Education
MA-LoT: Multi-Agent Lean-based Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning enhances Formal Theorem Proving
Wang, Ruida, Pan, Rui, Li, Yuxin, Zhang, Jipeng, Jia, Yizhen, Diao, Shizhe, Pi, Renjie, Hu, Junjie, Zhang, Tong
Solving mathematical problems using computer-verifiable languages like Lean has significantly impacted mathematical and computer science communities. State-of-the-art methods utilize single Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents or provers to either generate complete proof or perform tree searches. However, single-agent methods inherently lack a structured way to combine high-level reasoning in Natural Language (NL) with Formal Language (FL) verification feedback. To solve these issues, we propose MA-LoT: Multi-Agent Lean-based Long Chain-of-Thought framework, (to the best of our knowledge), the first multi-agent framework for Lean4 theorem proving that balance high-level NL reasoning and FL verification in Long CoT. Using this structured interaction, our approach enables deeper insights and long-term coherence in proof generation, with which past methods struggle. We do this by leveraging emergent formal reasoning ability in Long CoT using our novel LoT-Transfer Learning training-inference pipeline. Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves a 61.07% accuracy rate on the Lean4 version of the MiniF2F-Test dataset, largely outperforming GPT-4 (22.95%), single-agent tree search (InternLM-Step-Prover, 50.70%), and whole-proof generation (Godel-Prover, 55.33%) baselines. Furthermore, our findings highlight the potential of combining Long CoT with formal verification for a more insightful generation in a broader perspective.
Group Fairness in Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
Song, Kefan, Jiang, Runnan, Chandra, Rohan, Zhang, Shangtong
This paper addresses a critical societal consideration in the application of Reinforcement Learning (RL): ensuring equitable outcomes across different demographic groups in multi-task settings. While previous work has explored fairness in single-task RL, many real-world applications are multi-task in nature and require policies to maintain fairness across all tasks. We introduce a novel formulation of multi-task group fairness in RL and propose a constrained optimization algorithm that explicitly enforces fairness constraints across multiple tasks simultaneously. We have shown that our proposed algorithm does not violate fairness constraints with high probability and with sublinear regret in the finite-horizon episodic setting. Through experiments in RiverSwim and MuJoCo environments, we demonstrate that our approach better ensures group fairness across multiple tasks compared to previous methods that lack explicit multi-task fairness constraints in both the finite-horizon setting and the infinite-horizon setting. Our results show that the proposed algorithm achieves smaller fairness gaps while maintaining comparable returns across different demographic groups and tasks, suggesting its potential for addressing fairness concerns in real-world multi-task RL applications.
NeuroChat: A Neuroadaptive AI Chatbot for Customizing Learning Experiences
Baradari, Dรผnya, Kosmyna, Nataliya, Petrov, Oscar, Kaplun, Rebecah, Maes, Pattie
Generative AI is transforming education by enabling personalized, on-demand learning experiences. However, AI tutors lack the ability to assess a learner's cognitive state in real time, limiting their adaptability. Meanwhile, electroencephalography (EEG)-based neuroadaptive systems have successfully enhanced engagement by dynamically adjusting learning content. This paper presents NeuroChat, a proof-of-concept neuroadaptive AI tutor that integrates real-time EEG-based engagement tracking with generative AI. NeuroChat continuously monitors a learner's cognitive engagement and dynamically adjusts content complexity, response style, and pacing using a closed-loop system. We evaluate this approach in a pilot study (n=24), comparing NeuroChat to a standard LLM-based chatbot. Results indicate that NeuroChat enhances cognitive and subjective engagement but does not show an immediate effect on learning outcomes. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of real-time cognitive feedback in LLMs, highlighting new directions for adaptive learning, AI tutoring, and human-AI interaction.
