As Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly impacts professional practice, there is a growing need to AI-related competencies into higher education curricula. However, research on the implementation of AI education within study programs remains limited and requires new forms of collaboration across disciplines. This study addresses this gap and explores perspectives on interdisciplinary curriculum development through the lens of different stakeholders. In particular, we examine the case of curriculum development for a novel undergraduate program in AI in engineering. The research uses a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative curriculum mapping with qualitative focus group interviews. In addition to assessing the alignment of the curriculum with the targeted competencies, the study also examines the perceived quality, consistency, practicality and effectiveness from both academic and industry perspectives, as well as differences in perceptions between educators who were involved in the development and those who were not. The findings provide a practical understanding of the outcomes of interdisciplinary AI curriculum development and contribute to a broader understanding of how educator participation in curriculum development influences perceptions of quality aspects. It also advances the field of AI education by providing a reference point and insights for further interdisciplinary curriculum developments in response to evolving industry needs.

Recommender systems play a critical role in enhancing user experience by providing personalized suggestions based on user preferences. Traditional approaches often rely on explicit numerical ratings or assume access to fully ranked lists of items. However, ratings frequently fail to capture true preferences due to users' behavioral biases and subjective interpretations of rating scales, while eliciting full rankings is demanding and impractical. To overcome these limitations, we propose a generalized utility-based framework that learns preferences from simple and intuitive pairwise comparisons. Our approach is model-agnostic and designed to optimize for arbitrary, task-specific utility functions, allowing the system's objective to be explicitly aligned with the definition of a high-quality outcome in any given application. A central contribution of our work is a novel utility-based active sampling strategy for preference elicitation. This method selects queries that are expected to provide the greatest improvement to the utility of the final recommended outcome. We ground our preference model in the probabilistic Plackett-Luce framework for pairwise data. To demonstrate the versatility of our approach, we present two distinct experiments: first, an implementation using matrix factorization for a classic movie recommendation task, and second, an implementation using a neural network for a complex candidate selection scenario in university admissions. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework provides a more accurate, data-efficient, and user-centric paradigm for personalized ranking.

Multimodal Machine Learning (MML) aims to integrate and analyze information from diverse modalities, such as text, audio, and visuals, enabling machines to address complex tasks like sentiment analysis, emotion recognition, and multimedia retrieval. Recently, Arabic MML has reached a certain level of maturity in its foundational development, making it time to conduct a comprehensive survey. This paper explores Arabic MML by categorizing efforts through a novel taxonomy and analyzing existing research. Our taxonomy organizes these efforts into four key topics: datasets, applications, approaches, and challenges. By providing a structured overview, this survey offers insights into the current state of Arabic MML, highlighting areas that have not been investigated and critical research gaps. Researchers will be empowered to build upon the identified opportunities and address challenges to advance the field.

Recent advances in test-time scaling have led to the emergence of thinking LLMs that exhibit self-reflective behaviors and multi-step reasoning. While RL drives this self-improvement paradigm, a recent study (Gandhi et al., 2025) shows that RL alone does not truly instill these new reasoning abilities - it merely draws out behaviors already present in the base models. This raises a question: How can we train the models that don't exhibit such thinking behavior to develop it in the first place? To this end, we propose ThinkTuning, a GRPO-based interactive training approach where we augment the rollouts of a student model with the guidance from a teacher model. A simple idea from classroom practice inspires our method: a teacher poses a problem, lets the student try an answer, then gives corrective feedback -- enough to point the mind in the right direction and then show the solution. Each piece of feedback reshapes the student's thoughts, leading them to arrive at the correct solution. Similarly, we find that this type of implicit supervision through feedback from a teacher model of the same size improves the reasoning capabilities of the student model. In particular, on average, our method shows a 3.85% improvement over zero-shot baselines across benchmarks, and on MATH-500, AIME and GPQA-Diamond it shows 2.08%, 2.23% and 3.99% improvements over the vanilla-GRPO baseline. Source code is available at https://github.com/3rdAT/ThinkTuning.

The automation of robotic tasks requires high precision and adaptability, particularly in force-based operations such as insertions. Traditional learning-based approaches either rely on static datasets, which limit their ability to generalize, or require frequent manual intervention to maintain good performances. As a result, ensuring long-term reliability without human supervision remains a significant challenge. To address this, we propose an adaptive self-supervised learning framework for insertion classification that continuously improves its precision over time. The framework operates in real-time, incrementally refining its classification decisions by integrating newly acquired force data. Unlike conventional methods, it does not rely on pre-collected datasets but instead evolves dynamically with each task execution. Through real-world experiments, we demonstrate how the system progressively reduces execution time while maintaining near-perfect precision as more samples are processed. This adaptability ensures long-term reliability in force-based robotic tasks while minimizing the need for manual intervention.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are commonly tuned with supervised finetuning on ReAct-style expert trajectories or preference optimization over pairwise rollouts. Most of these methods focus on imitating specific expert behaviors or promoting chosen reasoning thoughts and actions over rejected ones. However, without reasoning and comparing over alternatives actions, LLM agents finetuned with these methods may over-commit towards seemingly plausible but suboptimal actions due to limited action space exploration. To address this, in this paper we propose Self-taught ActioN Deliberation (SAND) framework, enabling LLM agents to explicitly deliberate over candidate actions before committing to one. To tackle the challenges of when and what to deliberate given large action space and step-level action evaluation, we incorporate self-consistency action sampling and execution-guided action critique to help synthesize step-wise action deliberation thoughts using the base model of the LLM agent. In an iterative manner, the deliberation trajectories are then used to finetune the LLM agent itself. Evaluating on two representative interactive agent tasks, SAND achieves an average 20% improvement over initial supervised finetuning and also outperforms state-of-the-art agent tuning approaches.

