Education
Improving Graduate Outcomes by Identifying Skills Gaps and Recommending Courses Based on Career Interests
Soni, Rahul, Suleiman, Basem, Singh, Sonit
Abstract--This paper aims to address the challenge of selecting relevant courses for students by proposing the design and development of a course recommendation system. The course recommendation system utilises a combination of data analytics techniques and machine learning algorithms to recommend courses that align with current industry trends and requirements. In order to provide customised suggestions, the study entails the design and implementation of an extensive algorithmic framework that combines machine learning methods, user preferences, and academic criteria. The system employs data mining and collaborative filtering techniques to examine past courses and individual career goals in order to provide course recommendations. Moreover, to improve the accessibility and usefulness of the recommendation system, special attention is given to the development of an easy-to-use front-end interface. We refined and optimised the proposed system by incorporating user feedback, ensuring that it effectively meets the needs and preferences of its target users. The proposed course recommendation system could be a useful tool for students, instructors, and career advisers to use in promoting lifelong learning and professional progression as it fills the gap between university learning and industry expectations. We hope that the proposed course recommendation system will help university students in making data-drive and industry-informed course decisions, in turn, improving graduate outcomes for the university sector .
SlideBot: A Multi-Agent Framework for Generating Informative, Reliable, Multi-Modal Presentations
Xie, Eric, Waterfield, Danielle, Kennedy, Michael, Zhang, Aidong
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown immense potential in education, automating tasks like quiz generation and content summarization. However, generating effective presentation slides introduces unique challenges due to the complexity of multimodal content creation and the need for precise, domain-specific information. Existing LLM-based solutions often fail to produce reliable and informative outputs, limiting their educational value. To address these limitations, we introduce SlideBot - a modular, multi-agent slide generation framework that integrates LLMs with retrieval, structured planning, and code generation. SlideBot is organized around three pillars: informativeness, ensuring deep and contextually grounded content; reliability, achieved by incorporating external sources through retrieval; and practicality, which enables customization and iterative feedback through instructor collaboration. It incorporates evidence-based instructional design principles from Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML), using structured planning to manage intrinsic load and consistent visual macros to reduce extraneous load and enhance dual-channel learning. Within the system, specialized agents collaboratively retrieve information, summarize content, generate figures, and format slides using LaTeX, aligning outputs with instructor preferences through interactive refinement. Evaluations from domain experts and students in AI and biomedical education show that SlideBot consistently enhances conceptual accuracy, clarity, and instructional value. These findings demonstrate SlideBot's potential to streamline slide preparation while ensuring accuracy, relevance, and adaptability in higher education.
ProbLog4Fairness: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Modeling and Mitigating Bias
Adriaensen, Rik, Van Praet, Lucas, Bekker, Jessa, Manhaeve, Robin, Delobelle, Pieter, Buyl, Maarten
Operationalizing definitions of fairness is difficult in practice, as multiple definitions can be incompatible while each being arguably desirable. Instead, it may be easier to directly describe algorithmic bias through ad-hoc assumptions specific to a particular real-world task, e.g., based on background information on systemic biases in its context. Such assumptions can, in turn, be used to mitigate this bias during training. Y et, a framework for incorporating such assumptions that is simultaneously principled, flexible, and interpretable is currently lacking. Our approach is to formalize bias assumptions as programs in ProbLog, a probabilistic logic programming language that allows for the description of probabilistic causal relationships through logic. Neurosymbolic extensions of ProbLog then allow for easy integration of these assumptions in a neural network's training process. We propose a set of templates to express different types of bias and show the versatility of our approach on synthetic tabular datasets with known biases. Using estimates of the bias distortions present, we also succeed in mitigating algorithmic bias in real-world tabular and image data. We conclude that ProbLog4Fairness outperforms baselines due to its ability to flexibly model the relevant bias assumptions, where other methods typically uphold a fixed bias type or notion of fairness.