A Comprehensive Survey of Mixture-of-Experts: Algorithms, Theory, and Applications
Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved astonishing successes in many domains, especially with the recent breakthroughs in the development of foundational large models. These large models, leveraging their extensive training data, provide versatile solutions for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, as modern datasets become increasingly diverse and complex, the development of large AI models faces two major challenges: (1) the enormous consumption of computational resources and deployment difficulties, and (2) the difficulty in fitting heterogeneous and complex data, which limits the usability of the models. Mixture of Experts (MoE) models has recently attracted much attention in addressing these challenges, by dynamically selecting and activating the most relevant sub-models to process input data. It has been shown that MoEs can significantly improve model performance and efficiency with fewer resources, particularly excelling in handling large-scale, multimodal data. Given the tremendous potential MoE has demonstrated across various domains, it is urgent to provide a comprehensive summary of recent advancements of MoEs in many important fields. Existing surveys on MoE have their limitations, e.g., being outdated or lacking discussion on certain key areas, and we aim to address these gaps. In this paper, we first introduce the basic design of MoE, including gating functions, expert networks, routing mechanisms, training strategies, and system design. We then explore the algorithm design of MoE in important machine learning paradigms such as continual learning, meta-learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning. Additionally, we summarize theoretical studies aimed at understanding MoE and review its applications in computer vision and natural language processing. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions.
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All Summarization: Customizing Summaries for Diverse Users
Duran, Mehmet Samet, Aytekin, Tevfik
In recent years, automatic text summarization has witnessed significant advancement, particularly with the development of transformer-based models. However, the challenge of controlling the readability level of generated summaries remains an under-explored area, especially for languages with complex linguistic features like Turkish. This gap has the effect of impeding effective communication and also limits the accessibility of information. Controlling readability of textual data is an important element for creating summaries for different audiences with varying literacy and education levels, such as students ranging from primary school to graduate level, as well as individuals with diverse educational backgrounds. Summaries that align with the needs of specific reader groups can improve comprehension and engagement, ensuring that the intended message is effectively communicated. Furthermore, readability adjustment is essential to expand the usability of summarization models in educational and professional domains. Current summarization models often don't have the mechanisms to adjust the complexity of their outputs, resulting in summaries that may be too simplistic or overly complex for certain types of reader groups. Developing adaptive models that can tailor content to specific readability levels is therefore crucial. To address this problem, we create our own custom dataset and train a model with our custom architecture. Our method ensures that readability levels are effectively controlled while maintaining accuracy and coherence. We rigorously compare our model to a supervised fine-tuned baseline, demonstrating its superiority in generating readability-aware summaries.
AI for Just Work: Constructing Diverse Imaginations of AI beyond "Replacing Humans"
Jin, Weina, Vincent, Nicholas, Hamarneh, Ghassan
The AI community usually focuses on "how" to develop AI techniques, but lacks thorough open discussions on "why" we develop AI. Lacking critical reflections on the general visions and purposes of AI may make the community vulnerable to manipulation. In this position paper, we explore the "why" question of AI. We denote answers to the "why" question the imaginations of AI, which depict our general visions, frames, and mindsets for the prospects of AI. We identify that the prevailing vision in the AI community is largely a monoculture that emphasizes objectives such as replacing humans and improving productivity. Our critical examination of this mainstream imagination highlights its underpinning and potentially unjust assumptions. We then call to diversify our collective imaginations of AI, embedding ethical assumptions from the outset in the imaginations of AI. To facilitate the community's pursuit of diverse imaginations, we demonstrate one process for constructing a new imagination of "AI for just work," and showcase its application in the medical image synthesis task to make it more ethical. We hope this work will help the AI community to open dialogues with civil society on the visions and purposes of AI, and inspire more technical works and advocacy in pursuit of diverse and ethical imaginations to restore the value of AI for the public good.
