Education
STRAP: Spatio-Temporal Pattern Retrieval for Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Zhang, Haoyu, Zhang, Wentao, Miao, Hao, Jiang, Xinke, Fang, Yuchen, Zhang, Yifan
Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for modeling dynamic graph-structured data across diverse domains. However, they often fail to generalize in Spatio-Temporal Out-of-Distribution (STOOD) scenarios, where both temporal dynamics and spatial structures evolve beyond the training distribution. To address this problem, we propose an innovative Spatio-Temporal Retrieval-Augmented Pattern Learning framework,STRAP, which enhances model generalization by integrating retrieval-augmented learning into the STGNN continue learning pipeline. The core of STRAP is a compact and expressive pattern library that stores representative spatio-temporal patterns enriched with historical, structural, and semantic information, which is obtained and optimized during the training phase. During inference, STRAP retrieves relevant patterns from this library based on similarity to the current input and injects them into the model via a plug-and-play prompting mechanism. This not only strengthens spatio-temporal representations but also mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Moreover, STRAP introduces a knowledge-balancing objective to harmonize new information with retrieved knowledge. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world streaming graph datasets show that STRAP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art STGNN baselines on STOOD tasks, demonstrating its robustness, adaptability, and strong generalization capability without task-specific fine-tuning.
From Problem-Solving to Teaching Problem-Solving: Aligning LLMs with Pedagogy using Reinforcement Learning
Dinucu-Jianu, David, Macina, Jakub, Daheim, Nico, Hakimi, Ido, Gurevych, Iryna, Sachan, Mrinmaya
Large language models (LLMs) can transform education, but their optimization for direct question-answering often undermines effective pedagogy which requires strategically withholding answers. To mitigate this, we propose an online reinforcement learning (RL)-based alignment framework that can quickly adapt LLMs into effective tutors using simulated student-tutor interactions by emphasizing pedagogical quality and guided problem-solving over simply giving away answers. We use our method to train a 7B parameter tutor model without human annotations which reaches similar performance to larger proprietary models like LearnLM. We introduce a controllable reward weighting to balance pedagogical support and student solving accuracy, allowing us to trace the Pareto frontier between these two objectives. Our models better preserve reasoning capabilities than single-turn SFT baselines and can optionally enhance interpretability through thinking tags that expose the model's instructional planning.
SoLoPO: Unlocking Long-Context Capabilities in LLMs via Short-to-Long Preference Optimization
Sun, Huashan, Liao, Shengyi, Han, Yansen, Bai, Yu, Gao, Yang, Fu, Cheng, Shen, Weizhou, Wan, Fanqi, Yan, Ming, Zhang, Ji, Huang, Fei
Despite advances in pretraining with extended context lengths, large language models (LLMs) still face challenges in effectively utilizing real-world long-context information, primarily due to insufficient long-context alignment caused by data quality issues, training inefficiencies, and the lack of well-designed optimization objectives. To address these limitations, we propose a framework named $\textbf{S}$h$\textbf{o}$rt-to-$\textbf{Lo}$ng $\textbf{P}$reference $\textbf{O}$ptimization ($\textbf{SoLoPO}$), decoupling long-context preference optimization (PO) into two components: short-context PO and short-to-long reward alignment (SoLo-RA), supported by both theoretical and empirical evidence. Specifically, short-context PO leverages preference pairs sampled from short contexts to enhance the model's contextual knowledge utilization ability. Meanwhile, SoLo-RA explicitly encourages reward score consistency utilization for the responses when conditioned on both short and long contexts that contain identical task-relevant information. This facilitates transferring the model's ability to handle short contexts into long-context scenarios. SoLoPO is compatible with mainstream preference optimization algorithms, while substantially improving the efficiency of data construction and training processes. Experimental results show that SoLoPO enhances all these algorithms with respect to stronger length and domain generalization abilities across various long-context benchmarks, while achieving notable improvements in both computational and memory efficiency.
