The rise of online learning has led to the development of various knowledge tracing (KT) methods. However, existing methods have overlooked the problem of increasing computational cost when utilizing large graphs and long learning sequences. To address this issue, we introduce Dual Graph Attention-based Knowledge Tracing (DGAKT), a graph neural network model designed to leverage high-order information from subgraphs representing student-exercise-KC relationships. DGAKT incorporates a subgraph-based approach to enhance computational efficiency. By processing only relevant subgraphs for each target interaction, DGAKT significantly reduces memory and computational requirements compared to full global graph models. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DGAKT not only outperforms existing KT models but also sets a new standard in resource efficiency, addressing a critical need that has been largely overlooked by prior KT approaches.

Understanding how novices acquire and hone visual search skills is crucial for developing and optimizing training methods across domains. Network analysis methods can be used to analyze graph representations of visual expertise. This study investigates the relationship between eye-gaze movements and learning outcomes among undergraduate dentistry students who were diagnosing dental radiographs over multiple semesters. We use network analysis techniques to model eye-gaze scanpaths as directed graphs and examine changes in network metrics over time. Using time series clustering on each metric, we identify distinct patterns of visual search strategies and explore their association with students' diagnostic performance. Our findings suggest that the network metric of transition entropy is negatively correlated with performance scores, while the number of nodes and edges as well as average PageRank are positively correlated with performance scores. Changes in network metrics for individual students over time suggest a developmental shift from intermediate to expert-level processing. These insights contribute to understanding expertise acquisition in visual tasks and can inform the design of AI-assisted learning interventions.

Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, yet efforts to develop and evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for Arabic remain relatively limited. Most existing Arabic benchmarks focus on linguistic, cultural, or religious content, leaving a significant gap in domains like STEM and code which are increasingly relevant for real-world LLM applications. To help bridge this gap, we present 3LM, a suite of three benchmarks designed specifically for Arabic. The first is a set of STEM-related question-answer pairs, naturally sourced from Arabic textbooks and educational worksheets. The second consists of synthetically generated STEM questions, created using the same sources. The third benchmark focuses on code generation, built through a careful translation of two widely used code benchmarks, incorporating a human-in-the-loop process with several rounds of review to ensure high-quality and faithful translations. We release all three benchmarks publicly to support the growth of Arabic LLM research in these essential but underrepresented areas.

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have been driven bypretrained language models like BERT, RoBERTa, T5, and GPT. Thesemodels excel at understanding complex texts, but biomedical literature, withits domain-specific terminology, poses challenges that models likeWord2Vec and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) can't fullyaddress. GPT and T5, despite capturing context, fall short in tasks needingbidirectional understanding, unlike BERT. Addressing this, we proposedMedicalBERT, a pretrained BERT model trained on a large biomedicaldataset and equipped with domain-specific vocabulary that enhances thecomprehension of biomedical terminology. MedicalBERT model is furtheroptimized and fine-tuned to address diverse tasks, including named entityrecognition, relation extraction, question answering, sentence similarity, anddocument classification. Performance metrics such as the F1-score,accuracy, and Pearson correlation are employed to showcase the efficiencyof our model in comparison to other BERT-based models such as BioBERT,SciBERT, and ClinicalBERT. MedicalBERT outperforms these models onmost of the benchmarks, and surpasses the general-purpose BERT model by5.67% on average across all the tasks evaluated respectively. This work alsounderscores the potential of leveraging pretrained BERT models for medicalNLP tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of transfer learning techniques incapturing domain-specific information. (PDF) MedicalBERT: enhancing biomedical natural language processing using pretrained BERT-based model. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392489050_MedicalBERT_enhancing_biomedical_natural_language_processing_using_pretrained_BERT-based_model [accessed Jul 06 2025].

Distilling reasoning paths from teacher to student models via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides a shortcut for improving the reasoning ability of smaller Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the reasoning paths generated by teacher models often reflect only surface-level traces of their underlying authentic reasoning. Insights from cognitive neuroscience suggest that authentic reasoning involves a complex interweaving between meta-reasoning (which selects appropriate sub-problems from multiple candidates) and solving (which addresses the sub-problem). This implies authentic reasoning has an implicit multi-branch structure. Supervised fine-tuning collapses this rich structure into a flat sequence of token prediction in the teacher's reasoning path, preventing effective distillation of this structure to students. To address this limitation, we propose RLKD, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based distillation framework guided by a novel Generative Structure Reward Model (GSRM). Our GSRM converts reasoning paths into multiple meta-reasoning-solving steps and computes rewards to measure structural alignment between student and teacher reasoning. RLKD combines this reward with RL, enabling student LLMs to internalize the teacher's implicit multi-branch reasoning structure rather than merely mimicking fixed output paths. Experiments show RLKD surpasses standard SFT-RL pipelines even when trained on 0.1% of data under an RL-only regime, unlocking greater student reasoning potential than SFT-based distillation.

