With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), their performance on multiple-choice question (MCQ) tasks has improved significantly. However, existing approaches face key limitations: answer choices are typically presented to LLMs without contextual grounding or explanation. This absence of context can lead to incomplete exploration of all possible answers, ultimately degrading the models' reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce BiasPrompting, a novel inference framework that guides LLMs to generate and critically evaluate reasoning across all plausible answer options before reaching a final prediction. It consists of two components: first, a reasoning generation stage, where the model is prompted to produce supportive reasonings for each answer option, and then, a reasoning-guided agreement stage, where the generated reasonings are synthesized to select the most plausible answer. Through comprehensive evaluations, BiasPrompting demonstrates significant improvements in five widely used multiple-choice question answering benchmarks. Our experiments showcase that BiasPrompting enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs and provides a strong foundation for tackling complex and challenging questions, particularly in settings where existing methods underperform.

We address the challenge of efficient exploration in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), where the system dynamics are unknown and the RL agent must learn directly from online interactions. We propose Scalable and Optimistic MBRL (SOMBRL), an approach based on the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty. SOMBRL learns an uncertainty-aware dynamics model and greedily maximizes a weighted sum of the extrinsic reward and the agent's epistemic uncertainty. SOMBRL is compatible with any policy optimizers or planners, and under common regularity assumptions on the system, we show that SOMBRL has sublinear regret for nonlinear dynamics in the (i) finite-horizon, (ii) discounted infinite-horizon, and (iii) non-episodic settings. Additionally, SOMBRL offers a flexible and scalable solution for principled exploration. We evaluate SOMBRL on state-based and visual-control environments, where it displays strong performance across all tasks and baselines. We also evaluate SOMBRL on a dynamic RC car hardware and show SOMBRL outperforms the state-of-the-art, illustrating the benefits of principled exploration for MBRL.

Educational simulations have long been recognized as powerful tools for enhancing learning outcomes, yet their creation has traditionally required substantial resources and technical expertise. This paper introduces MicroSims a novel framework for creating lightweight, interactive educational simulations that can be rapidly generated using artificial intelligence, universally embedded across digital learning platforms, and easily customized without programming knowledge. MicroSims occupy a unique position at the intersection of three key innovations: (1) standardized design patterns that enable AI-assisted generation, (2) iframe-based architecture that provides universal embedding and sandboxed security, and (3) transparent, modifiable code that supports customization and pedagogical transparency. We present a comprehensive framework encompassing design principles, technical architecture, metadata standards, and development workflows. Drawing on empirical research from physics education studies and meta-analyses across STEM disciplines, we demonstrate that interactive simulations can improve conceptual understanding by up to 30-40\% compared to traditional instruction. MicroSims extend these benefits while addressing persistent barriers of cost, technical complexity, and platform dependence. This work has significant implications for educational equity, and low-cost intelligent interactive textbooks that enabling educators worldwide to create customized, curriculum-aligned simulations on demand. We discuss implementation considerations, present evidence of effectiveness, and outline future directions for AI-powered adaptive learning systems built on the MicroSim foundation.

While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong image understanding, their ability to "think with images", i.e., to reason through multi-step visual interactions, remains limited. We introduce VISTA-Gym, a scalable training environment for incentivizing tool-integrated visual reasoning capabilities in VLMs. VISTA-Gym unifies diverse real-world multimodal reasoning tasks (7 tasks from 13 datasets in total) with a standardized interface for visual tools (e.g., grounding, parsing), executable interaction loops, verifiable feedback signals, and efficient trajectory logging, enabling visual agentic reinforcement learning at scale. While recent VLMs exhibit strong text-only reasoning, both proprietary and open-source models still struggle with tool selection, invocation, and coordination. With VISTA-Gym, we train VISTA-R1 to interleave tool-use with agentic reasoning via multi-turn trajectory sampling and end-to-end reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments across 11 public reasoning-intensive VQA benchmarks show that VISTA-R1-8B outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with similar sizes by 9.51%-18.72%, demonstrating VISTA-Gym as an effective training ground to unlock the tool-integrated reasoning capabilities for VLMs.

As educational systems evolve, ensuring that assessment items remain aligned with content standards is essential for maintaining fairness and instructional relevance. Traditional human alignment reviews are accurate but slow and labor-intensive, especially across large item banks. This study examines whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can accelerate this process without sacrificing accuracy. Using over 12,000 item-skill pairs in grades K-5, we tested three LLMs (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4o-mini, and GPT-4o) across three tasks that mirror real-world challenges: identifying misaligned items, selecting the correct skill from the full set of standards, and narrowing candidate lists prior to classification. In Study 1, GPT-4o-mini correctly identified alignment status in approximately 83-94% of cases, including subtle misalignments. In Study 2, performance remained strong in mathematics but was lower for reading, where standards are more semantically overlapping. Study 3 demonstrated that pre-filtering candidate skills substantially improved results, with the correct skill appearing among the top five suggestions more than 95% of the time. These findings suggest that LLMs, particularly when paired with candidate filtering strategies, can significantly reduce the manual burden of item review while preserving alignment accuracy. We recommend the development of hybrid pipelines that combine LLM-based screening with human review in ambiguous cases, offering a scalable solution for ongoing item validation and instructional alignment.