DUMP: Automated Distribution-Level Curriculum Learning for RL-based LLM Post-training
Wang, Zhenting, Cui, Guofeng, Li, Yu-Jhe, Wan, Kun, Zhao, Wentian
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training have led to notable improvements in large language models (LLMs), particularly in enhancing their reasoning capabilities to handle complex tasks. However, most existing methods treat the training data as a unified whole, overlooking the fact that modern LLM training often involves a mixture of data from diverse distributions-varying in both source and difficulty. This heterogeneity introduces a key challenge: how to adaptively schedule training across distributions to optimize learning efficiency. In this paper, we present a principled curriculum learning framework grounded in the notion of distribution-level learnability. Our core insight is that the magnitude of policy advantages reflects how much a model can still benefit from further training on a given distribution. Based on this, we propose a distribution-level curriculum learning framework for RL-based LLM post-training, which leverages the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) principle to dynamically adjust sampling probabilities for different distrubutions. This approach prioritizes distributions with either high average advantage (exploitation) or low sample count (exploration), yielding an adaptive and theoretically grounded training schedule. We instantiate our curriculum learning framework with GRPO as the underlying RL algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness on logic reasoning datasets with multiple difficulties and sources. Our experiments show that our framework significantly improves convergence speed and final performance, highlighting the value of distribution-aware curriculum strategies in LLM post-training. Code: https://github.com/ZhentingWang/DUMP.
BabyVLM: Data-Efficient Pretraining of VLMs Inspired by Infant Learning
Wang, Shengao, Chandra, Arjun, Liu, Aoming, Saligrama, Venkatesh, Gong, Boqing
Human infants rapidly develop visual reasoning skills from minimal input, suggesting that developmentally inspired pretraining could significantly enhance the efficiency of vision-language models (VLMs). Although recent efforts have leveraged infant-inspired datasets like SAYCam, existing evaluation benchmarks remain misaligned--they are either too simplistic, narrowly scoped, or tailored for large-scale pretrained models. Additionally, training exclusively on infant data overlooks the broader, diverse input from which infants naturally learn. To address these limitations, we propose BabyVLM, a novel framework comprising comprehensive in-domain evaluation benchmarks and a synthetic training dataset created via child-directed transformations of existing datasets. We demonstrate that VLMs trained with our synthetic dataset achieve superior performance on BabyVLM tasks compared to models trained solely on SAYCam or general-purpose data of the SAYCam size. BabyVLM thus provides a robust, developmentally aligned evaluation tool and illustrates how compact models trained on carefully curated data can generalize effectively, opening pathways toward data-efficient vision-language learning paradigms.
A Clustering-Based Method for Automatic Educational Video Recommendation Using Deep Face-Features of Lecturers
Mendes, Paulo R. C., Vieira, Eduardo S., Guedes, Álan L. V., Busson, Antonio J. G., Colcher, Sérgio
Discovering and accessing specific content within educational video bases is a challenging task, mainly because of the abundance of video content and its diversity. Recommender systems are often used to enhance the ability to find and select content. But, recommendation mechanisms, especially those based on textual information, exhibit some limitations, such as being error-prone to manually created keywords or due to imprecise speech recognition. This paper presents a method for generating educational video recommendation using deep face-features of lecturers without identifying them. More precisely, we use an unsupervised face clustering mechanism to create relations among the videos based on the lecturer's presence. Then, for a selected educational video taken as a reference, we recommend the ones where the presence of the same lecturers is detected. Moreover, we rank these recommended videos based on the amount of time the referenced lecturers were present. For this task, we achieved a mAP value of 99.165%.
CodePlot-CoT: Mathematical Visual Reasoning by Thinking with Code-Driven Images
Duan, Chengqi, Sun, Kaiyue, Fang, Rongyao, Zhang, Manyuan, Feng, Yan, Luo, Ying, Liu, Yufang, Wang, Ke, Pei, Peng, Cai, Xunliang, Li, Hongsheng, Ma, Yi, Liu, Xihui
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown significant progress in mathematical reasoning, yet they still face a critical bottleneck with problems requiring visual assistance, such as drawing auxiliary lines or plotting functions to solve the problems. Most LLMs and VLMs are constrained to text-only reasoning chains, while multimodal unified models that can generate interleaved text and images lack the necessary precision and controllability for such tasks. To address this, we propose CodePlot-CoT, a code-driven Chain-of-Thought paradigm for "thinking with images" in mathematics. Our approach leverages the VLM to generate text reasoning as well as executable plotting code, which is then rendered into images as "visual thought", to solve mathematical problems. To achieve this, we first construct Math-VR, the first large-scale, bilingual dataset and benchmark for Mathematics problems with Visual Reasoning, comprising 178K samples. Second, to create high-quality training data, we develop a state-of-the-art image-to-code converter specialized for parsing complex mathematical figures into codes. Finally, using these training data, we train the CodePlot-CoT model for solving mathematical problems. Experimental results show that our model achieves up to 21% increase over base model on our new benchmark, fully validating the efficacy of our proposed code-driven reasoning paradigm. Our work opens a new direction for multimodal mathematical reasoning and provides the community with the first large-scale dataset, comprehensive benchmark, and strong approach for such problems. To facilitate future research, we make our datasets, code, and pretrained models publicly available at https://github.com/HKU-MMLab/Math-VR-CodePlot-CoT.
