This paper investigates the influence of cognitive biases on Large Language Models (LLMs) outputs. Cognitive biases, such as confirmation and availability biases, can distort user inputs through prompts, potentially leading to unfaithful and misleading outputs from LLMs. Using a systematic framework, our study introduces various cognitive biases into prompts and assesses their impact on LLM accuracy across multiple benchmark datasets, including general and financial Q&A scenarios. The results demonstrate that even subtle biases can significantly alter LLM answer choices, highlighting a critical need for bias-aware prompt design and mitigation strategy. Additionally, our attention weight analysis highlights how these biases can alter the internal decision-making processes of LLMs, affecting the attention distribution in ways that are associated with output inaccuracies. This research has implications for Al developers and users in enhancing the robustness and reliability of Al applications in diverse domains.

Navigating the vast and rapidly growing body of scientific literature is a formidable challenge for aspiring researchers. Current approaches to supporting research idea generation often rely on generic large language models (LLMs). While LLMs are effective at aiding comprehension and summarization, they often fall short in guiding users toward practical research ideas due to their limitations. In this study, we present a novel structural framework for research ideation. Our framework, The Budget AI Researcher, uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chains, vector databases, and topic-guided pairing to recombine concepts from hundreds of machine learning papers. The system ingests papers from nine major AI conferences, which collectively span the vast subfields of machine learning, and organizes them into a hierarchical topic tree. It uses the tree to identify distant topic pairs, generate novel research abstracts, and refine them through iterative self-evaluation against relevant literature and peer reviews, generating and refining abstracts that are both grounded in real-world research and demonstrably interesting. Experiments using LLM-based metrics indicate that our method significantly improves the concreteness of generated research ideas relative to standard prompting approaches. Human evaluations further demonstrate a substantial enhancement in the perceived interestingness of the outputs. By bridging the gap between academic data and creative generation, the Budget AI Researcher offers a practical, free tool for accelerating scientific discovery and lowering the barrier for aspiring researchers. Beyond research ideation, this approach inspires solutions to the broader challenge of generating personalized, context-aware outputs grounded in evolving real-world knowledge.

Self-supervised pre-trained audio networks have seen widespread adoption in real-world systems, particularly in multi-modal large language models. These networks are often employed in a frozen state, under the assumption that the self-supervised pre-training has sufficiently equipped them to handle real-world audio. However, a critical question remains: how well do these models actually perform in real-world conditions, where audio is typically polyphonic and complex, involving multiple overlapping sound sources? Current audio self-supervised learning (SSL) methods are often benchmarked on datasets predominantly featuring monophonic audio, such as environmental sounds, and speech. As a result, the ability of SSL models to generalize to polyphonic audio, a common characteristic in natural scenarios, remains underexplored. This limitation raises concerns about the practical robustness of SSL models in more realistic audio settings. To address this gap, we introduce S elf-S upervised L earning from A udio M ixtures (SSLAM), a novel direction in audio SSL research, designed to improve the model's ability to learn from polyphonic data while maintaining strong performance on monophonic data. We thoroughly evaluate SSLAM on standard audio SSL benchmark datasets which are predominantly monophonic and conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis against state-of-the-art (SOT A) methods using a range of high-quality, publicly available polyphonic datasets. SS-LAM not only improves model performance on polyphonic audio, but also maintains or exceeds performance on standard audio SSL benchmarks. Notably, it achieves up to a 3.9% improvement on the AudioSet-2M(AS-2M), reaching a mean average precision (mAP) of 50.2. These results demonstrate SSLAM's effectiveness in both polyphonic and monophonic soundscapes, significantly enhancing the performance of audio SSL models. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ta012/SSLAM .

