Assessing writing in large classes for formal or informal learners presents a significant challenge. Consequently, most large classes, particularly in science, rely on objective assessment tools such as multiple-choice quizzes, which have a single correct answer. The rapid development of AI has introduced the possibility of using large language models (LLMs) to evaluate student writing. An experiment was conducted using GPT-4 to determine if machine learning methods based on LLMs can match or exceed the reliability of instructor grading in evaluating short writing assignments on topics in astronomy. The audience consisted of adult learners in three massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered through Coursera. One course was on astronomy, the second was on astrobiology, and the third was on the history and philosophy of astronomy. The results should also be applicable to non-science majors in university settings, where the content and modes of evaluation are similar. The data comprised answers from 120 students to 12 questions across the three courses. GPT-4 was provided with total grades, model answers, and rubrics from an instructor for all three courses. In addition to evaluating how reliably the LLM reproduced instructor grades, the LLM was also tasked with generating its own rubrics. Overall, the LLM was more reliable than peer grading, both in aggregate and by individual student, and approximately matched instructor grades for all three online courses. The implication is that LLMs may soon be used for automated, reliable, and scalable grading of student science writing.

This paper presents a comprehensive overview on the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in mathematical research, highlighting the transformative role AI has begun to play in this domain. Traditionally, AI advancements have heavily relied on theoretical foundations provided by mathematics and statistics. However, recent developments in AI, particularly in reinforcement learning (RL) and large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated the potential for AI to contribute back to mathematics by offering flexible algorithmic frameworks and powerful inductive reasoning capabilities that support various aspects of mathematical research. This survey aims to establish a bridge between AI and mathematics, providing insights into the mutual benefits and fostering deeper interdisciplinary understanding. In particular, we argue that while current AI and LLMs may struggle with complex deductive reasoning, their "inherent creativity", the ability to generate outputs at high throughput based on recognition of shallow patterns, holds significant potential to support and inspire mathematical research. This creative capability, often overlooked, could be the key to unlocking new perspectives and methodologies in mathematics. Furthermore, we address the lack of cross-disciplinary communication: mathematicians may not fully comprehend the latest advances in AI, while AI researchers frequently prioritize benchmark performance over real-world applications in frontier mathematical research. This paper seeks to close that gap, offering a detailed exploration of AI fundamentals, its strengths, and its emerging applications in the mathematical sciences.

Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned for use on downstream tasks, though this can degrade capabilities learned during previous training. This phenomenon, often referred to as catastrophic forgetting, has important potential implications for the safety of deployed models. In this work, we first show that models trained on downstream tasks forget their safety tuning to a greater extent than models trained in the opposite order. Second, we show that forgetting disproportionately impacts safety information about certain groups. To quantify this phenomenon, we define a new metric we term biased forgetting. We conduct a systematic evaluation of the effects of task ordering on forgetting and apply mitigations that can help the model recover from the forgetting observed. We hope our findings can better inform methods for chaining the finetuning of LLMs in continual learning settings to enable training of safer and less toxic models.

Federated learning (FL) is a promising paradigm in distributed learning while preserving the privacy of users. However, the increasing size of recent models makes it unaffordable for a few users to encompass the model. It leads the users to adopt heterogeneous models based on their diverse computing capabilities and network bandwidth. Correspondingly, FL with heterogeneous models should be addressed, given that FL typically involves training a single global model. In this paper, we propose Generative Model-Aided Federated Learning (GeFL), incorporating a generative model that aggregates global knowledge across users of heterogeneous models. Our experiments on various classification tasks demonstrate notable performance improvements of GeFL compared to baselines, as well as limitations in terms of privacy and scalability. To tackle these concerns, we introduce a novel framework, GeFL-F. It trains target networks aided by feature-generative models. We empirically demonstrate the consistent performance gains of GeFL-F, while demonstrating better privacy preservation and robustness to a large number of clients. Codes are available at [1].

Evaluating text comprehension in educational settings is critical for understanding student performance and improving curricular effectiveness. This study investigates the capability of state-of-the-art language models--RoBERTa Base, Bangla-BERT, and BERT Base--in automatically assessing Bangla passage-based question-answering from the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) textbooks for classes 6-10. A dataset of approximately 3,000 Bangla passage-based questionanswering instances was compiled, and the models were evaluated using F1 Score and Exact Match (EM) metrics across various hyperparameter configurations. Our findings revealed that Bangla-BERT consistently outperformed the other models, achieving the highest F1 (0.75) and EM (0.53) scores, particularly with smaller batch sizes, the inclusion of stop words, and a moderate learning rate. In contrast, RoBERTa Base demonstrated the weakest performance, with the lowest F1 (0.19) and EM (0.27) scores under certain configurations. The results underscore the importance of fine-tuning hyperparameters for optimizing model performance and highlight the potential of machine learning models in evaluating text comprehension in educational contexts. However, limitations such as dataset size, spelling inconsistencies, and computational constraints emphasize the need for further research to enhance the robustness and applicability of these models. This study lays the groundwork for the future development of automated evaluation systems in educational institutions, providing critical insights into model performance in the context of Bangla text comprehension.