Operand Quant: A Single-Agent Architecture for Autonomous Machine Learning Engineering
Sahney, Arjun, Gorthi, Ram, Łastowski, Cezary, Vega, Javier
We present Operand Quant, a single-agent, IDE-based architecture for autonomous machine learning engineering (MLE). Operand Quant departs from conventional multi-agent orchestration frameworks by consolidating all MLE lifecycle stages -- exploration, modeling, experimentation, and deployment -- within a single, context-aware agent. On the MLE-Benchmark (2025), Operand Quant achieved a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) result, with an overall medal rate of 0.3956 +/- 0.0565 across 75 problems -- the highest recorded performance among all evaluated systems to date. The architecture demonstrates that a linear, non-blocking agent, operating autonomously within a controlled IDE environment, can outperform multi-agent and orchestrated systems under identical constraints.
LLM-Oriented Token-Adaptive Knowledge Distillation
Xie, Xurong, Xue, Zhucun, Wu, Jiafu, Li, Jian, Wang, Yabiao, Hu, Xiaobin, Liu, Yong, Zhang, Jiangning
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing large-scale language models (LLMs), yet prevailing logit-based methods typically employ static strategies that are misaligned with the dynamic learning process of student models. These methods typically treat all tokens indiscriminately and apply a single, fixed temperature, resulting in suboptimal knowledge transfer. To address these limitations, we propose LLM-Oriented Token-Adaptive Knowledge Distillation (AdaKD), a novel framework that adapts the distillation process to the real-time learning state of each token. AdaKD consists of two synergistic modules driven by a unified token difficulty metric. First, our Loss-Driven Adaptive Token Focusing (LATF) module dynamically adjusts the distillation focus by monitoring the student's learning stability, concentrating computational resources on the most valuable tokens at each training phase. Second, we introduce Inverse Difficulty Temperature Scaling (IDTS), a counterintuitive yet effective token-level temperature strategy. It employs low temperatures for difficult tokens for targeted error correction, and high temperatures for easy tokens to encourage students to learn from the teacher's complete and smooth output distribution, thereby enhancing generalization. As a plug-and-play framework, AdaKD can consistently improve the performance of various distillation methods on multiple model architectures and benchmarks.
CodeWatcher: IDE Telemetry Data Extraction Tool for Understanding Coding Interactions with LLMs
Basha, Manaal, Ribeiro, Aimeê M., Javahar, Jeena, de Souza, Cleidson R. B., Rodríguez-Pérez, Gema
Understanding how developers interact with code generation tools (CGTs) requires detailed, real-time data on programming behavior which is often difficult to collect without disrupting workflow. We present \textit{CodeWatcher}, a lightweight, unobtrusive client-server system designed to capture fine-grained interaction events from within the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor. \textit{CodeWatcher} logs semantically meaningful events such as insertions made by CGTs, deletions, copy-paste actions, and focus shifts, enabling continuous monitoring of developer activity without modifying user workflows. The system comprises a VS Code plugin, a Python-based RESTful API, and a MongoDB backend, all containerized for scalability and ease of deployment. By structuring and timestamping each event, \textit{CodeWatcher} enables post-hoc reconstruction of coding sessions and facilitates rich behavioral analyses, including how and when CGTs are used during development. This infrastructure is crucial for supporting research on responsible AI, developer productivity, and the human-centered evaluation of CGTs. Please find the demo, diagrams, and tool here: https://osf.io/j2kru/overview.