--Federated Learning (FL) has recently been utilized to collaboratively fine-tune foundation models (FMs) across multiple clients. Notably, federated low-rank adaptation (LoRA)- based fine-tuning methods have recently gained attention, which allows clients to fine-tune FMs with a small portion of train-able parameters locally. However, most existing methods do not account for the heterogeneous resources of clients or lack an effective local training strategy to maximize global fine-tuning performance under limited resources. In this work, we propose Fed-HeLLo, a novel federated LoRA-based fine-tuning framework that enables clients to collaboratively fine-tune an FM with different local trainable LoRA layers. T o ensure its effectiveness, we develop several heterogeneous LoRA allocation (HLA) strategies that adaptively allocate local trainable LoRA layers based on clients' resource capabilities and the layer importance. Specifically, based on the dynamic layer importance, we design a Fisher Information Matrix score-based HLA (FIM-HLA) that leverages dynamic gradient norm information. T o better stabilize the training process, we consider the intrinsic importance of LoRA layers and design a Geometrically-Defined HLA (GD-HLA) strategy. It shapes the collective distribution of trainable LoRA layers into specific geometric patterns, such as Triangle, Inverted Triangle, Bottleneck, and Uniform. Moreover, we extend GD-HLA into a randomized version, named Randomized Geometrically-Defined HLA (RGD-HLA), for enhanced model accuracy with randomness. By co-designing the proposed HLA strategies, we incorporate both the dynamic and intrinsic layer importance into the design of our HLA strategy. T o thoroughly evaluate our approach, we simulate various complex federated LoRA-based fine-tuning settings using five datasets and three levels of data distributions ranging from IID to extreme Non-IID. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Fed-HeLLo with the proposed HLA strategies. OUNDA TION models (FMs) [13], [16], [36], [37], [68], characterized by their extensive parameter counts ranging into millions or billions, serve as robust initial weights for a variety of downstream tasks [47], [52] via fine-tuning. However, employing FMs presents substantial challenges, especially the high computational costs of fine-tuning the model. To mitigate the high computational requirement of fine-tuning FMs, researchers have developed a variety of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods.

Real-time continuous learning over streaming data remains a central challenge in deep learning and AI systems. Traditional gradient-based models such as backpropagation through time (BPTT) face computational and stability limitations when dealing with temporally unbounded data. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture, Quantum-Inspired Differentiable Integral Neural Networks (QIDINNs), which leverages the Feynman technique of differentiation under the integral sign to formulate neural updates as integrals over historical data. This reformulation allows for smoother, more stable learning dynamics that are both physically interpretable and computationally tractable. Inspired by Feynman's path integral formalism and compatible with quantum gradient estimation frameworks, QIDINNs open a path toward hybrid classical-quantum neural computation. We demonstrate our model's effectiveness on synthetic and real-world streaming tasks, and we propose directions for quantum extensions and scalable implementations.

The implementation of transformational pedagogy in secondary education classrooms requires a broad multiliteracy approach. Due to limited planning time and resources, high school English Literature teachers often struggle to curate diverse, thematically aligned literature text sets. This study addresses the critical need for a tool that provides scaffolds for novice educators in selecting literature texts that are diverse -- in terms of genre, theme, subtheme, and author -- yet similar in context and pedagogical merits. We have developed a recommendation system, Teaching Text Expansion for Teacher Scaffolding (T-TExTS), that suggests high school English Literature books based on pedagogical merits, genre, and thematic relevance using a knowledge graph. We constructed a domain-specific ontology using the KNowledge Acquisition and Representation Methodology (KNARM), transformed into a knowledge graph, which was then embedded using DeepWalk, biased random walk, and a hybrid of both approaches. The system was evaluated using link prediction and recommendation performance metrics, including Area Under the Curve (AUC), Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), Hits@K, and normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG). DeepWalk outperformed in most ranking metrics, with the highest AUC (0.9431), whereas the hybrid model offered balanced performance. These findings demonstrate the importance of semantic, ontology-driven approaches in recommendation systems and suggest that T-TExTS can significantly ease the burden of English Literature text selection for high school educators, promoting more informed and inclusive curricular decisions. The source code for T-TExTS is available at: https://github.com/koncordantlab/TTExTS

