation for JSD. We conduct both theoretical and empirical studies to validate our method. Experimental results on T3Bench demonstrate that our method can produce high-quality and diversified 3D assets.

Leading large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning-intensive tasks, such as standardized educational testing. However, they often require extensive training in low-resource settings with inaccessible infrastructure. Small or compact models, though more efficient, frequently lack sufficient support for underrepresented languages, leaving a performance gap in critical domains. This work explores the potential of parameter-efficient fine-tuning of compact open-weight language models to handle reasoning-intensive tasks in the underrepresented Ukrainian language, building on the findings of the ZNO-Eval benchmark. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning of LLaMA 3.1 (8 billion parameters), LLaMA 3.2 (3 billion parameters), and Gemma 2 (9 billion parameters) models on chain-of-thought solutions resulted in a modest test score improvement of up to 17.4% on complex matching tasks and 1.6% overall compared to tuning on answer letters alone, offering enhanced interpretability and robustness. In addition, the proposed tuning method with joint task topic and step-by-step solution generation outperforms standard chain-of-thought tuning in matching tasks and provides a 5.4% gain over the best LLaMA 3.2 model due to guiding the model to recall and apply domain-relevant information. Contrasting obtained results with zero-shot evaluations of leading open-weight and proprietary models such as Qwen, DeepSeek R1, OpenAI o1 and o3, Gemini, and Claude, highlight that fine-tuning LLaMA and Gemma models with 2,032 step-by-step solutions and 20 to 50 million trainable parameters on a single A100 GPU lets them outperform GPT-4o mini, Mistral Large, and larger open-weight models. This research also evaluates how merging the quantized adapter with the base model influences the generation quality. Source code and tuned models are available at https://github.com/NLPForUA/ZNO.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into transportation planning has the potential to revolutionize tasks such as demand forecasting, infrastructure design, policy evaluation, and traffic simulation. However, there is a critical need for a systematic framework to guide the adoption of GenAI in this interdisciplinary domain. In this survey, we, a multidisciplinary team of researchers spanning computer science and transportation engineering, present the first comprehensive framework for leveraging GenAI in transportation planning. Specifically, we introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes existing applications and methodologies into two perspectives: transportation planning tasks and computational techniques. From the transportation planning perspective, we examine the role of GenAI in automating descriptive, predictive, generative, simulation, and explainable tasks to enhance mobility systems. From the computational perspective, we detail advancements in data preparation, domain-specific fine-tuning, and inference strategies, such as retrieval-augmented generation and zero-shot learning tailored to transportation applications. Additionally, we address critical challenges, including data scarcity, explainability, bias mitigation, and the development of domain-specific evaluation frameworks that align with transportation goals like sustainability, equity, and system efficiency. This survey aims to bridge the gap between traditional transportation planning methodologies and modern AI techniques, fostering collaboration and innovation. By addressing these challenges and opportunities, we seek to inspire future research that ensures ethical, equitable, and impactful use of generative AI in transportation planning.