Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have contributed to the development of automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems that can correct grammatical errors. However, while these systems are effective at improving text, they are not optimally designed for language learning. They favor direct revisions, often with a click-to-fix functionality that can be applied without considering the reason for the correction. Meanwhile, depending on the error type, learners may benefit most from simple explanations and strategically indirect hints, especially on generalizable grammatical rules. To support the generation of such feedback, we introduce an annotation framework that models each error's error type and generalizability. For error type classification, we introduce a typology focused on inferring learners' knowledge gaps by connecting their errors to specific grammatical patterns. Following this framework, we collect a dataset of annotated learner errors and corresponding human-written feedback comments, each labeled as a direct correction or hint. With this data, we evaluate keyword-guided, keyword-free, and template-guided methods of generating feedback using large language models (LLMs). Human teachers examined each system's outputs, assessing them on grounds including relevance, factuality, and comprehensibility. We report on the development of the dataset and the comparative performance of the systems investigated.

Offline-to-online Reinforcement Learning (O2O RL) aims to perform online fine-tuning on an offline pre-trained policy to minimize costly online interactions. Existing work used offline datasets to generate data that conform to the online data distribution for data augmentation. However, generated data still exhibits a gap with the online data, limiting overall performance. To address this, we propose a new data augmentation approach, Classifier-Free Diffusion Generation (CFDG). Without introducing additional classifier training overhead, CFDG leverages classifier-free guidance diffusion to significantly enhance the generation quality of offline and online data with different distributions. Additionally, it employs a reweighting method to enable more generated data to align with the online data, enhancing performance while maintaining the agent's stability. Experimental results show that CFDG outperforms replaying the two data types or using a standard diffusion model to generate new data. Our method is versatile and can be integrated with existing offline-to-online RL algorithms. By implementing CFDG to popular methods IQL, PEX and APL, we achieve a notable 15% average improvement in empirical performance on the D4RL benchmark such as MuJoCo and AntMaze.

Analyzing literature involves tracking interactions between characters, locations, and themes. Visualization has the potential to facilitate the mapping and analysis of these complex relationships, but capturing structured information from unstructured story data remains a challenge. As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, we see an opportunity to use their text processing and analysis capabilities to augment and reimagine existing storyline visualization techniques. Toward this goal, we introduce an LLM-driven data parsing pipeline that automatically extracts relevant narrative information from novels and scripts. We then apply this pipeline to create Story Ribbons, an interactive visualization system that helps novice and expert literary analysts explore detailed character and theme trajectories at multiple narrative levels. Through pipeline evaluations and user studies with Story Ribbons on 36 literary works, we demonstrate the potential of LLMs to streamline narrative visualization creation and reveal new insights about familiar stories. We also describe current limitations of AI-based systems, and interaction motifs designed to address these issues.

We introduce a modular prompting framework that supports safer and more adaptive use of large language models (LLMs) across dynamic, user-centered tasks. Grounded in human learning theory, particularly the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), our method combines a natural language boundary prompt with a control schema encoded with fuzzy scaffolding logic and adaptation rules. This architecture enables LLMs to modulate behavior in response to user state without requiring fine-tuning or external orchestration. In a simulated intelligent tutoring setting, the framework improves scaffolding quality, adaptivity, and instructional alignment across multiple models, outperforming standard prompting baselines. Evaluation is conducted using rubric-based LLM graders at scale. While initially developed for education, the framework has shown promise in other interaction-heavy domains, such as procedural content generation for games. Designed for safe deployment, it provides a reusable methodology for structuring interpretable, goal-aligned LLM behavior in uncertain or evolving contexts.

Oral histories are vital records of lived experience, particularly within communities affected by systemic injustice and historical erasure. Effective and efficient analysis of their oral history archives can promote access and understanding of the oral histories. However, Large-scale analysis of these archives remains limited due to their unstructured format, emotional complexity, and high annotation costs. This paper presents a scalable framework to automate semantic and sentiment annotation for Japanese American Incarceration Oral History. Using LLMs, we construct a high-quality dataset, evaluate multiple models, and test prompt engineering strategies in historically sensitive contexts. Our multiphase approach combines expert annotation, prompt design, and LLM evaluation with ChatGPT, Llama, and Qwen. We labeled 558 sentences from 15 narrators for sentiment and semantic classification, then evaluated zero-shot, few-shot, and RAG strategies. For semantic classification, ChatGPT achieved the highest F1 score (88.71%), followed by Llama (84.99%) and Qwen (83.72%). For sentiment analysis, Llama slightly outperformed Qwen (82.66%) and ChatGPT (82.29%), with all models showing comparable results. The best prompt configurations were used to annotate 92,191 sentences from 1,002 interviews in the JAIOH collection. Our findings show that LLMs can effectively perform semantic and sentiment annotation across large oral history collections when guided by well-designed prompts. This study provides a reusable annotation pipeline and practical guidance for applying LLMs in culturally sensitive archival analysis. By bridging archival ethics with scalable NLP techniques, this work lays the groundwork for responsible use of artificial intelligence in digital humanities and preservation of collective memory. GitHub: https://github.com/kc6699c/LLM4OralHistoryAnalysis.

--Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown strong performance on graph-structured data, but their reliance on graph connectivity often limits scalability and efficiency. In this work, we integrate KANs into three popular GNN architectures --GA T, SGC, and APPNP --resulting in three new models: KGA T, KSGC, and KAPPNP . We further adopt a multi-teacher knowledge amalgamation framework, where knowledge from multiple KAN-based GNNs is distilled into a graph-independent KAN student model. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed models improve node classification accuracy, and the knowledge amalgamation approach significantly boosts student model performance. Our findings highlight the potential of KANs for enhancing GNN expressiveness and for enabling efficient, graph-free inference. With the rapid development of deep learning technologies, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in processing graph-structured data [1]. GNNs have been widely applied in social network analysis, recommendation systems, knowledge graphs, and bioinfor-matics.

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often struggle to generalize to new tasks and contexts without updating their parameters, mainly because their learned representations and policies are overfit to the specifics of their training environments. To boost agents' in-context RL (ICRL) ability, this work formulates ICRL as a two-agent emergent communication problem and introduces CORAL (Communicative Representation for Adaptive RL), a framework that learns a transferable communicative context by decoupling latent representation learning from control. In CORAL, an Information Agent (IA) is pre-trained as a world model on a diverse distribution of tasks. Its objective is not to maximize task reward, but to build a world model and distill its understanding into concise messages. The emergent communication protocol is shaped by a novel Causal Influence Loss, which measures the effect that the message has on the next action. During deployment, the previously trained IA serves as a fixed contextualizer for a new Control Agent (CA), which learns to solve tasks by interpreting the provided communicative context. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach enables the CA to achieve significant gains in sample efficiency and successfully perform zero-shot adaptation with the help of pre-trained IA in entirely unseen sparse-reward environments, validating the efficacy of learning a transferable communicative representation.

--Point cloud place recognition (PCPR) determines the geo-location within a prebuilt map and plays a crucial role in geoscience and robotics applications such as autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, and augmented reality. In real-world large-scale deployments of a geographic positioning system, PCPR models must continuously acquire, update, and accumulate knowledge to adapt to diverse and dynamic environments, i.e., the ability known as continual learning (CL). However, existing PCPR models often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, leading to significant performance degradation in previously learned scenes when adapting to new environments or sensor types. This results in poor model scalability, increased maintenance costs, and system deployment difficulties, undermining the practicality of PCPR. T o address these issues, we propose LifelongPR, a novel continual learning framework for PCPR, which effectively extracts and fuses knowledge from sequential point cloud data. First, to alleviate the knowledge loss, we propose a replay sample selection method that dynamically allocates sample sizes according to each dataset's information quantity and selects spatially diverse samples for maximal representativeness. Second, to handle domain shifts, we design a prompt learning-based CL framework with a lightweight prompt module and a two-stage training strategy, enabling domain-specific feature adaptation while minimizing forgetting. Comprehensive experiments on large-scale public and self-collected datasets are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the state-of-the-art (SOT A) method, our method achieves 6.50% improvement in mIR @1, 7.96% improvement in mR @1, and an 8.95% reduction in F . LACE recognition is a foundational task in geoscience and robotics, enabling autonomous systems to determining their geo-locations within previously mapped environments by identifying revisited places [1, 2]. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation Project (No. 42130105, No. 42201477, No. 42171431). Jianping Li is with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798.

While large multi-modal models (LMMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in segmentation and comprehension, they still struggle with two limitations: inaccurate segmentation and hallucinated comprehension. These challenges stem primarily from constraints in weak visual comprehension and a lack of fine-grained perception. T o alleviate these limitations, we propose LIRA, a framework that capitalizes on the complementary relationship between visual comprehension and segmentation via two key components: (1) Semantic-Enhanced Feature Extractor (SEFE) improves object attribute inference by fusing semantic and pixel-level features, leading to more accurate segmentation; (2) Interleaved Local Visual Coupling (ILVC) autoregressively generates local descriptions after extracting local features based on segmentation masks, offering fine-grained supervision to mitigate hallucinations. Furthermore, we find that the precision of object segmentation is positively correlated with the latent related semantics of the token. T o quantify this relationship and the model's potential semantic inferring ability, we introduce the Attributes Evaluation (AttrEval) dataset. Our experiments show that LIRA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both segmentation and comprehension tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/echo840/LIRA .

Agentic AI systems, possessing capabilities for autonomous planning and action, show great potential across diverse domains. However, their practical deployment is hindered by challenges in aligning their behavior with varied human values, complex safety requirements, and specific compliance needs. Existing alignment methodologies often falter when faced with the complex task of providing personalized context without inducing confabulation or operational inefficiencies. This paper introduces a novel solution: a 'superego' agent, designed as a personalized oversight mechanism for agentic AI. This system dynamically steers AI planning by referencing user-selected 'Creed Constitutions' encapsulating diverse rule sets -- with adjustable adherence levels to fit non-negotiable values. A real-time compliance enforcer validates plans against these constitutions and a universal ethical floor before execution. We present a functional system, including a demonstration interface with a prototypical constitution-sharing portal, and successful integration with third-party models via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Comprehensive benchmark evaluations (HarmBench, AgentHarm) demonstrate that our Superego agent dramatically reduces harmful outputs -- achieving up to a 98.3% harm score reduction and near-perfect refusal rates (e.g., 100% with Claude Sonnet 4 on AgentHarm's harmful set) for leading LLMs like Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT-4o. This approach substantially simplifies personalized AI alignment, rendering agentic systems more reliably attuned to individual and cultural contexts, while also enabling substantial safety improvements. An overview on this research with examples is available at https://superego.creed.space.