Digital technologies are increasingly used in education to reduce the workload of teachers and students. However, creating open-ended study or examination questions and grading their answers is still a tedious task. This thesis presents the foundation for a system that generates questions grounded in class materials and automatically grades student answers. It introduces a sophisticated method for chunking documents with a visual layout, specifically targeting PDF documents. This method enhances the accuracy of downstream tasks, including Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Our thesis demonstrates that high-quality questions and reference answers can be generated from study material. Further, it introduces a new benchmark for automated grading of short answers to facilitate comparison of automated grading systems. An evaluation of various grading systems is conducted and indicates that Large Language Models (LLMs) can generalise to the task of automated grading of short answers from their pre-training tasks. As with other tasks, increasing the parameter size of the LLMs leads to greater performance. Currently, available systems still need human oversight, especially in examination scenarios.

The design of fair and efficient algorithms for allocating public resources, such as school admissions, housing, or medical residency, has a profound social impact. In one-sided matching problems, where individuals are assigned to items based on ranked preferences, a fundamental trade-off exists between efficiency and strategyproofness. Existing algorithms like Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD), Probabilistic Serial (PS), and Rank Minimization (RM) capture only one side of this trade-off: RSD is strategyproof but inefficient, while PS and RM are efficient but incentivize manipulation. We propose EMERGENT, a novel application of Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to one-sided matching, leveraging its ability to sample diverse, high-reward solutions. In our approach, efficient and manipulation-resistant matches emerge naturally: high-reward solutions yield efficient matches, while the stochasticity of GFlowNets-based outputs reduces incentives for manipulation. Experiments show that EMERGENT outperforms RSD in rank efficiency while significantly reducing strategic vulnerability compared to matches produced by RM and PS. Our work highlights the potential of GFlowNets for applications involving social choice mechanisms, where it is crucial to balance efficiency and manipulability.

There are many genetic and environmental factors that affect cognitive development. Music education can also be considered as one of the environmental factors. Some researchers emphasize that Music is an action that requires meta-cognitive functions such as mathematics and chess and supports spatial intelligence. The effect of Music on cognitive development in early childhood was examined using the Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets(PFS) method defined by Yager. This study created PFS based on experts' opinions, and an algorithm was given according to PFS. The algorithm's results supported the experts' data on the development of spatial-temporal skills in music education given in early childhood. The algorithm's ranking was done using the Expectation Score Function. The rankings obtained from the algorithm overlap with the experts' rankings.

Incompletely-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation (ISCOS) involves segmenting objects that seamlessly blend into their surrounding environments, utilizing incompletely annotated data, such as weak and semi-annotations, for model training. This task remains highly challenging due to (1) the limited supervision provided by the incompletely annotated training data, and (2) the difficulty of distinguishing concealed objects from the background, which arises from the intrinsic similarities in concealed scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the first unified method for ISCOS to address these challenges. To tackle the issue of incomplete supervision, we propose a unified mean-teacher framework, SEE, that leverages the vision foundation model, ``\emph{Segment Anything Model (SAM)}'', to generate pseudo-labels using coarse masks produced by the teacher model as prompts. To mitigate the effect of low-quality segmentation masks, we introduce a series of strategies for pseudo-label generation, storage, and supervision. These strategies aim to produce informative pseudo-labels, store the best pseudo-labels generated, and select the most reliable components to guide the student model, thereby ensuring robust network training. Additionally, to tackle the issue of intrinsic similarity, we design a hybrid-granularity feature grouping module that groups features at different granularities and aggregates these results. By clustering similar features, this module promotes segmentation coherence, facilitating more complete segmentation for both single-object and multiple-object images. We validate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple ISCOS tasks, and experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, SEE can serve as a plug-and-play solution, enhancing the performance of existing models.