Education
MuFFIN: Multifaceted Pronunciation Feedback Model with Interactive Hierarchical Neural Modeling
Yan, Bi-Cheng, Tsai, Ming-Kang, Chen, Berlin
Computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) manages to facilitate second-language (L2) learners to practice pronunciation skills by offering timely and instructive feedback. To examine pronunciation proficiency from multiple facets, existing methods for CAPT broadly fall into two categories: mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) as well as automatic pronunciation assessment (APA). The former aims to pinpoint phonetic pronunciation errors and provide diagnostic feedback, while the latter seeks instead to quantify pronunciation proficiency pertaining to various aspects. Despite the natural complementarity between MDD and APA, researchers and practitioners, however, often treat them as independent tasks with disparate modeling paradigms. In light of this, we in this paper first introduce MuFFIN, a Multi-Faceted pronunciation Feedback model with an Interactive hierarchical Neural architecture, to jointly address the tasks of MDD and APA. To better capture the nuanced distinctions between phonemes in the feature space, a novel phoneme-contrastive ordinal regularization mechanism is then put forward to optimize the proposed model to generate more phoneme-discriminative features while factoring in the ordinality of the aspect scores. In addition, to address the intricate data imbalance problem in MDD, we design a simple yet effective training objective, which is specifically tailored to perturb the outputs of a phoneme classifier with the phoneme-specific variations, so as to better render the distribution of predicted phonemes meanwhile considering their mispronunciation characteristics. A series of experiments conducted on the Speechocean762 benchmark dataset demonstrates the efficacy of our method in relation to several cutting-edge baselines, showing state-of-the-art performance on both the APA and MDD tasks.
Harnessing LLM for Noise-Robust Cognitive Diagnosis in Web-Based Intelligent Education Systems
Zhang, Guixian, Yuan, Guan, Xu, Ziqi, Zhang, Yanmei, Ren, Jing, Deng, Zhenyun, Cheng, Debo
Cognitive diagnostics in the Web-based Intelligent Education System (WIES) aims to assess students' mastery of knowledge concepts from heterogeneous, noisy interactions. Recent work has tried to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) for cognitive diagnosis, yet LLMs struggle with structured data and are prone to noise-induced misjudgments. Specially, WIES's open environment continuously attracts new students and produces vast amounts of response logs, exacerbating the data imbalance and noise issues inherent in traditional educational systems. To address these challenges, we propose DLLM, a Diffusion-based LLM framework for noise-robust cognitive diagnosis. DLLM first constructs independent subgraphs based on response correctness, then applies relation augmentation alignment module to mitigate data imbalance. The two subgraph representations are then fused and aligned with LLM-derived, semantically augmented representations. Importantly, before each alignment step, DLLM employs a two-stage denoising diffusion module to eliminate intrinsic noise while assisting structural representation alignment. Specifically, unconditional denoising diffusion first removes erroneous information, followed by conditional denoising diffusion based on graph-guided to eliminate misleading information. Finally, the noise-robust representation that integrates semantic knowledge and structural information is fed into existing cognitive diagnosis models for prediction. Experimental results on three publicly available web-based educational platform datasets demonstrate that our DLLM achieves optimal predictive performance across varying noise levels, which demonstrates that DLLM achieves noise robustness while effectively leveraging semantic knowledge from LLM.
Report of the 2025 Workshop on Next-Generation Ecosystems for Scientific Computing: Harnessing Community, Software, and AI for Cross-Disciplinary Team Science
McInnes, Lois Curfman, Arnold, Dorian, Balaprakash, Prasanna, Bernhardt, Mike, Cerny, Beth, Dubey, Anshu, Giles, Roscoe, Hood, Denice Ward, Leung, Mary Ann, Lopez-Marrero, Vanessa, Messina, Paul, Newton, Olivia B., Oehmen, Chris, Wild, Stefan M., Willenbring, Jim, Woodley, Lou, Baylis, Tony, Bernholdt, David E., Camano, Chris, Cohoon, Johannah, Ferenbaugh, Charles, Fiore, Stephen M., Gesing, Sandra, Gomez-Zara, Diego, Howison, James, Islam, Tanzima, Kepczynski, David, Lively, Charles, Menon, Harshitha, Messer, Bronson, Ngom, Marieme, Paliath, Umesh, Papka, Michael E., Qualters, Irene, Raybourn, Elaine M., Riley, Katherine, Rodriguez, Paulina, Rouson, Damian, Schwalbe, Michelle, Seal, Sudip K., Surer, Ozge, Taylor, Valerie, Wu, Lingfei
This report summarizes insights from the 2025 Workshop on Next-Generation Ecosystems for Scientific Computing: Harnessing Community, Software, and AI for Cross-Disciplinary Team Science, which convened more than 40 experts from national laboratories, academia, industry, and community organizations to chart a path toward more powerful, sustainable, and collaborative scientific software ecosystems. To address urgent challenges at the intersection of high-performance computing (HPC), AI, and scientific software, participants envisioned agile, robust ecosystems built through socio-technical co-design--the intentional integration of social and technical components as interdependent parts of a unified strategy. This approach combines advances in AI, HPC, and software with new models for cross-disciplinary collaboration, training, and workforce development. Key recommendations include building modular, trustworthy AI-enabled scientific software systems; enabling scientific teams to integrate AI systems into their workflows while preserving human creativity, trust, and scientific rigor; and creating innovative training pipelines that keep pace with rapid technological change. Pilot projects were identified as near-term catalysts, with initial priorities focused on hybrid AI/HPC infrastructure, cross-disciplinary collaboration and pedagogy, responsible AI guidelines, and prototyping of public-private partnerships. This report presents a vision of next-generation ecosystems for scientific computing where AI, software, hardware, and human expertise are interwoven to drive discovery, expand access, strengthen the workforce, and accelerate scientific progress.
