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Finding Pre-Injury Patterns in Triathletes from Lifestyle, Recovery and Load Dynamics Features

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Embedded Sensing Group ESG Institute of Computer Science in V orarlberg ICV, University of St. Gallen HSG, Switzerland E-mail: leonardo.rossi@student.unisg.ch, Abstract--Triathlon training, which involves high-volume swimming, cycling, and running, places athletes at substantial risk for overuse injuries due to repetitive physiological stress. Current injury prediction approaches primarily rely on training load metrics, often neglecting critical factors such as sleep quality, stress, and individual lifestyle patterns that significantly influence recovery and injury susceptibility. We introduce a novel synthetic data generation framework tailored explicitly for triathlon. This framework generates physiologically plausible athlete profiles, simulates individualized training programs that incorporate periodization and load-management principles, and integrates daily-life factors such as sleep quality, stress levels, and recovery states. We evaluated machine learning models (LASSO, Random Forest, and XGBoost) showing high predictive performance (AUC up to 0.86), identifying sleep disturbances, heart rate variability, and stress as critical early indicators of injury risk. This wearable-driven approach not only enhances injury prediction accuracy but also provides a practical solution to overcoming real-world data limitations, offering a pathway toward a holistic, context-aware athlete monitoring. Triathlon is a demanding multi-sport discipline that combines swimming, cycling, and running.


Boosting Reinforcement Learning in 3D Visuospatial Tasks Through Human-Informed Curriculum Design

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement Learning is a mature technology, often suggested as a potential route towards Artificial General Intelligence, with the ambitious goal of replicating the wide range of abilities found in natural and artificial intelligence, including the complexities of human cognition. While RL had shown successes in relatively constrained environments, such as the classic Atari games and specific continuous control problems, recent years have seen efforts to expand its applicability. This work investigates the potential of RL in demonstrating intelligent behaviour and its progress in addressing more complex and less structured problem domains. We present an investigation into the capacity of modern RL frameworks in addressing a seemingly straightforward 3D Same-Different visuospatial task. While initial applications of state-of-the-art methods, including PPO, behavioural cloning and imitation learning, revealed challenges in directly learning optimal strategies, the successful implementation of curriculum learning offers a promising avenue. Effective learning was achieved by strategically designing the lesson plan based on the findings of a real-world human experiment.


Efficient Mathematical Reasoning Models via Dynamic Pruning and Knowledge Distillation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the rapid development of deep learning, large language models have shown strong capabilities in complex reasoning tasks such as mathematical equation solving. However, their substantial computational and storage costs hinder practical deployment. This paper proposes a lightweight optimization method that integrates dynamic attention head pruning with knowledge distillation. The approach dynamically evaluates the importance of each attention head in the multi-head attention mechanism using a combination of weight norms and entropy, and prunes redundant heads in real time to reduce computational overhead. To mitigate performance degradation, knowledge distillation transfers information from the original model to the pruned student, enabling the smaller model to preserve reasoning ability. Experiments conducted on both Math23k and ASDiv-A verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. For example, on Math23k with a 30% pruning ratio, parameters are reduced by 18.7%, inference speed is improved by 27.5%, FLOPs are reduced by 19.3%, and accuracy drops only 0.7% (from 84.4% to 83.7%). These results demonstrate that the method achieves substantial efficiency gains while maintaining strong reasoning performance, providing a practical solution for efficient deployment of large language models in mathematical reasoning tasks.


Embedding Generative AI into Systems Analysis and Design Curriculum: Framework, Case Study, and Cross-Campus Empirical Evidence

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Systems analysis students increasingly use Generative AI, yet current pedagogy lacks systematic approaches for teaching responsible AI orchestration that fosters critical thinking whilst meeting educational outcomes. Students risk accepting AI suggestions blindly or uncritically without assessing alignment with user needs or contextual appropriateness. SAGE (Structured AI-Guided Education) addresses this gap by embedding GenAI into curriculum design, training students when to accept, modify, or reject AI contributions. Implementation with 18 student groups across four Australian universities revealed how orchestration skills develop. Most groups (84\%) moved beyond passive acceptance, showing selective judgment, yet none proactively identified gaps overlooked by both human and AI analysis, indicating a competency ceiling. Students strong at explaining decisions also performed well at integrating sources, and those with deep domain understanding consistently considered accessibility considerations. Accessibility awareness proved fragile. When writing requirements, 85\% of groups explicitly considered elderly users and cultural needs. Notably, 55\% of groups struggled identifying when AI misclassified system boundaries (what belongs inside versus outside the system), 45\% missed data management errors (how information is stored and updated), and 55\% overlooked missing exception handling. Three implications emerge for educators: (i) require students to document why they accepted, modified, or rejected each AI suggestion, making reasoning explicit; (ii) embed accessibility prompts at each development stage because awareness collapses without continuous scaffolding; and (iii) have students create their own specifications before using AI, then compare versions, and anchor to research or standards to identify gaps.