Omnilingual ASR: Open-Source Multilingual Speech Recognition for 1600+ Languages
Omnilingual ASR team, null, Keren, Gil, Kozhevnikov, Artyom, Meng, Yen, Ropers, Christophe, Setzler, Matthew, Wang, Skyler, Adebara, Ife, Auli, Michael, Balioglu, Can, Chan, Kevin, Cheng, Chierh, Chuang, Joe, Droof, Caley, Duppenthaler, Mark, Duquenne, Paul-Ambroise, Erben, Alexander, Gao, Cynthia, Gonzalez, Gabriel Mejia, Lyu, Kehan, Miglani, Sagar, Pratap, Vineel, Sadagopan, Kaushik Ram, Saleem, Safiyyah, Turkatenko, Arina, Ventayol-Boada, Albert, Yong, Zheng-Xin, Chung, Yu-An, Maillard, Jean, Moritz, Rashel, Mourachko, Alexandre, Williamson, Mary, Yates, Shireen
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has advanced in high-resource languages, but most of the world's 7,000+ languages remain unsupported, leaving thousands of long-tail languages behind. Expanding ASR coverage has been costly and limited by architectures that restrict language support, making extension inaccessible to most--all while entangled with ethical concerns when pursued without community collaboration. To transcend these limitations, we introduce Omnilingual ASR, the first large-scale ASR system designed for extensibility. Omnilingual ASR enables communities to introduce unserved languages with only a handful of data samples. It scales self-supervised pre-training to 7B parameters to learn robust speech representations and introduces an encoder-decoder architecture designed for zero-shot generalization, leveraging a LLM-inspired decoder. This capability is grounded in a massive and diverse training corpus; by combining breadth of coverage with linguistic variety, the model learns representations robust enough to adapt to unseen languages. Incorporating public resources with community-sourced recordings gathered through compensated local partnerships, Omnilingual ASR expands coverage to over 1,600 languages, the largest such effort to date--including over 500 never before served by ASR. Automatic evaluations show substantial gains over prior systems, especially in low-resource conditions, and strong generalization. We release Omnilingual ASR as a family of models, from 300M variants for low-power devices to 7B for maximum accuracy. We reflect on the ethical considerations shaping this design and conclude by discussing its societal impact. In particular, we highlight how open-sourcing models and tools can lower barriers for researchers and communities, inviting new forms of participation. Open-source artifacts are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/omnilingual-asr.
AlignSurvey: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Human Preferences Alignment in Social Surveys
Lin, Chenxi, Yuan, Weikang, Jiang, Zhuoren, Huang, Biao, Zhang, Ruitao, Ge, Jianan, Xu, Yueqian, Yu, Jianxing
Understanding human attitudes, preferences, and behaviors through social surveys is essential for academic research and policymaking. Y et traditional surveys face persistent challenges, including fixed-question formats, high costs, limited adaptability, and difficulties ensuring cross-cultural equivalence. While recent studies explore large language models (LLMs) to simulate survey responses, most are limited to structured questions, overlook the entire survey process, and risks under-representing marginalized groups due to training data biases. We introduce AlignSurvey, the first benchmark that systematically replicates and evaluates the full social survey pipeline using LLMs. It defines four tasks aligned with key survey stages: social role modeling, semi-structured interview modeling, attitude stance modeling and survey response modeling. It also provides task-specific evaluation metrics to assess alignment fidelity, consistency, and fairness at both individual and group levels, with a focus on demographic diversity. To support AlignSurvey, we construct a multi-tiered dataset architecture: (i) the Social Foundation Corpus, a cross-national resource with 44K+ interview dialogues and 400K+ structured survey records; and (ii) a suite of Entire-Pipeline Survey Datasets, including the expert-annotated AlignSurvey-Expert (ASE) and two nationally representative surveys for cross-cultural evaluation. We release the SurveyLM family, obtained through two-stage fine-tuning of open-source LLMs, and offer reference models for evaluating domain-specific alignment. All datasets, models, and tools are available at github and huggingface to support transparent and socially responsible research.
A Critical Review of the Need for Knowledge-Centric Evaluation of Quranic Recitation
Al-Kharusi, Mohammed Hilal, Hayat, Khizar, Ruqeishi, Khalil Bader Al, Lone, Haroon Rashid
The art and science of Quranic recitation (Tajweed), a discipline governed by meticulous phonetic, rhythmic, and theological principles, confronts substantial educational challenges in today's digital age. Although modern technology offers unparalleled opportunities for learning, existing automated systems for evaluating recitation have struggled to gain broad acceptance or demonstrate educational effectiveness. This literature review examines this crucial disparity, offering a thorough analysis of scholarly research, digital platforms, and commercial tools developed over the past twenty years. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental flaw in current approaches that adapt Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, which emphasize word identification over qualitative acoustic evaluation. These systems suffer from limitations such as reliance on biased datasets, demographic disparities, and an inability to deliver meaningful feedback for improvement. Challenging these data-centric methodologies, we advocate for a paradigm shift toward a knowledge-based computational framework. By leveraging the unchanging nature of the Quranic text and the well-defined rules of Tajweed, we propose that an effective evaluation system should be built upon rule-based acoustic modeling centered on canonical pronunciation principles and articulation points (Makhraj), rather than depending on statistical patterns derived from flawed or biased data. The review concludes that the future of automated Quranic recitation assessment lies in hybrid systems that combine linguistic expertise with advanced audio processing. Such an approach paves the way for developing reliable, fair, and pedagogically effective tools that can authentically assist learners across the globe.