Generating High-Quality Datasets for Code Editing via Open-Source Language Models
Zhang, Zekai, Liu, Mingwei, Chen, Zhenxi, Liang, Linxi, Chen, Yuxuan, Ou, Guangsheng, Wang, Yanlin, Li, Dan, Peng, Xin, Zheng, Zibin
Code editing plays a vital role in software engineering, requiring developers to adjust existing code according to natural language instructions while keeping functionality intact and avoiding unnecessary modifications. However, commit-based datasets commonly used for this task are often noisy, lack diversity, and fail to reflect the style of real-world edit instructions. To address this, we introduce OpenCodeEdit, an open-source pipeline that leverages multiple LLMs to synthesize realistic code-edit triplets. The pipeline produces both concise "lazy" instructions and more detailed "descriptive" ones, and applies filtering based on diffs and topics to guarantee data quality and variety. Using this process, we construct OCEDataFT, a curated dataset of 20K samples. Fine-tuning three advanced base models on OCEDataFT leads to significant performance boosts on the CanItEdit benchmark, with relative pass@1 improvements ranging from 4.50% to 20.79%. Notably, the resulting models achieve performance close to closed-source systems, narrowing the gap to GPT-4 to just 3.54%, without relying on proprietary resources or manual annotation.
COSPADI: Compressing LLMs via Calibration-Guided Sparse Dictionary Learning
Shopkhoev, Dmitriy, Makhov, Denis, Zhussip, Magauiya, Ali, Ammar, Lefkimmiatis, Stamatios
Post-training compression of large language models (LLMs) largely relies on low-rank weight approximation, which represents each column of a weight matrix in a shared low-dimensional subspace. While this is a computationally efficient strategy, the imposed structural constraint is rigid and can lead to a noticeable model accuracy drop. In this work, we propose CoSpaDi (Compression via Sparse Dictionary Learning), a novel training-free compression framework that replaces low-rank decomposition with a more flexible structured sparse factorization in which each weight matrix is represented with a dense dictionary and a column-sparse coefficient matrix. This formulation enables a union-of-subspaces representation: different columns of the original weight matrix are approximated in distinct subspaces spanned by adaptively selected dictionary atoms, offering greater expressiveness than a single invariant basis. Crucially, CoSpaDi leverages a small calibration dataset to optimize the factorization such that the output activations of compressed projection layers closely match those of the original ones, thereby minimizing functional reconstruction error rather than mere weight approximation. This data-aware strategy preserves better model fidelity without any fine-tuning under reasonable compression ratios. Moreover, the resulting structured sparsity allows efficient sparse-dense matrix multiplication and is compatible with post-training quantization for further memory and latency gains. We evaluate CoSpaDi across multiple Llama and Qwen models under per-layer and per-group settings at 20-50\% compression ratios, demonstrating consistent superiority over state-of-the-art data-aware low-rank methods both in accuracy and perplexity. Our results establish structured sparse dictionary learning as a powerful alternative to conventional low-rank approaches for efficient LLM deployment.
GEM-Bench: A Benchmark for Ad-Injected Response Generation within Generative Engine Marketing
Hu, Silan, Zhang, Shiqi, Shi, Yimin, Xiao, Xiaokui
Generative Engine Marketing (GEM) is an emerging ecosystem for monetizing generative engines, such as LLM-based chatbots, by seamlessly integrating relevant advertisements into their responses. At the core of GEM lies the generation and evaluation of ad-injected responses. However, existing benchmarks are not specifically designed for this purpose, which limits future research. To address this gap, we propose GEM-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark for ad-injected response generation in GEM. GEM-Bench includes three curated datasets covering both chatbot and search scenarios, a metric ontology that captures multiple dimensions of user satisfaction and engagement, and several baseline solutions implemented within an extensible multi-agent framework. Our preliminary results indicate that, while simple prompt-based methods achieve reasonable engagement such as click-through rate, they often reduce user satisfaction. In contrast, approaches that insert ads based on pre-generated ad-free responses help mitigate this issue but introduce additional overhead. These findings highlight the need for future research on designing more effective and efficient solutions for generating ad-injected responses in GEM. The benchmark and all related resources are publicly available at https://gem-bench.org/.