Reversing the Lens: Using Explainable AI to Understand Human Expertise

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Both humans and machine learning models learn from experience, particularly in safety- and reliability-critical domains. While psychology seeks to understand human cognition, the field of Explainable AI (XAI) develops methods to interpret machine learning models. This study bridges these domains by applying computational tools from XAI to analyze human learning. We modeled human behavior during a complex real-world task -- tuning a particle accelerator -- by constructing graphs of operator subtasks. Applying techniques such as community detection and hierarchical clustering to archival operator data, we reveal how operators decompose the problem into simpler components and how these problem-solving structures evolve with expertise. Our findings illuminate how humans develop efficient strategies in the absence of globally optimal solutions, and demonstrate the utility of XAI-based methods for quantitatively studying human cognition.


Estimating LLM Consistency: A User Baseline vs Surrogate Metrics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations and sensitive to prompt perturbations, often resulting in inconsistent or unreliable generated text. Different methods have been proposed to mitigate such hallucinations and fragility, one of which is to measure the consistency of LLM responses -- the model's confidence in the response or likelihood of generating a similar response when resampled. In previous work, measuring LLM response consistency often relied on calculating the probability of a response appearing within a pool of resampled responses, analyzing internal states, or evaluating logits of responses. However, it was not clear how well these approaches approximated users' perceptions of consistency of LLM responses. To find out, we performed a user study ($n=2,976$) demonstrating that current methods for measuring LLM response consistency typically do not align well with humans' perceptions of LLM consistency. We propose a logit-based ensemble method for estimating LLM consistency and show that our method matches the performance of the best-performing existing metric in estimating human ratings of LLM consistency. Our results suggest that methods for estimating LLM consistency without human evaluation are sufficiently imperfect to warrant broader use of evaluation with human input; this would avoid misjudging the adequacy of models because of the imperfections of automated consistency metrics.


FalconWing: An Ultra-Light Indoor Fixed-Wing UAV Platform for Vision-Based Autonomy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce FalconWing, an ultra-light (150 g) indoor fixed-wing UAV platform for vision-based autonomy. Controlled indoor environment enables year-round repeatable UAV experiment but imposes strict weight and maneuverability limits on the UAV, motivating our ultra-light FalconWing design. FalconWing couples a lightweight hardware stack (137g airframe with a 9g camera) and offboard computation with a software stack featuring a photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splat (GSplat) simulator for developing and evaluating vision-based controllers. We validate FalconWing on two challenging vision-based aerial case studies. In the leader-follower case study, our best vision-based controller, trained via imitation learning on GSplat-rendered data augmented with domain randomization, achieves 100% tracking success across 3 types of leader maneuvers over 30 trials and shows robustness to leader's appearance shifts in simulation. In the autonomous landing case study, our vision-based controller trained purely in simulation transfers zero-shot to real hardware, achieving an 80% success rate over ten landing trials. We will release hardware designs, GSplat scenes, and dynamics models upon publication to make FalconWing an open-source flight kit for engineering students and research labs.


Pumpkin's secret health powers go far beyond the holidays, experts say

FOX News

Certified holistic nutritionist Robin DeCicco explains how pumpkin's antioxidants and carotenoids help protect against cell damage and reduce inflammatory conditions.


Beyond Benchmarks: Responsible AI in Education Needs Learning Sciences

Communications of the ACM

Learning sciences emerged in the 1980s from roots in cognitive science and AI, as well as other social sciences such as linguistics and anthropology. LS distinctively investigates the process of learning, in contrast to research on teaching, instructional design, policies, and institutions. LS also focuses on research in authentic educational settings, which contrasts with psychology or brain science research conducted in a laboratory. Learning scientists use and develop a variety of methods and theories, leading to a large body of knowledge. The field also has blurry lines with neighboring fields such as AI in education.


Enhancing Quranic Learning: A Multimodal Deep Learning Approach for Arabic Phoneme Recognition

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in multimodal deep learning have greatly enhanced the capability of systems for speech analysis and pronunciation assessment. Accurate pronunciation detection remains a key challenge in Arabic, particularly in the context of Quranic recitation, where subtle phonetic differences can alter meaning. Addressing this challenge, the present study proposes a transformer-based multimodal framework for Arabic phoneme mispronunciation detection that combines acoustic and textual representations to achieve higher precision and robustness. The framework integrates UniSpeech-derived acoustic embeddings with BERT-based textual embeddings extracted from Whisper transcriptions, creating a unified representation that captures both phonetic detail and linguistic context. To determine the most effective integration strategy, early, intermediate, and late fusion methods were implemented and evaluated on two datasets containing 29 Arabic phonemes, including eight hafiz sounds, articulated by 11 native speakers. Additional speech samples collected from publicly available YouTube recordings were incorporated to enhance data diversity and generalization. Model performance was assessed using standard evaluation metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, allowing a detailed comparison of the fusion strategies. Experimental findings show that the UniSpeech-BERT multimodal configuration provides strong results and that fusion-based transformer architectures are effective for phoneme-level mispronunciation detection. The study contributes to the development of intelligent, speaker-independent, and multimodal Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL) systems, offering a practical step toward technology-supported Quranic pronunciation training and broader speech-based educational applications.