Edge-cloud collaborative computing (ECCC) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for addressing the computational demands of modern intelligent applications, integrating cloud resources with edge devices to enable efficient, low-latency processing. Recent advancements in AI, particularly deep learning and large language models (LLMs), have dramatically enhanced the capabilities of these distributed systems, yet introduce significant challenges in model deployment and resource management. In this survey, we comprehensive examine the intersection of distributed intelligence and model optimization within edge-cloud environments, providing a structured tutorial on fundamental architectures, enabling technologies, and emerging applications. Additionally, we systematically analyze model optimization approaches, including compression, adaptation, and neural architecture search, alongside AI-driven resource management strategies that balance performance, energy efficiency, and latency requirements. We further explore critical aspects of privacy protection and security enhancement within ECCC systems and examines practical deployments through diverse applications, spanning autonomous driving, healthcare, and industrial automation. Performance analysis and benchmarking techniques are also thoroughly explored to establish evaluation standards for these complex systems. Furthermore, the review identifies critical research directions including LLMs deployment, 6G integration, neuromorphic computing, and quantum computing, offering a roadmap for addressing persistent challenges in heterogeneity management, real-time processing, and scalability. By bridging theoretical advancements and practical deployments, this survey offers researchers and practitioners a holistic perspective on leveraging AI to optimize distributed computing environments, fostering innovation in next-generation intelligent systems.

Arabic text diacritization remains a persistent challenge in natural language processing due to the language's morphological richness. In this paper, we introduce Sadeed, a novel approach based on a fine-tuned decoder-only language model adapted from Kuwain 1.5B Hennara et al. [2025], a compact model originally trained on diverse Arabic corpora. Sadeed is fine-tuned on carefully curated, high-quality diacritized datasets, constructed through a rigorous data-cleaning and normalization pipeline. Despite utilizing modest computational resources, Sadeed achieves competitive results compared to proprietary large language models and outperforms traditional models trained on similar domains. Additionally, we highlight key limitations in current benchmarking practices for Arabic diacritization. To address these issues, we introduce SadeedDiac-25, a new benchmark designed to enable fairer and more comprehensive evaluation across diverse text genres and complexity levels. Together, Sadeed and SadeedDiac-25 provide a robust foundation for advancing Arabic NLP applications, including machine translation, text-to-speech, and language learning tools.

Fairness in machine learning is more important than ever as ethical concerns continue to grow. Individual fairness demands that individuals differing only in sensitive attributes receive the same outcomes. However, commonly used machine learning algorithms often fail to achieve such fairness. To improve individual fairness, various training methods have been developed, such as incorporating fairness constraints as optimisation objectives. While these methods have demonstrated empirical effectiveness, they lack formal guarantees of fairness. Existing approaches that aim to provide fairness guarantees primarily rely on verification techniques, which can sometimes fail to produce definitive results. Moreover, verification alone does not actively enhance individual fairness during training. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework that formally guarantees individual fairness throughout training. Our approach consists of two parts, i.e., (1) provably fair initialisation that ensures the model starts in a fair state, and (2) a fairness-preserving training algorithm that maintains fairness as the model learns. A key element of our method is the use of randomised response mechanisms, which protect sensitive attributes while maintaining fairness guarantees. We formally prove that this mechanism sustains individual fairness throughout the training process. Experimental evaluations confirm that our approach is effective, i.e., producing models that are empirically fair and accurate. Furthermore, our approach is much more efficient than the alternative approach based on certified training (which requires neural network verification during training).

In this paper, we propose a new measure for detecting overlap in multivariate Gaussian clusters. The aim of online learning from data streams is to create clustering, classification, or regression models that can adapt over time based on the conceptual drift of streaming data. In the case of clustering, this can result in a large number of clusters that may overlap and should be merged. Commonly used distribution dissimilarity measures are not adequate for determining overlapping clusters in the context of online learning from streaming data due to their inability to account for all shapes of clusters and their high computational demands. Our proposed dissimilarity measure is specifically designed to detect overlap rather than dissimilarity and can be computed faster compared to existing measures. Our method is several times faster than compared methods and is capable of detecting overlapping clusters while avoiding the merging of orthogonal clusters.