Retrieval-augmented generation systems rely on effective document retrieval capabilities. By design, conventional sparse or dense retrievers face challenges in multi-hop retrieval scenarios. In this paper, we present GeAR, which advances RAG performance through two key innovations: (i) graph expansion, which enhances any conventional base retriever, such as BM25, and (ii) an agent framework that incorporates graph expansion. Our evaluation demonstrates GeAR's superior retrieval performance on three multi-hop question answering datasets. Additionally, our system achieves state-of-the-art results with improvements exceeding 10% on the challenging MuSiQue dataset, while requiring fewer tokens and iterations compared to other multi-step retrieval systems.

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the first edition of the Academic Essay Authenticity Challenge, organized as part of the GenAI Content Detection shared tasks collocated with COLING 2025. This challenge focuses on detecting machine-generated vs. human-authored essays for academic purposes. The task is defined as follows: "Given an essay, identify whether it is generated by a machine or authored by a human.'' The challenge involves two languages: English and Arabic. During the evaluation phase, 25 teams submitted systems for English and 21 teams for Arabic, reflecting substantial interest in the task. Finally, seven teams submitted system description papers. The majority of submissions utilized fine-tuned transformer-based models, with one team employing Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Llama 2 and Llama 3. This paper outlines the task formulation, details the dataset construction process, and explains the evaluation framework. Additionally, we present a summary of the approaches adopted by participating teams. Nearly all submitted systems outperformed the n-gram-based baseline, with the top-performing systems achieving F1 scores exceeding 0.98 for both languages, indicating significant progress in the detection of machine-generated text.

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has gained significant popularity for creating diverse content. Current AIGC models primarily focus on content quality within a centralized framework, resulting in a high service delay and negative user experiences. However, not only does the workload of an AIGC task depend on the AIGC model's complexity rather than the amount of data, but the large model and its multi-layer encoder structure also result in a huge demand for computational and memory resources. These unique characteristics pose new challenges in its modeling, deployment, and scheduling at edge networks. Thus, we model an offloading problem among edges for providing real AIGC services and propose LAD-TS, a novel Latent Action Diffusion-based Task Scheduling method that orchestrates multiple edge servers for expedited AIGC services. The LAD-TS generates a near-optimal offloading decision by leveraging the diffusion model's conditional generation capability and the reinforcement learning's environment interaction ability, thereby minimizing the service delays under multiple resource constraints. Meanwhile, a latent action diffusion strategy is designed to guide decision generation by utilizing historical action probability, enabling rapid achievement of near-optimal decisions. Furthermore, we develop DEdgeAI, a prototype edge system with a refined AIGC model deployment to implement and evaluate our LAD-TS method. DEdgeAI provides a real AIGC service for users, demonstrating up to 29.18% shorter service delays than the current five representative AIGC platforms. We release our open-source code at https://github.com/ChangfuXu/DEdgeAI/.

Effective pre-training of large language models (LLMs) has been challenging due to the immense resource demands and the complexity of the technical processes involved. This paper presents a detailed technical report on YuLan-Mini, a highly capable base model with 2.42B parameters that achieves top-tier performance among models of similar parameter scale. Our pre-training approach focuses on enhancing training efficacy through three key technical contributions: an elaborate data pipeline combines data cleaning with data schedule strategies, a robust optimization method to mitigate training instability, and an effective annealing approach that incorporates targeted data selection and long context training. Remarkably, YuLan-Mini, trained on 1.08T tokens, achieves performance comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data. To facilitate reproduction, we release the full details of the data composition for each training phase.

Solving complex mathematical problems via system-2 reasoning is a natural human skill, yet it remains a significant challenge for current large language models (LLMs). We identify the scarcity of deliberate multi-step reasoning data as a primary limiting factor. To this end, we introduce Enriched Instruction Tuning (EIT), a method that enriches existing human-annotated mathematical datasets by synergizing human and AI feedback to create fine-grained reasoning trajectories. These datasets are then used to fine-tune open-source LLMs, enhancing their mathematical reasoning abilities without reliance on any symbolic verification program. Concretely, EIT is composed of two critical steps: Enriching with Reasoning Plan (ERP) and Enriching with Reasoning Step (ERS). The former generates a high-level plan that breaks down complex instructions into a sequence of simpler objectives, while ERS fills in reasoning contexts often overlooked by human annotators, creating a smoother reasoning trajectory for LLM fine-tuning. Unlike existing CoT prompting methods that generate reasoning chains only depending on LLM's internal knowledge, our method leverages human-annotated initial answers as ``meta-knowledge'' to help LLMs generate more detailed and precise reasoning processes, leading to a more trustworthy LLM expert for complex mathematical problems. In experiments, EIT achieves an accuracy of 84.1% on GSM8K and 32.5% on MATH, surpassing state-of-the-art fine-tuning and prompting methods, and even matching the performance of tool-augmented methods.