AuthorMist: Evading AI Text Detectors with Reinforcement Learning
In the age of powerful AI-generated text, automatic detectors have emerged to identify machine-written content. This poses a threat to author privacy and freedom, as text authored with AI assistance may be unfairly flagged. We propose AuthorMist, a novel reinforcement learning-based system to transform AI-generated text into human-like writing. AuthorMist leverages a 3-billion-parameter language model as a backbone, fine-tuned with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GPRO) to paraphrase text in a way that evades AI detectors. Our framework establishes a generic approach where external detector APIs (GPTZero, WinstonAI, Originality.ai, etc.) serve as reward functions within the reinforcement learning loop, enabling the model to systematically learn outputs that these detectors are less likely to classify as AI-generated. This API-as-reward methodology can be applied broadly to optimize text against any detector with an accessible interface. Experiments on multiple datasets and detectors demonstrate that AuthorMist effectively reduces the detectability of AI-generated text while preserving the original meaning. Our evaluation shows attack success rates ranging from 78.6% to 96.2% against individual detectors, significantly outperforming baseline paraphrasing methods. AuthorMist maintains high semantic similarity (above 0.94) with the original text while successfully evading detection. These results highlight limitations in current AI text detection technologies and raise questions about the sustainability of the detection-evasion arms race.
Predicting and Understanding College Student Mental Health with Interpretable Machine Learning
Chowdhury, Meghna Roy, Xuan, Wei, Sen, Shreyas, Zhao, Yixue, Ding, Yi
Mental health issues among college students have reached critical levels, significantly impacting academic performance and overall wellbeing. Predicting and understanding mental health status among college students is challenging due to three main factors: the necessity for large-scale longitudinal datasets, the prevalence of black-box machine learning models lacking transparency, and the tendency of existing approaches to provide aggregated insights at the population level rather than individualized understanding. To tackle these challenges, this paper presents I-HOPE, the first Interpretable Hierarchical mOdel for Personalized mEntal health prediction. I-HOPE is a two-stage hierarchical model, validated on the College Experience Study, the longest longitudinal mobile sensing dataset. This dataset spans five years and captures data from both pre-pandemic periods and the COVID-19 pandemic. I-HOPE connects raw behavioral features to mental health status through five defined behavioral categories as interaction labels. This approach achieves a prediction accuracy of 91%, significantly surpassing the 60-70% accuracy of baseline methods. In addition, our model distills complex patterns into interpretable and individualized insights, enabling the future development of tailored interventions and improving mental health support. The code is available at https://github.com/roycmeghna/I-HOPE.
Provable Zero-Shot Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning
Wang, Zhiyong, Yang, Chen, Lui, John C. S., Zhou, Dongruo
In this work, we study offline reinforcement learning (RL) with zero-shot generalization property (ZSG), where the agent has access to an offline dataset including experiences from different environments, and the goal of the agent is to train a policy over the training environments which performs well on test environments without further interaction. Existing work showed that classical offline RL fails to generalize to new, unseen environments. We propose pessimistic empirical risk minimization (PERM) and pessimistic proximal policy optimization (PPPO), which leverage pessimistic policy evaluation to guide policy learning and enhance generalization. We show that both PERM and PPPO are capable of finding a near-optimal policy with ZSG. Our result serves as a first step in understanding the foundation of the generalization phenomenon in offline reinforcement learning.
The StudyChat Dataset: Student Dialogues With ChatGPT in an Artificial Intelligence Course
McNichols, Hunter, Lan, Andrew
The widespread availability of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has significantly impacted education, raising both opportunities and challenges. Students can frequently interact with LLM-powered, interactive learning tools, but their usage patterns need to be analyzed to ensure ethical usage of these tools. To better understand how students interact with LLMs in an academic setting, we introduce \textbf{StudyChat}, a publicly available dataset capturing real-world student interactions with an LLM-powered tutoring chatbot in a semester-long, university-level artificial intelligence (AI) course. We deploy a web application that replicates ChatGPT's core functionalities, and use it to log student interactions with the LLM while working on programming assignments. We collect 1,197 conversations, which we annotate using a dialogue act labeling schema inspired by observed interaction patterns and prior research. Additionally, we analyze these interactions, highlight behavioral trends, and analyze how specific usage patterns relate to course outcomes. \textbf{StudyChat} provides a rich resource for the learning sciences and AI in education communities, enabling further research into the evolving role of LLMs in education.