The adoption of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) in education is still emerging. In this study, we explore the development and evaluation of AI teaching assistants that provide curriculum-based guidance using a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline applied to selected open-source small language models (SLMs). We benchmarked eight SLMs, including LLaMA 3.1, IBM Granite 3.3, and Gemma 3 (7-17B parameters), against GPT-4o. Our findings show that with proper prompting and targeted retrieval, SLMs can match LLMs in delivering accurate, pedagogically aligned responses. Importantly, SLMs offer significant sustainability benefits due to their lower computational and energy requirements, enabling real-time use on consumer-grade hardware without depending on cloud infrastructure. This makes them not only cost-effective and privacy-preserving but also environmentally responsible, positioning them as viable AI teaching assistants for educational institutions aiming to scale personalized learning in a sustainable and energy-efficient manner.

Our results resolve an open question by Gillen et al. (2018) by showing that online learning under an unknown individual fairness constraint is possible even without assuming a strong parametric form of the

Our results resolve an open question by Gillen et al. (2018) by showing that online learning under an unknown individual fairness constraint is possible even without assuming a strong parametric form of the

Further clarify the description of the reduction from fair online batch classification to online batch classification.

We consider online learning in episodic loop-free Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the loss function can change arbitrarily between episodes.

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. Online Learning with Costly Features and Labels Summary: The paper discusses a version of sequential prediction where there is a cost associated to obtaining features and labels. First, the case where labels are given but features are bought. Here the regret bound is of the form sqrt{2^d T}. The time dependence is as desired, and a lower bound shows that the exponential dependence in the dimension of the features space cannot be reduced in general.