The study aims to enhance mathematics education accessibility for hard-of-hearing students by developing an accurate Palestinian sign language PSL recognition system using advanced artificial intelligence techniques. Due to the scarcity of digital resources for PSL, a custom dataset comprising 41 mathematical gesture classes was created, and recorded by PSL experts to ensure linguistic accuracy and domain specificity. To leverage state-of-the-art-computer vision techniques, a Vision Transformer ViTModel was fine-tuned for gesture classification. The model achieved an accuracy of 97.59%, demonstrating its effectiveness in recognizing mathematical signs with high precision and reliability. This study highlights the role of deep learning in developing intelligent educational tools that bridge the learning gap for hard-of-hearing students by providing AI-driven interactive solutions to enhance mathematical comprehension. This work represents a significant step toward innovative and inclusive frosting digital integration in specialized learning environments. The dataset is hosted on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/fidaakh/STEM_data.

The primary goal of this study is to develop and evaluate an innovative prompting technique, AnaQuest, for generating multiple-choice questions (MCQs) using a pre-trained large language model. In AnaQuest, the choice items are sentence-level assertions about complex concepts. The technique integrates formative and summative assessments. In the formative phase, students answer open-ended questions for target concepts in free text. For summative assessment, AnaQuest analyzes these responses to generate both correct and incorrect assertions. To evaluate the validity of the generated MCQs, Item Response Theory (IRT) was applied to compare item characteristics between MCQs generated by AnaQuest, a baseline ChatGPT prompt, and human-crafted items. An empirical study found that expert instructors rated MCQs generated by both AI models to be as valid as those created by human instructors. However, IRT-based analysis revealed that AnaQuest-generated questions - particularly those with incorrect assertions (foils) - more closely resembled human-crafted items in terms of difficulty and discrimination than those produced by ChatGPT.

OpenAI has highlighted GPT-5's ability to create software in its entirety and demonstrate better reasoning capabilities - with answers that show workings, logic and inference. The company claims it has been trained to be more honest, provide users with more accurate responses and says that, overall, it feels more human. According to Altman, the model is "significantly better" than its predecessors. "GPT-3 sort of felt to me like talking to a high school student... 4 felt like you're kind of talking to a college student," he said in a briefing ahead of Thursday's launch. "GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert."

OpenAI has claimed to have taken a "significant step" towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) with the launch of its latest upgrade to ChatGPT, but has admitted there are still "many things" missing in its quest to create a system able to do humans' jobs. The startup said its GPT-5 model, the underlying technology that will power its breakthrough AI chatbot, represents a big upgrade on its predecessors in areas such as coding and creative writing – and is also a lot less sycophantic. It said the upgrade was being made available to all of ChatGPT's 700 million weekly users immediately. Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, called the model a "significant step forward" to achieving the theoretical state of AGI, which the startup defines as a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work – or, in other words, can do their jobs. However, Altman admitted GPT-5 had not reached that goal yet.

Distance-based classifiers, such as k-nearest neighbors and support vector machines, continue to be a workhorse of machine learning, widely used in science and industry. In practice, to derive insights from these models, it is also important to ensure that their predictions are explainable. While the field of Explainable AI has supplied methods that are in principle applicable to any model, it has also emphasized the usefulness of latent structures (e.g. the sequence of layers in a neural network) to produce explanations. In this paper, we contribute by uncovering a hidden neural network structure in distance-based classifiers (consisting of linear detection units combined with nonlinear pooling layers) upon which Explainable AI techniques such as layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) become applicable. Through quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate the advantage of our novel explanation approach over several baselines. We also show the overall usefulness of explaining distance-based models through two practical use cases.