What Makes AI Applications Acceptable or Unacceptable? A Predictive Moral Framework
Eriksson, Kimmo, Karlsson, Simon, Vartanova, Irina, Strimling, Pontus
As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms society, developers and policymakers struggle to anticipate which applications will face public moral resistance. We propose that these judgments are not idiosyncratic but systematic and predictable. In a large, preregistered study (N = 587, U.S. representative sample), we used a comprehensive taxonomy of 100 AI applications spanning personal and organizational contexts-including both functional uses and the moral treatment of AI itself. In participants' collective judgment, applications ranged from highly unacceptable to fully acceptable. We found this variation was strongly predictable: five core moral qualities-perceived risk, benefit, dishonesty, unnaturalness, and reduced accountability-collectively explained over 90% of the variance in acceptability ratings. The framework demonstrated strong predictive power across all domains and successfully predicted individual-level judgments for held-out applications. These findings reveal that a structured moral psychology underlies public evaluation of new technologies, offering a powerful tool for anticipating public resistance and guiding responsible innovation in AI.
Generative Interfaces for Language Models
Chen, Jiaqi, Zhang, Yanzhe, Zhang, Yutong, Shao, Yijia, Yang, Diyi
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly seen as assistants, copilots, and consultants, capable of supporting a wide range of tasks through natural conversation. However, most systems remain constrained by a linear request-response format that often makes interactions inefficient in multi-turn, information-dense, and exploratory tasks. To address these limitations, we propose Generative Interfaces for Language Models, a paradigm in which LLMs respond to user queries by proactively generating user interfaces (UIs) that enable more adaptive and interactive engagement. Our framework leverages structured interface-specific representations and iterative refinements to translate user queries into task-specific UIs. For systematic evaluation, we introduce a multidimensional assessment framework that compares generative interfaces with traditional chat-based ones across diverse tasks, interaction patterns, and query types, capturing functional, interactive, and emotional aspects of user experience. Results show that generative interfaces consistently outperform conversational ones, with up to a 72% improvement in human preference. These findings clarify when and why users favor generative interfaces, paving the way for future advancements in human-AI interaction.
Pref-GUIDE: Continual Policy Learning from Real-Time Human Feedback via Preference-Based Learning
Training reinforcement learning agents with human feedback is crucial when task objectives are difficult to specify through dense reward functions. While prior methods rely on offline trajectory comparisons to elicit human preferences, such data is unavailable in online learning scenarios where agents must adapt on the fly. Recent approaches address this by collecting real-time scalar feedback to guide agent behavior and train reward models for continued learning after human feedback becomes unavailable. However, scalar feedback is often noisy and inconsistent, limiting the accuracy and generalization of learned rewards. We propose Pref-GUIDE, a framework that transforms real-time scalar feedback into preference-based data to improve reward model learning for continual policy training. Pref-GUIDE Individual mitigates temporal inconsistency by comparing agent behaviors within short windows and filtering ambiguous feedback. Pref-GUIDE Voting further enhances robustness by aggregating reward models across a population of users to form consensus preferences. Across three challenging environments, Pref-GUIDE significantly outperforms scalar-feedback baselines, with the voting variant exceeding even expert-designed dense rewards. By reframing scalar feedback as structured preferences with population feedback, Pref-GUIDE offers a scalable and principled approach for harnessing human input in online reinforcement learning.
LLM Unlearning Without an Expert Curated Dataset
Zhu, Xiaoyuan, Zhang, Muru, Liu, Ollie, Jia, Robin, Neiswanger, Willie
Modern large language models often encode sensitive, harmful, or copyrighted knowledge, raising the need for post-hoc unlearning-the ability to remove specific domains of knowledge from a model without full retraining. A major bottleneck in current unlearning pipelines is constructing effective forget sets-datasets that approximate the target domain and guide the model to forget it. In this work, we introduce a scalable, automated approach to generate high-quality forget sets using language models themselves. Our method synthesizes textbook-style data through a structured prompting pipeline, requiring only a domain name as input. Through experiments on unlearning biosecurity, cybersecurity, and Harry Potter novels, we show that our synthetic datasets consistently outperform the baseline synthetic alternatives and are comparable to the expert-curated ones. Additionally, ablation studies reveal that the multi-step generation pipeline significantly boosts data diversity, which in turn improves unlearning utility. Overall, our findings suggest that synthetic datasets offer a promising path toward practical, scalable unlearning for a wide range of emerging domains without the need for manual intervention. We release our code and dataset at https://github.com/xyzhu123/Synthetic_Textbook.