The integration of large language models (LLMs) into education presents unprecedented opportunities for scalable personalized learning. However, standard LLMs often function as generic information providers, lacking alignment with fundamental pedagogical principles such as helpfulness, student-centered personalization, and creativity cultivation. To bridge this gap, we propose EduAlign, a novel framework designed to guide LLMs toward becoming more effective and responsible educational assistants. EduAlign consists of two main stages. In the first stage, we curate a dataset of 8k educational interactions and annotate them-both manually and automatically-along three key educational dimensions: Helpfulness, Personalization, and Creativity (HPC). These annotations are used to train HPC-RM, a multi-dimensional reward model capable of accurately scoring LLM outputs according to these educational principles. We further evaluate the consistency and reliability of this reward model. In the second stage, we leverage HPC-RM as a reward signal to fine-tune a pre-trained LLM using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on a set of 2k diverse prompts. We then assess the pre- and post-finetuning models on both educational and general-domain benchmarks across the three HPC dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that the fine-tuned model exhibits significantly improved alignment with pedagogical helpfulness, personalization, and creativity stimulation. This study presents a scalable and effective approach to aligning LLMs with nuanced and desirable educational traits, paving the way for the development of more engaging, pedagogically aligned AI tutors.

Many real-world systems, such as transportation systems, ecological systems, and Internet systems, are complex systems. As an important tool for studying complex systems, computational experiments can map them into artificial society models that are computable and reproducible within computers, thereby providing digital and computational methods for quantitative analysis. In current research, the construction of individual agent models often ignores the long-term accumulative effect of memory mechanisms in the development process of agents, which to some extent causes the constructed models to deviate from the real characteristics of real-world systems. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an individual agent model based on a memory-learning collaboration mechanism, which implements hierarchical modeling of the memory mechanism and a multi-indicator evaluation mechanism. Through hierarchical modeling of the individual memory repository, the group memory repository, and the memory buffer pool, memory can be effectively managed, and knowledge sharing and dissemination between individuals and groups can be promoted. At the same time, the multi-indicator evaluation mechanism enables dynamic evaluation of memory information, allowing dynamic updates of information in the memory set and promoting collaborative decision-making between memory and learning. Experimental results show that, compared with existing memory modeling methods, the agents constructed by the proposed model demonstrate better decision-making quality and adaptability within the system. This verifies the effectiveness of the individual agent model based on the memory-learning collaboration mechanism proposed in this paper in improving the quality of individual-level modeling in artificial society modeling and achieving anthropomorphic characteristics.

Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) rely on benchmark scores, but it is difficult to interpret what these individual scores reveal about a model's overall skills. Specifically, as a community we lack understanding of how tasks relate to one another, what they measure in common, how they differ, or which ones are redundant. As a result, models are often assessed via a single score averaged across benchmarks, an approach that fails to capture the models' wholistic strengths and limitations. Here, we propose a new evaluation paradigm that uses factor analysis to identify latent skills driving performance across benchmarks. We apply this method to a comprehensive new leaderboard showcasing the performance of 60 LLMs on 44 tasks, and identify a small set of latent skills that largely explain performance. Finally, we turn these insights into practical tools that identify redundant tasks, aid in model selection, and profile models along each latent skill.

The goal of this investigation is to quantify to what extent computer vision methods can correctly classify facial expressions on a sign language dataset. We extend our experiments by recognizing expressions using only the upper or lower part of the face, which is needed to further investigate the difference in emotion manifestation between hearing and deaf subjects. To take into account the peculiar color profile of a dataset, our method introduces a color normalization stage based on histogram equalization and fine-tuning. The results show the ability to correctly recognize facial expressions with 83.8% mean sensitivity and very little variance (.042) among classes. Like for humans, recognition of expressions from the lower half of the face (79.6%) is higher than that from the upper half (77.9%). Noticeably, the classification accuracy from the upper half of the face is higher than human level.

This paper presents an in-depth investigation into the high-performance parallel optimization of the Fish School Behaviour (FSB) algorithm on the Setonix supercomputing platform using the OpenMP framework. Given the increasing demand for enhanced computational capabilities for complex, large-scale calculations across diverse domains, there's an imperative need for optimized parallel algorithms and computing structures. The FSB algorithm, inspired by nature's social behavior patterns, provides an ideal platform for parallelization due to its iterative and computationally intensive nature. This study leverages the capabilities of the Setonix platform and the OpenMP framework to analyze various aspects of multi-threading, such as thread counts, scheduling strategies, and OpenMP constructs, aiming to discern patterns and strategies that can elevate program performance. Experiments were designed to rigorously test different configurations, and our results not only offer insights for parallel optimization of FSB on Setonix but also provide valuable references for other parallel computational research using OpenMP. Looking forward, other factors, such as cache behavior and thread scheduling strategies at micro and macro levels, hold potential for further exploration and optimization.

