Education
Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Tracing Models
Mitton, Joshua, Bhattacharyya, Prarthana, Abboud, Ralph, Woodhead, Simon
The main focus of research on Knowledge Tracing (KT) models is on model developments with the aim of improving predictive accuracy. Most of these models make the most incorrect predictions when students choose a distractor, leading to student errors going undetected. We present an approach to add new capabilities to KT models by capturing predictive uncertainty and demonstrate that a larger predictive uncertainty aligns with model incorrect predictions. We show that uncertainty in KT models is informative and that this signal would be pedagogically useful for application in an educational learning platform that can be used in a limited resource setting where understanding student ability is necessary.
Gender Stereotypes in Professional Roles Among Saudis: An Analytical Study of AI-Generated Images Using Language Models
AlKhalifah, Khaloud S., Mashaabi, Malak, Al-Khalifa, Hend
This study investigates the extent to which contemporary Text-to-Image artificial intelligence (AI) models perpetuate gender stereotypes and cultural inaccuracies when generating depictions of professionals in Saudi Arabia. We analyzed 1,006 images produced by ImageFX, DALL-E V3, and Grok for 56 diverse Saudi professions using neutral prompts. Two trained Saudi annotators evaluated each image on five dimensions: perceived gender, clothing and appearance, background and setting, activities and interactions, and age. A third senior researcher adjudicated whenever the two primary raters disagreed, yielding 10,100 individual judgements. The results reveal a strong gender imbalance, with ImageFX outputs being 85\% male, Grok 86.6\% male, and DALL-E V3 96\% male, indicating that DALL-E V3 exhibited the strongest overall gender stereotyping. This imbalance was most evident in leadership and technical roles. Moreover, cultural inaccuracies in clothing, settings, and depicted activities were frequently observed across all three models. Counter-stereotypical images often arise from cultural misinterpretations rather than genuinely progressive portrayals. We conclude that current models mirror societal biases embedded in their training data, generated by humans, offering only a limited reflection of the Saudi labour market's gender dynamics and cultural nuances. These findings underscore the urgent need for more diverse training data, fairer algorithms, and culturally sensitive evaluation frameworks to ensure equitable and authentic visual outputs.
A State-of-the-Art SQL Reasoning Model using RLVR
Ali, Alnur, Baheti, Ashutosh, Chang, Jonathan, Chi, Ta-Chung, Cui, Brandon, Drozdov, Andrew, Frankle, Jonathan, Gupta, Abhay, Koppol, Pallavi, Kulinski, Sean, Li, Jonathan, Misra, Dipendra, Opsahl-Ong, Krista, Ortiz, Jose Javier Gonzalez, Zaharia, Matei, Zhang, Yue
Developing custom reasoning models via Reinforcement Learning (RL) that can incorporate organization-specific knowledge has great potential to address problems faced by enterprise customers. In many of these problems, the reward function is verifiable, a setting termed RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). We apply RLVR to a popular data science benchmark called BIRD that measures the ability of an AI agent to convert a natural language query for a database to SQL executions. We apply a simple and general-purpose training recipe involving careful prompt and model selection, a warm-up stage using our offline RL approach called TAO, followed by rigorous online RLVR training. With no additional training data beyond the BIRD training set and no use of proprietary models, our very first submission to the BIRD leaderboard reached state-of-the-art accuracy on the private test set: 73.56% without self-consistency and 75.68% with self-consistency. In the latter case, our model also required fewer generations than the second-best approach. While BIRD is only a proxy task, the simplicity of our framework makes it broadly applicable to enterprise domains such as business intelligence, data science, and coding.
DivLogicEval: A Framework for Benchmarking Logical Reasoning Evaluation in Large Language Models
Chung, Tsz Ting, Liu, Lemao, Yu, Mo, Yeung, Dit-Yan
Logic reasoning in natural language has been recognized as an important measure of human intelligence for Large Language Models (LLMs). Popular benchmarks may entangle multiple reasoning skills and thus provide unfaithful evaluations on the logic reasoning skill. Meanwhile, existing logic reasoning benchmarks are limited in language diversity and their distributions are deviated from the distribution of an ideal logic reasoning benchmark, which may lead to biased evaluation results. This paper thereby proposes a new classical logic benchmark DivLogicEval, consisting of natural sentences composed of diverse statements in a counterintuitive way. To ensure a more reliable evaluation, we also introduce a new evaluation metric that mitigates the influence of bias and randomness inherent in LLMs. Through experiments, we demonstrate the extent to which logical reasoning is required to answer the questions in DivLogicEval and compare the performance of different popular LLMs in conducting logical reasoning.