Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a fundamental technique for compressing large language models (LLMs) into compact, efficient student models. However, existing white-box KD methods mainly focus on balancing ground truth and student-generated responses while overlooking two critical factors: training data quality and student-model compatibility. To address these limitations, we propose Selective Reflection Distillation (SRD), a novel data curation framework that leverages reflections from student models to systematically refine training data. SRD dynamically evaluates and selects prompt-response pairs by comparing ground truth data with student model outputs, selectively curating high-quality, student-compatible training instances through automated ranking based on difficulty. Furthermore, after selecting the training data, a curriculum scheduling strategy is employed to incrementally introduce these curated subsets into the distillation process at fixed intervals. As a plug-and-play enhancement, SRD consistently improves distillation outcomes across diverse white-box KD approaches and model architectures, as well as decreases computational cost significantly during KD training. Experiments on a range of language model benchmarks demonstrate SRD's consistent improvements in distilled model performance, as well as a reduction in training runtime by up to 39%, under diverse KD methods and model families. Notably, SRD operates as a plug-and-play module, enhancing sample efficiency without modifying underlying KD algorithms. Our findings highlight that data quality and compatibility are pivotal to effective and efficient distillation of LLMs, and SRD provides a principled framework to achieve both. This work advances the understanding of data-centric factors in KD and offers practical insights for enhancing the capability and efficiency of compressed LLMs.

This work leverages adaptive social learning to estimate partially observable global states in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach enables the concurrent operation of social learning and reinforcement learning. Specifically, it alternates between a single step of social learning and a single step of MARL, eliminating the need for the time- and computation-intensive two-timescale learning frameworks. Theoretical guarantees are provided to support the effectiveness of the proposed method. Simulation results verify that the performance of the proposed methodology can approach that of reinforcement learning when the true state is known.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to handle complex decision-making tasks, yet their ability to perform structured resource allocation remains underexplored. Evaluating their reasoning is also difficult due to data contamination and the static nature of existing benchmarks. We present a dual-purpose framework leveraging Participatory Budgeting (PB) both as (i) a practical setting for LLM-based resource allocation and (ii) an adaptive benchmark for evaluating their reasoning capabilities. We task LLMs with selecting project subsets under feasibility (e.g., budget) constraints via three prompting strategies: greedy selection, direct optimization, and a hill-climbing-inspired refinement. We benchmark LLMs' allocations against a utility-maximizing oracle. Interestingly, we also test whether LLMs can infer structured preferences from natural-language voter input or metadata, without explicit votes. By comparing allocations based on inferred preferences to those from ground-truth votes, we evaluate LLMs' ability to extract preferences from open-ended input. Our results underscore the role of prompt design and show that LLMs hold promise for mechanism design with unstructured inputs.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is closer than ever to becoming a reality, sparking widespread enthusiasm in the research community to collect and work with various modalities, including text, image, video, and audio. Despite recent efforts, satellite spectral imagery, as an additional modality, has yet to receive the attention it deserves. This area presents unique challenges, but also holds great promise in advancing the capabilities of AGI in understanding the natural world. In this paper, we argue why Earth Observation data is useful for an intelligent model, and then we review existing benchmarks and highlight their limitations in evaluating the generalization ability of foundation models in this domain. This paper emphasizes the need for a more comprehensive benchmark to evaluate earth observation models. To facilitate this, we propose a comprehensive set of tasks that a benchmark should encompass to effectively assess a model's ability to understand and interact with Earth observation data.

Operational skill learning, inherently physical and reliant on hands-on practice and kinesthetic feedback, has yet to be effectively replicated in large language model (LLM)-supported training. Current LLM training assistants primarily generate customized textual feedback, neglecting the crucial kinesthetic modality. This gap derives from the textual and uncertain nature of LLMs, compounded by concerns on user acceptance of LLM driven body control. To bridge this gap and realize the potential of collaborative human-LLM action, this work explores human experience of LLM driven kinesthetic assistance. Specifically, we introduced an "Align-Analyze-Adjust" strategy and developed FlightAxis, a tool that integrates LLM with Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) for flight skill acquisition, a representative operational skill domain. FlightAxis learns flight skills from manuals and guides forearm movements during simulated flight tasks. Our results demonstrate high user acceptance of LLM-mediated body control and significantly reduced task completion times. Crucially, trainees reported that this kinesthetic assistance enhanced their awareness of operation flaws and fostered increased engagement in the training process, rather than relieving perceived load. This work demonstrated the potential of kinesthetic LLM training in operational skill acquisition.