Consider a service system in which individuals are served by facilities at different locations within a geographical region. For example, the facilities could represent schools, polling places, or commercial fulfillment centers. The geographical partitioning problem (Carlsson & Devulapalli 2013) divides the region into non-overlapping districts, such that all individuals residing in the same district are served by the same facility. The goal is to choose a partition that optimizes some measure of social welfare, most commonly the average travel cost per individual (Carlsson et al. 2016). We formulate and study a novel variant of this problem where the population is heterogeneous, consisting of multiple demographic groups, each with a different spatial distribution throughout the region. Again we optimize the expected cost, but now we also impose a new group fairness condition: each subpopulation can be neither over-nor under-represented at any facility. In other words, the districts are designed in such a way that the proportion of the population belonging to a particular group in any district must match that group's incidence in the entire population. This condition is also known as "demographic parity" in the literature (Dwork et al. 2012).

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly used in education, posing significant challenges for teachers adapting to these changes. GenAI offers unprecedented opportunities for accessibility, scalability and productivity in educational tasks. However, the automation of teaching tasks through GenAI raises concerns about reduced teacher agency, potential cognitive atrophy, and the broader deprofessionalisation of teaching. Drawing findings from prior literature on AI in Education, and refining through a recent systematic literature review, this chapter presents a conceptualisation of five levels of teacher-AI teaming: transactional, situational, operational, praxical and synergistic teaming. The framework aims to capture the nuanced dynamics of teacher-AI interactions, particularly with GenAI, that may lead to the replacement, complementarity, or augmentation of teachers' competences and professional practice. GenAI technological affordances required in supporting teaming, along with empirical studies, are discussed. Drawing on empirical observations, we outline a future vision that moves beyond individual teacher agency toward collaborative decision-making between teachers and AI, in which both agents engage in negotiation, constructive challenge, and co-reasoning that enhance each other's capabilities and enable outcomes neither could realise independently. Further discussion of socio-technical factors beyond teacher-AI teaming is also included to streamline the synergy of teachers and AI in education ethically and practically.

Language model inversion (LMI), i.e., recovering hidden prompts from outputs, emerges as a concrete threat to user privacy and system security. We recast LMI as reusing the LLM's own latent space and propose the Invariant Latent Space Hypothesis (ILSH): (1) diverse outputs from the same source prompt should preserve consistent semantics (source invariance), and (2) input<->output cyclic mappings should be self-consistent within a shared latent space (cyclic invariance). Accordingly, we present Inv^2A, which treats the LLM as an invariant decoder and learns only a lightweight inverse encoder that maps outputs to a denoised pseudo-representation. When multiple outputs are available, they are sparsely concatenated at the representation layer to increase information density. Training proceeds in two stages: contrastive alignment (source invariance) and supervised reinforcement (cyclic invariance). An optional training-free neighborhood search can refine local performance. Across 9 datasets covering user and system prompt scenarios, Inv^2A outperforms baselines by an average of 4.77% BLEU score while reducing dependence on large inverse corpora. Our analysis further shows that prevalent defenses provide limited protection, underscoring the need for stronger strategies. The source code and data involved in this paper can be found in https://github.com/yyy01/Invariant_Attacker.

Emergent communication in multi-agent systems typically occurs through independent learning, resulting in slow convergence and potentially suboptimal protocols. We introduce TSLEC (Trust-Based Social Learning with Emergent Communication), a framework where agents explicitly teach successful strategies to peers, with knowledge transfer modulated by learned trust relationships. Through experiments with 100 episodes across 30 random seeds, we demonstrate that trust-based social learning reduces episodes-to-convergence by 23.9% (p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 1.98) compared to independent emergence, while producing compositional protocols (C = 0.38) that remain robust under dynamic objectives (Phi > 0.867 decoding accuracy). Trust scores strongly correlate with teaching quality (r = 0.743, p < 0.001), enabling effective knowledge filtering. Our results establish that explicit social learning fundamentally accelerates emergent communication in multi-agent coordination.

Open-world machine learning is an emerging technique in artificial intelligence, where conventional machine learning models often follow closed-world assumptions, which can hinder their ability to retain previously learned knowledge for future tasks. However, automated intelligence systems must learn about novel classes and previously known tasks. The proposed model offers novel learning classes in an open and continuous learning environment. It consists of two different but connected tasks. First, it discovers unknown classes in the data and creates novel classes; next, it learns how to perform class incrementally for each new class. Together, they enable continual learning, allowing the system to expand its understanding of the data and improve over time. The proposed model also outperformed existing approaches in open-world learning. Furthermore, it demonstrated strong performance in continuous learning, achieving a highest average accuracy of 82.54% over four iterations and a minimum accuracy of 65.87%.