Artificial-Intelligence Grading Assistance for Handwritten Components of a Calculus Exam
Kortemeyer, Gerd, Caspar, Alexander, Horica, Daria
We investigate whether contemporary multimodal LLMs can assist with grading open-ended calculus at scale without eroding validity. In a large first-year exam, students' handwritten work was graded by GPT-5 against the same rubric used by teaching assistants (TAs), with fractional credit permitted; TA rubric decisions served as ground truth. We calibrated a human-in-the-loop filter that combines a partial-credit threshold with an Item Response Theory (2PL) risk measure based on the deviation between the AI score and the model-expected score for each student-item. Unfiltered AI-TA agreement was moderate, adequate for low-stakes feedback but not for high-stakes use. Confidence filtering made the workload-quality trade-off explicit: under stricter settings, AI delivered human-level accuracy, but also left roughly 70% of the items to be graded by humans. Psychometric patterns were constrained by low stakes on the open-ended portion, a small set of rubric checkpoints, and occasional misalignment between designated answer regions and where work appeared. Practical adjustments such as slightly higher weight and protected time, a few rubric-visible substeps, stronger spatial anchoring should raise ceiling performance. Overall, calibrated confidence and conservative routing enable AI to reliably handle a sizable subset of routine cases while reserving expert judgment for ambiguous or pedagogically rich responses.
DOoM: Difficult Olympiads of Math
Kuleshov, Ilya, Pavel, Ilin, Kompanets, Nikolay, Sycheva, Ksenia, Nikolich, Aleksandr
This paper introduces DOoM, a new open-source benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of language models in solving mathematics and physics problems in Russian. The benchmark includes problems of varying difficulty, ranging from school-level tasks to university Olympiad and entrance exam questions. In this paper we discuss the motivation behind its creation, describe dataset's structure and evaluation methodology, and present initial results from testing various models. Analysis of the results shows a correlation between model performance and the number of tokens used, and highlights differences in performance between mathematics and physics tasks.
VisualMimic: Visual Humanoid Loco-Manipulation via Motion Tracking and Generation
Yin, Shaofeng, Ze, Yanjie, Yu, Hong-Xing, Liu, C. Karen, Wu, Jiajun
Humanoid loco-manipulation in unstructured environments demands tight integration of egocentric perception and whole-body control. However, existing approaches either depend on external motion capture systems or fail to generalize across diverse tasks. We introduce VisualMimic, a visual sim-to-real framework that unifies egocentric vision with hierarchical whole-body control for humanoid robots. VisualMimic combines a task-agnostic low-level keypoint tracker -- trained from human motion data via a teacher-student scheme -- with a task-specific high-level policy that generates keypoint commands from visual and proprioceptive input. To ensure stable training, we inject noise into the low-level policy and clip high-level actions using human motion statistics. VisualMimic enables zero-shot transfer of visuomotor policies trained in simulation to real humanoid robots, accomplishing a wide range of loco-manipulation tasks such as box lifting, pushing, football dribbling, and kicking. Beyond controlled laboratory settings, our policies also generalize robustly to outdoor environments. Videos are available at: https://visualmimic.github.io .
Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Interpretation of Radio Regulations
Kassimi, Zakaria El, Fourati, Fares, Alouini, Mohamed-Slim
We study question answering in the domain of radio regulations, a legally sensitive and high-stakes area. We propose a telecom-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline and introduce, to our knowledge, the first multiple-choice evaluation set for this domain, constructed from authoritative sources using automated filtering and human validation. To assess retrieval quality, we define a domain-specific retrieval metric, under which our retriever achieves approximately 97% accuracy. Beyond retrieval, our approach consistently improves generation accuracy across all tested models. In particular, while naively inserting documents without structured retrieval yields only marginal gains for GPT-4o (less than 1%), applying our pipeline results in nearly a 12% relative improvement. These findings demonstrate that carefully targeted grounding provides a simple yet strong baseline and an effective domain-specific solution for regulatory question answering. All code and evaluation scripts, along with our derived question-answer dataset, are available at https://github.com/Zakaria010/Radio-RAG.