The growing and evolving landscape of cybersecurity threats necessitates the development of supporting tools and platforms that allow for the creation of realistic IT environments operating within virtual, controlled settings as Cyber Ranges (CRs). CRs can be exploited for analyzing vulnerabilities and experimenting with the effectiveness of devised countermeasures, as well as serving as training environments for building cyber security skills and abilities for IT operators. This paper proposes ARCeR as an innovative solution for the automatic generation and deployment of CRs, starting from user-provided descriptions in a natural language. ARCeR relies on the Agentic RAG paradigm, which allows it to fully exploit state-of-art AI technologies. Experimental results show that ARCeR is able to successfully process prompts even in cases that LLMs or basic RAG systems are not able to cope with. Furthermore, ARCeR is able to target any CR framework provided that specific knowledge is made available to it.

Making new friends is hard. Finding out what trousers exist in the world other than black ones is also, apparently, hard. Fortunately, for an AI-enabled generation of students, help with the complexities of campus life is just a prompt away. If you are really stuck on an essay or can't decide between management consulting or a legal career, or need suggestions on what you can cook with tomatoes, mushrooms, beetroot, mozzarella, olive oil and rice, then ChatGPT is there. It will to listen to you, analyse your inputs, and offer up a perfectly structured paper, a convincing cover letter, or a workable recipe for tomato and mushroom risotto with roasted beetroot and mozzarella. I know this because three undergraduates have given me permission to eavesdrop on every conversation they have had with ChatGPT over the past 18 months.

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. Kate Candon is a PhD student at Yale University interested in understanding how we can create interactive agents that are more effectively able to help people. We spoke to Kate to find out more about how she is leveraging explicit and implicit feedback in human-robot interactions. Specifically I'm interested in how we can get robots to better learn from humans in the way that they naturally teach. Typically, a lot of work in robot learning is with a human teacher who is only tasked with giving explicit feedback to the robot, but they're not necessarily engaged in the task.

Accurate uncertainty quantification remains a key challenge for standard LLMs, prompting the adoption of Bayesian and ensemble-based methods. However, such methods typically necessitate computationally expensive sampling, involving multiple forward passes to effectively estimate predictive uncertainty. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach enabling efficient and effective uncertainty estimation in LLMs without sacrificing performance. Specifically, we distill uncertainty-aware teacher models - originally requiring multiple forward passes - into compact student models sharing the same architecture but fine-tuned using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We compare two distinct distillation strategies: one in which the student employs traditional softmax-based outputs, and another in which the student leverages Dirichlet-distributed outputs to explicitly model epistemic uncertainty via evidential learning. Empirical evaluations on classification datasets demonstrate that such students can achieve comparable or superior predictive and uncertainty quantification performance relative to their teacher models, while critically requiring only a single forward pass. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that immediate and robust uncertainty quantification can be achieved in LLMs through evidential distillation.

Learning from non-stationary data streams subject to concept drift requires models that can adapt on-the-fly while remaining resource-efficient. Existing adaptive ensemble methods often rely on coarse-grained adaptation mechanisms or simple voting schemes that fail to optimally leverage specialized knowledge. This paper introduces DriftMoE, an online Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that addresses these limitations through a novel co-training framework. DriftMoE features a compact neural router that is co-trained alongside a pool of incremental Hoeffding tree experts. The key innovation lies in a symbiotic learning loop that enables expert specialization: the router selects the most suitable expert for prediction, the relevant experts update incrementally with the true label, and the router refines its parameters using a multi-hot correctness mask that reinforces every accurate expert. This feedback loop provides the router with a clear training signal while accelerating expert specialization. We evaluate DriftMoE's performance across nine state-of-the-art data stream learning benchmarks spanning abrupt, gradual, and real-world drifts testing two distinct configurations: one where experts specialize on data regimes (multi-class variant), and another where they focus on single-class specialization (task-based variant). Our results demonstrate that DriftMoE achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art stream learning adaptive ensembles, offering a principled and efficient approach to concept drift adaptation.