The framework relies on two methodological innovations.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99.9% of U.S. businesses yet remain systematically excluded from AI due to a mismatch between their operational scale and modern machine learning's data requirements. This paper introduces SmallML, a Bayesian transfer learning framework achieving enterprise-level prediction accuracy with datasets as small as 50-200 observations. We develop a three-layer architecture integrating transfer learning, hierarchical Bayesian modeling, and conformal prediction. Layer 1 extracts informative priors from 22,673 public records using a SHAP-based procedure transferring knowledge from gradient boosting to logistic regression. Layer 2 implements hierarchical pooling across J=5-50 SMEs with adaptive shrinkage, balancing population patterns with entity-specific characteristics. Layer 3 provides conformal sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees P(y in C(x)) >= 1-alpha for distribution-free uncertainty quantification. Validation on customer churn data demonstrates 96.7% +/- 4.2% AUC with 100 observations per business -- a +24.2 point improvement over independent logistic regression (72.5% +/- 8.1%), with p < 0.000001. Conformal prediction achieves 92% empirical coverage at 90% target. Training completes in 33 minutes on standard CPU hardware. By enabling enterprise-grade predictions for 33 million U.S. SMEs previously excluded from machine learning, SmallML addresses a critical gap in AI democratization. Keywords: Bayesian transfer learning, hierarchical models, conformal prediction, small-data analytics, SME machine learning

Current AI alignment through RLHF follows a single directional paradigm that AI conforms to human preferences while treating human cognition as fixed. We propose a shift to co-alignment through Bidirectional Cognitive Alignment (BiCA), where humans and AI mutually adapt. BiCA uses learnable protocols, representation mapping, and KL-budget constraints for controlled co-evolution. In collaborative navigation, BiCA achieved 85.5% success versus 70.3% baseline, with 230% better mutual adaptation and 332% better protocol convergence. Emergent protocols outperformed handcrafted ones by 84%, while bidirectional adaptation unexpectedly improved safety (+23% out-of-distribution robustness). The 46% synergy improvement demonstrates optimal collaboration exists at the intersection, not union, of human and AI capabilities, validating the shift from single-directional to co-alignment paradigms.

Large language models (LLMs) often make reasoning errors when solving mathematical problems, and how to automatically detect and correct these errors has become an important research direction. However, existing approaches \textit{mainly focus on self-correction within the model}, which falls short of the ``teacher-style`` correction required in educational settings, \textit{i.e.}, systematically guiding and revising a student's problem-solving process. To address this gap, we propose \texttt{SMRC} (\textit{\underline{S}tudent \underline{M}athematical \underline{R}easoning \underline{C}orrection}), a novel method that aligns LLMs with student reasoning. Specifically, \texttt{SMRC} formulates student reasoning as a multi-step sequential decision problem and introduces Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore optimal correction paths. To reduce the cost of the annotating process-level rewards, we leverage breadth-first search (BFS) guided by LLMs and final-answer evaluation to generate reward signals, which are then distributed across intermediate reasoning steps via a back-propagation mechanism, enabling fine-grained process supervision. Additionally, we construct a benchmark for high school mathematics, MSEB (Multi-Solution Error Benchmark), consisting of 158 instances that include problem statements, student solutions, and correct reasoning steps. We further propose a dual evaluation protocol centered on \textbf{solution accuracy} and \textbf{correct-step retention}, offering a comprehensive measure of educational applicability. Experiments demonstrate that \texttt{SMRC} significantly outperforms existing methods on two public datasets (ProcessBench and MR-GSM8K) and our MSEB in terms of effectiveness and overall performance. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Mind-Lab-ECNU/SMRC.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to sequential decision-making through in-context learning (ICL), yet their effectiveness is highly sensitive to prompt quality. Effective prompts should meet three principles: focus on decision-critical information, provide step-level granularity, and minimize reliance on expert annotations through label efficiency. However, existing ICL methods often fail to satisfy all three criteria simultaneously. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce SkillGen, a skill-based ICL framework for structured sequential reasoning. It constructs an action-centric, domain-level graph from sampled trajectories, identifies high-utility actions via temporal-difference credit assignment, and retrieves step-wise skills to generate fine-grained, context-aware prompts. We further present a theoretical analysis showing that focusing on high-utility segments supports task identifiability and informs more effective ICL prompt design. Experiments on ALFWorld, BabyAI, and ScienceWorld, using both open-source and proprietary LLMs, show that SkillGen achieves consistent gains, improving progress rate by 5.9%-16.5% on average across models.