Gaussian Processes (GPs), as a nonparametric learning method, offer flexible modeling capabilities and calibrated uncertainty quantification for function approximations. Additionally, GPs support online learning by efficiently incorporating new data with polynomial-time computation, making them well-suited for safety-critical dynamical systems that require rapid adaptation. However, the inference and online updates of exact GPs, when processing streaming data, incur cubic computation time and quadratic storage memory complexity, limiting their scalability to large datasets in real-time settings. In this paper, we propose a streaming kernel-induced progressively generated expert framework of Gaussian processes (SkyGP) that addresses both computational and memory constraints by maintaining a bounded set of experts, while inheriting the learning performance guarantees from exact Gaussian processes. Furthermore, two SkyGP variants are introduced, each tailored to a specific objective, either maximizing prediction accuracy (SkyGP-Dense) or improving computational efficiency (SkyGP-Fast). The effectiveness of SkyGP is validated through extensive benchmarks and real-time control experiments demonstrating its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Research to improve Automated Short Answer Grading has recently focused on Large Language Models (LLMs) with prompt engineering and no- or few-shot prompting to achieve best results. This is in contrast to the fine-tuning approach, which has historically required large-scale compute clusters inaccessible to most users. New closed-model approaches such as OpenAI's fine-tuning service promise results with as few as 100 examples, while methods using open weights such as quantized low-rank adaptive (QLORA) can be used to fine-tune models on consumer GPUs. We evaluate both of these fine-tuning methods, measuring their interaction with few-shot prompting for automated short answer grading (ASAG) with structured (JSON) outputs. Our results show that finetuning with small amounts of data has limited utility for Llama open-weight models, but that fine-tuning methods can outperform few-shot baseline instruction-tuned LLMs for OpenAI's closed models. While our evaluation set is limited, we find some evidence that the observed benefits of finetuning may be impacted by the domain subject matter. Lastly, we observed dramatic improvement with the LLama 3.1 8B-Instruct open-weight model by seeding the initial training examples with a significant amount of cheaply generated synthetic training data.

Extended reality (XR) systems, which consist of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (XR), offer a transformative interface for immersive, multi-modal, and embodied human-computer interaction. In this paper, we envision that multi-modal multi-task (M3T) federated foundation models (FedFMs) can offer transformative capabilities for XR systems through integrating the representational strength of M3T foundation models (FMs) with the privacy-preserving model training principles of federated learning (FL). We present a modular architecture for FedFMs, which entails different coordination paradigms for model training and aggregations. Central to our vision is the codification of XR challenges that affect the implementation of FedFMs under the SHIFT dimensions: (1) Sensor and modality diversity, (2) Hardware heterogeneity and system-level constraints, (3) Interactivity and embodied personalization, (4) Functional/task variability, and (5) Temporality and environmental variability. We illustrate the manifestation of these dimensions across a set of emerging and anticipated applications of XR systems. Finally, we propose evaluation metrics, dataset requirements, and design tradeoffs necessary for the development of resource-aware FedFMs in XR. This perspective aims to chart the technical and conceptual foundations for context-aware privacy-preserving intelligence in the next generation of XR systems.

The composition of pre-training datasets for large language models (LLMs) remains largely undisclosed, hindering transparency and efforts to optimize data quality, a critical driver of model performance. Current data selection methods, such as natural language quality assessments, diversity-based filters, and classifier-based approaches, are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies. To address these gaps, we propose four dimensions to evaluate data quality: professionalism, readability, reasoning, and cleanliness. We further introduce Meta-rater,a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates these dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings. Meta-rater employs proxy models to train a regression model that predicts validation loss, enabling the identification of optimal combinations of quality scores. Experiments demonstrate that Meta-rater doubles convergence speed for 1.3B parameter models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23, with advantages that scale to models as large as 7.2B parameters. Our work establishes that holistic, multi-dimensional quality integration significantly outperforms conventional single-dimension approaches, offering a scalable paradigm for enhancing pre-training efficiency and model capability. To advance future research, we release scripts, data, and models at https://github.com/opendatalab/Meta-rater.

--Spectral clustering is a leading clustering method. Two of its major shortcomings are the disjoint optimization process and the limited representation capacity. T o address these issues, we propose a deep spectral clustering model (named BootSC), which jointly learns all stages of spectral clustering-- affinity matrix construction, spectral embedding, and k -means clustering--using a single network in an end-to-end manner . Moreover, a semantically-consistent orthogonal re-parameterization technique is introduced to or-thogonalize spectral embeddings, significantly enhancing the discrimination capability. Experimental results indicate that BootSC achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance. For example, it accomplishes a notable 16% NMI improvement over the runner-up method on the challenging ImageNet-Dogs dataset. EEP clustering models aim to detect underlying cluster structures within unlabelled data. To train these models, creating effective and efficient supervision signals is necessary. Inadequate supervision could result in excessive computational costs [1], training instability [2], and degenerate results [3]. Classical deep clustering models [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10] commonly adopt cluster assignments obtained by k -means on data representations as training supervision. A major challenge with this k -means-style supervision is that data representations are assumed to follow simple isotropic Gaussian distributions.