Cross-topic automated essay scoring (AES) aims to develop a transferable model capable of effectively evaluating essays on a target topic. A significant challenge in this domain arises from the inherent discrepancies between topics. While existing methods predominantly focus on extracting topic-shared features through distribution alignment of source and target topics, they often neglect topic-specific features, limiting their ability to assess critical traits such as topic adherence. To address this limitation, we propose an Adversarial TOpic-aware Prompt-tuning (ATOP), a novel method that jointly learns topic-shared and topic-specific features to improve cross-topic AES. ATOP achieves this by optimizing a learnable topic-aware prompt--comprising both shared and specific components--to elicit relevant knowledge from pre-trained language models (PLMs). To enhance the robustness of topic-shared prompt learning and mitigate feature scale sensitivity introduced by topic alignment, we incorporate adversarial training within a unified regression and classification framework. In addition, we employ a neighbor-based classifier to model the local structure of essay representations and generate pseudo-labels for target-topic essays. These pseudo-labels are then used to guide the supervised learning of topic-specific prompts tailored to the target topic. Extensive experiments on the publicly available ASAP++ dataset demonstrate that ATOP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both holistic and multi-trait essay scoring. The implementation of our method is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ATOP-A271.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are often used as virtual tutors in computer science (CS) education, this approach can foster passive learning and over-reliance. This paper presents a novel pedagogical paradigm that inverts this model: students act as instructors who must teach an LLM to solve problems. To facilitate this, we developed strategies for designing questions with engineered knowledge gaps that only a student can bridge, and we introduce Socrates, a system for deploying this method with minimal overhead. We evaluated our approach in an undergraduate course and found that this active-learning method led to statistically significant improvements in student performance compared to historical cohorts. Our work demonstrates a practical, cost-effective framework for using LLMs to deepen student engagement and mastery.

The affective brain-computer interface is a crucial technology for affective interaction and emotional intelligence, emerging as a significant area of research in the human-computer interaction. Compared to single-type features, multi-type EEG features provide a multi-level representation for analyzing multi-dimensional emotions. However, the high dimensionality of multi-type EEG features, combined with the relatively small number of high-quality EEG samples, poses challenges such as classifier overfitting and suboptimal real-time performance in multi-dimensional emotion recognition. Moreover, practical applications of affective brain-computer interface frequently encounters partial absence of multi-dimensional emotional labels due to the open nature of the acquisition environment, and ambiguity and variability in individual emotion perception. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel EEG feature selection method for missing multi-dimensional emotion recognition. The method leverages adaptive orthogonal non-negative matrix factorization to reconstruct the multi-dimensional emotional label space through second-order and higher-order correlations, which could reduce the negative impact of missing values and outliers on label reconstruction. Simultaneously, it employs least squares regression with graph-based manifold learning regularization and global feature redundancy minimization regularization to enable EEG feature subset selection despite missing information, ultimately achieving robust EEG-based multi-dimensional emotion recognition. Simulation experiments on three widely used multi-dimensional emotional datasets, DREAMER, DEAP and HDED, reveal that the proposed method outperforms thirteen advanced feature selection methods in terms of robustness for EEG emotional feature selection.

Affective Computing has been established as a crucial field of inquiry to advance the holistic development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Foundation models -- especially Large Language Models (LLMs) -- have been evaluated, trained, or instruction-tuned in several past works, to become better predictors or generators of emotion. Most of these studies, however, approach emotion-related tasks in a supervised manner, assessing or training the capabilities of LLMs using discrete emotion labels associated with stimuli (e.g., text, images, video, audio). Evaluation studies, in particular, have often been limited to standard and superficial emotion-related tasks, such as the recognition of evoked or expressed emotions. In this paper, we move beyond surface-level emotion tasks to investigate how LLMs reason about emotions through cognitive dimensions. Drawing from cognitive appraisal theory, we examine whether LLMs produce coherent and plausible cognitive reasoning when reasoning about emotionally charged stimuli. We introduce a large-scale benchmark on Cognitive Reasoning for Emotions - CoRE - to evaluate internal cognitive structures implicitly used by LLMs for emotional reasoning. Through a plethora of evaluation experiments and analysis, we seek to answer: (a) Are models more likely to implicitly rely on specific cognitive appraisal dimensions?, (b) What cognitive dimensions are important for characterizing specific emotions?, and, (c) Can the internal representations of different emotion categories in LLMs be interpreted through cognitive appraisal dimensions? Our results and analyses reveal diverse reasoning patterns across different LLMs. Our benchmark and code will be made publicly available.

As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language - an idea supported by classic connectionist modelling work. The rise of Transformers appears to challenge this idea, as these models can learn language effectively, despite lacking memory limitations or other architectural recency biases. Here, we investigate the hypothesized benefit of fleeting memory for language learning in tightly controlled experiments on transformer language models. Training transformers with and without fleeting memory on a developmentally realistic training set, we find that fleeting memory consistently improves language learning (as quantified by both overall language modelling performance and targeted syntactic evaluation) but, unexpectedly, impairs surprisal-based prediction of human reading times. Interestingly, follow up analyses revealed that this discrepancy - better language modeling, yet worse reading time prediction - could not be accounted for by prior explanations of why better language models sometimes fit human reading time worse. Together, these results support a benefit of memory limitations on neural network language learning - but not on predicting behavior.