Abstract--T ask-oriented knowledge graphs (KGs) enable AIpowered learning assistant systems to automatically generate high-quality multiple-choice questions (MCQs). Y et converting unstructured educational materials, such as lecture notes and slides, into KGs that capture key pedagogical content remains difficult. We propose a framework for knowledge graph construction and refinement grounded in rate-distortion (RD) theory and optimal transport geometry. In the framework, lecture content is modeled as a metric-measure space, capturing semantic and relational structure, while candidate KGs are aligned using Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) couplings to quantify semantic distortion. The rate term, expressed via the size of KG, reflects complexity and compactness. Refinement operators (add, merge, split, remove, rewire) minimize the rate-distortion Lagrangian, yielding compact, information-preserving KGs. Our prototype applied to data science lectures yields interpretable RD curves and shows that MCQs generated from refined KGs consistently surpass those from raw notes on fifteen quality criteria. This study establishes a principled foundation for information-theoretic KG optimization in personalized and AI-assisted education. An AI-powered learning assistant (AILA) system [1] can automatically generate educational questions such as multiple choice questions (MCQs) from teaching materials including lecture notes and slides [2], [3]. Recent research demonstrates that integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) with large language models (LLMs) significantly improves the factual accuracy, explainability, and reasoning capabilities of LLM-powered answers [4], [5].

With Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) becoming more and more prominent in generative AI solutions, there is an emerging need for systematically evaluating their effectiveness. We introduce the LiveRAG benchmark, a publicly available dataset of 895 synthetic questions and answers designed to support systematic evaluation of RAG-based Q&A systems. This synthetic benchmark is derived from the one used during the SIGIR'2025 LiveRAG Challenge, where competitors were evaluated under strict time constraints. It is augmented with information that was not made available to competitors during the Challenge, such as the ground-truth answers, together with their associated supporting claims which were used for evaluating competitors' answers. In addition, each question is associated with estimated difficulty and discriminability scores, derived from applying an Item Response Theory model to competitors' responses. Our analysis highlights the benchmark's questions diversity, the wide range of their difficulty levels, and their usefulness in differentiating between system capabilities. The LiveRAG benchmark will hopefully help the community advance RAG research, conduct systematic evaluation, and develop more robust Q&A systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into educational applications. However, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak and fine-tuning attacks, which can compromise safety alignment and lead to harmful outputs. Existing studies mainly focus on general safety evaluations, with limited attention to the unique safety requirements of educational scenarios. To address this gap, we construct EduHarm, a benchmark containing safe-unsafe instruction pairs across five representative educational scenarios, enabling systematic safety evaluation of educational LLMs. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage shield framework (TSSF) for educational LLMs that simultaneously mitigates both jailbreak and fine-tuning attacks. First, safety-aware attention realignment redirects attention toward critical unsafe tokens, thereby restoring the harmfulness feature that discriminates between unsafe and safe inputs. Second, layer-wise safety judgment identifies harmfulness features by aggregating safety cues across multiple layers to detect unsafe instructions. Finally, defense-driven dual routing separates safe and unsafe queries, ensuring normal processing for benign inputs and guarded responses for harmful ones. Extensive experiments across eight jailbreak attack strategies demonstrate that TSSF effectively strengthens safety while preventing over-refusal of benign queries. Evaluations on three fine-tuning attack datasets further show that it consistently achieves robust defense against harmful queries while maintaining preserving utility gains from benign fine-tuning.

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful zero- and few-shot learners. However, when predicting over a set of candidate options, LLMs suffer from label biases, and existing calibration methods overlook biases arising from multi-token class labels. We tackle an issue we call label length bias, where labels of different lengths are treated inconsistently, even after standard length normalization. To mitigate it, we propose normalized contextual calibration (NCC), an effective method that normalizes and calibrates predictions at the full-label level. NCC achieves statistically significant improvements over prior approaches across multiple datasets and models, with gains of up to 10% F1. Moreover, NCC extends bias mitigation to broader tasks such as multiple-choice question answering. Our analysis shows that, when combined with in-context learning, NCC is less sensitive to few-shot example selection, requires fewer examples for competitive performance, and produces more reliable confidence estimates. These findings highlight the importance of mitigating full-label biases to improve the performance and robustness of LLM-based methods, particularly in real-world applications where class labels naturally consist of multiple tokens.

The Whisper model, an open-source automatic speech recognition system, is widely adopted for its strong performance across multilingual and zero-shot settings. However, it frequently suffers from hallucination errors, especially under noisy acoustic conditions. Previous works to reduce hallucinations in Whisper-style ASR systems have primarily focused on audio preprocessing or post-processing of transcriptions to filter out erroneous content. However, modifications to the Whisper model itself remain largely unexplored to mitigate hallucinations directly. To address this challenge, we present a two-stage architecture that first enhances encoder robustness through Adaptive Layer Attention (ALA) and further suppresses hallucinations using a multi-objective knowledge distillation (KD) framework. In the first stage, ALA groups encoder layers into semantically coherent blocks via inter-layer correlation analysis. A learnable multi-head attention module then fuses these block representations, enabling the model to jointly exploit low- and high-level features for more robust encoding. In the second stage, our KD framework trains the student model on noisy audio to align its semantic and attention distributions with a teacher model processing clean inputs. Our experiments on noisy speech benchmarks show notable reductions in hallucinations and word error rates, while preserving performance on clean speech. Together, ALA and KD offer a principled strategy to improve Whisper's reliability under real-world noisy conditions.