In recent years, online learning has attracted increasing attention due to its adaptive capability to process streaming and non-stationary data. To facilitate algorithm development and practical deployment in this area, we introduce Awesome-OL, an extensible Python toolkit tailored for online learning research. Awesome-OL integrates state-of-the-art algorithm, which provides a unified framework for reproducible comparisons, curated benchmark datasets, and multi-modal visualization. Built upon the scikit-multiflow open-source infrastructure, Awesome-OL emphasizes user-friendly interactions without compromising research flexibility or extensibility.

In continual learning problems, it is often necessary to overwrite components of a neural network's learned representation in response to changes in the data stream; however, neural networks often exhibit primacy bias, whereby early training data hinders the network's ability to generalize on later tasks. While feature-learning dynamics of nonstationary learning problems are not well studied, the emergence of feature-learning dynamics is known to drive the phenomenon of grokking, wherein neural networks initially memorize their training data and only later exhibit perfect generalization. This work conjectures that the same feature-learning dynamics which facilitate generalization in grokking also underlie the ability to overwrite previous learned features as well, and methods which accelerate grokking by facilitating feature-learning dynamics are promising candidates for addressing primacy bias in non-stationary learning problems. We then propose a straightforward method to induce feature-learning dynamics as needed throughout training by increasing the effective learning rate, i.e. the ratio between parameter and update norms. We show that this approach both facilitates feature-learning and improves generalization in a variety of settings, including grokking, warm-starting neural network training, and reinforcement learning tasks. Non-stationarity is ubiquitous in real-world applications of AI systems: datasets may grow over time, correlations may appear and then disappear as trends evolve, and AI systems themselves may take an active role in the generation of their own training data. In this paper, we will propose a framework for understanding and mitigating this degradation in generalization performance which connects three previously disparate phenomena: primacy bias, grokking, and feature-learning dynamics. Primacy bias: A neural network initially trained on one task is trained on a different data distribution and/or objective, and achieves worse performance than a randomly initialized network on the new task (Achille et al., 2017; Ash & Adams, 2020; Nikishin et al., 2022). Grokking: A model suddenly closes the generalization gap as a result of (possibly prolonged) further training after it has initially achieved perfect training accuracy (memorization) with poor test-time performance (Power et al., 2022). Feature learning: a network's ability to make nontrivial changes to its learned representation (a.k.a.

The Stable Roommates problems are characterized by the preferences of agents over other agents as roommates. A solution is a partition of the agents into pairs that are acceptable to each other (i.e., they are in the preference lists of each other), and the matching is stable (i.e., there do not exist any two agents who prefer each other to their roommates, and thus block the matching). Motivated by real-world applications, and considering that stable roommates problems do not always have solutions, we continue our studies to compute "good-enough" matchings. In addition to the agents' habits and habitual preferences, we consider their networks of preferred friends, and introduce a method to generate personalized solutions to stable roommates problems. We illustrate the usefulness of our method with examples and empirical evaluations.

This perspective paper explores the future potential of "conversational intelligence" by examining how Large Language Models (LLMs) could be combined with GRAPHYP's network system to better understand human conversations and preferences. Using recent research and case studies, we propose a conceptual framework that could make AI rea-soning transparent and traceable, allowing humans to see and understand how AI reaches its conclusions. We present the conceptual perspective of "Matching Game Preferences through Dialogical Large Language Models (D-LLMs)," a proposed system that would allow multiple users to share their different preferences through structured conversations. This approach envisions personalizing LLMs by embedding individual user preferences directly into how the model makes decisions. The proposed D-LLM framework would require three main components: (1) reasoning processes that could analyze different search experiences and guide performance, (2) classification systems that would identify user preference patterns, and (3) dialogue approaches that could help humans resolve conflicting information. This perspective framework aims to create an interpretable AI system where users could examine, understand, and combine the different human preferences that influence AI responses, detected through GRAPHYP's search experience networks. The goal of this perspective is to envision AI systems that would not only provide answers but also show users how those answers were reached, making artificial intelligence more transparent and trustworthy for human decision-making.

Comparing tensors and identifying their (dis)similar structures is fundamental in understanding the underlying phenomena for complex data. Tensor decomposition methods help analysts extract tensors' essential characteristics and aid in visual analytics for tensors. In contrast to dimensionality reduction (DR) methods designed only for analyzing a matrix (i.e., second-order tensor), existing tensor decomposition methods do not support flexible comparative analysis. To address this analysis limitation, we introduce a new tensor decomposition method, named tensor unified linear comparative analysis (TULCA), by extending its DR counterpart, ULCA, for tensor analysis. TULCA integrates discriminant analysis and contrastive learning schemes for tensor decomposition, enabling flexible comparison of tensors. We also introduce an effective method to visualize a core tensor extracted from TULCA into a set of 2D visualizations. We integrate TULCA's functionalities into a visual analytics interface to support analysts in interpreting and refining the TULCA results. We demonstrate the efficacy of TULCA and the visual analytics interface with computational evaluations and two case studies, including an analysis of log data collected from a supercomputer.