Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize various fields, including code development, robotics, finance, and education, due to their extensive prior knowledge and rapid advancements. This paper investigates how LLMs can be leveraged in engineering education. Specifically, we benchmark the capabilities of different LLMs, including GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4o, and Llama 3 70B, in assessing homework for an undergraduate-level circuit analysis course. We have developed a novel dataset consisting of official reference solutions and real student solutions to problems from various topics in circuit analysis. To overcome the limitations of image recognition in current state-of-the-art LLMs, the solutions in the dataset are converted to LaTeX format. Using this dataset, a prompt template is designed to test five metrics of student solutions: completeness, method, final answer, arithmetic error, and units. The results show that GPT-4o and Llama 3 70B perform significantly better than GPT-3.5 Turbo across all five metrics, with GPT-4o and Llama 3 70B each having distinct advantages in different evaluation aspects. Additionally, we present insights into the limitations of current LLMs in several aspects of circuit analysis. Given the paramount importance of ensuring reliability in LLM-generated homework assessment to avoid misleading students, our results establish benchmarks and offer valuable insights for the development of a reliable, personalized tutor for circuit analysis -- a focus of our future work. Furthermore, the proposed evaluation methods can be generalized to a broader range of courses for engineering education in the future.

Artificial intelligence is poised to transform teaching and coaching practices,yet its optimal role alongside human expertise remains unclear.This study investigates human and AI collaboration in fitness education through a one year qualitative case study with a Pilates instructor.The researcher participated in the instructor classes and conducted biweekly semi structured interviews to explore how generative AI could be integrated into class planning and instruction.

With the widespread adoption of online education platforms, an increasing number of students are gaining new knowledge through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Exercise recommendation have made strides toward improving student learning outcomes. However, existing methods not only struggle with high dropout rates but also fail to match the diverse learning pace of students. They frequently face difficulties in adjusting to inactive students' learning patterns and in accommodating individualized learning paces, resulting in limited accuracy and diversity in recommendations. To tackle these challenges, we propose Neural Re-ranking for Diversified Exercise Recommendation (in short, NR4DER). NR4DER first leverages the mLSTM model to improve the effectiveness of the exercise filter module. It then employs a sequence enhancement method to enhance the representation of inactive students, accurately matches students with exercises of appropriate difficulty. Finally, it utilizes neural re-ranking to generate diverse recommendation lists based on individual students' learning histories. Extensive experimental results indicate that NR4DER significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple real-world datasets and effectively caters to the diverse learning pace of students.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed framework for collaborative model training over large-scale distributed data, enabling higher performance while maintaining client data privacy. However, the nature of model aggregation at the centralized server can result in a performance drop in the presence of non-IID data across different clients. We remark that training a client locally on more data than necessary does not benefit the overall performance of all clients. In this paper, we devise a novel framework that leverages a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent to select an optimized amount of data necessary to train a client model without oversharing information with the server. Starting without awareness of the client's performance, the DRL agent utilizes the change in training loss as a reward signal and learns to optimize the amount of training data necessary for improving the client's performance. Specifically, after each aggregation round, the DRL algorithm considers the local performance as the current state and outputs the optimized weights for each class, in the training data, to be used during the next round of local training. In doing so, the agent learns a policy that creates an optimized partition of the local training dataset during the FL rounds. After FL, the client utilizes the entire local training dataset to further enhance its performance on its own data distribution, mitigating the non-IID effects of aggregation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that training FL clients through our algorithm results in superior performance on multiple benchmark datasets and FL frameworks. Our code is available at https://github.com/amuraddd/optimized_client_training.git.

As generative AI (GenAI) becomes increasingly widespread, it is crucial to equip users, particularly vulnerable populations such as older adults (65 and older), with the knowledge to understand its benefits and potential risks. Older adults often exhibit greater reservations about adopting emerging technologies and require tailored literacy support. Using a mixed methods approach, this study examines strategies for delivering GenAI literacy to older adults through a chatbot named Litti, evaluating its impact on their AI literacy (knowledge, safety, and ethical use). The quantitative data indicated a trend toward improved AI literacy, though the results were not statistically significant. However, qualitative interviews revealed diverse levels of familiarity with generative AI and a strong desire to learn more. Findings also show that while Litti provided a positive learning experience, it did not significantly enhance participants' trust or sense of safety regarding GenAI. This exploratory case study highlights the challenges and opportunities in designing AI literacy education for the rapidly growing older adult population.

Recent advancements in AI reasoning have driven substantial improvements across diverse tasks. A critical open question is whether these improvements also yields better knowledge transfer: the ability of models to communicate reasoning in ways humans can understand, apply, and learn from. To investigate this, we introduce Knowledge Integration and Transfer Evaluation (KITE), a conceptual and experimental framework for Human-AI knowledge transfer capabilities and conduct the first large-scale human study (N=118) explicitly designed to measure it. In our two-phase setup, humans first ideate with an AI on problem-solving strategies, then independently implement solutions, isolating model explanations' influence on human understanding. Our findings reveal that although model benchmark performance correlates with collaborative outcomes, this relationship is notably inconsistent, featuring significant outliers, indicating that knowledge transfer requires dedicated optimization. Our analysis identifies behavioral and strategic factors mediating successful knowledge transfer. We release our code, dataset, and evaluation framework to support future work on communicatively aligned models.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently demonstrated strong potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Particularly, the "Zero" reinforcement learning introduced by Deepseek-R1-Zero, enables direct RL training of base LLMs without relying on an intermediate supervised fine-tuning stage. Despite these advancements, current works for LLM reasoning mainly focus on mathematical and coding domains, largely due to data abundance and the ease of answer verification. This limits the applicability and generalization of such models to broader domains, where questions often have diverse answer representations, and data is more scarce. In this paper, we propose General-Reasoner, a novel training paradigm designed to enhance LLM reasoning capabilities across diverse domains. Our key contributions include: (1) constructing a large-scale, high-quality dataset of questions with verifiable answers curated by web crawling, covering a wide range of disciplines; and (2) developing a generative model-based answer verifier, which replaces traditional rule-based verification with the capability of chain-of-thought and context-awareness. We train a series of models and evaluate them on a wide range of datasets covering wide domains like physics, chemistry, finance, electronics etc. Our comprehensive evaluation across these 12 benchmarks (e.g. MMLU-Pro, GPQA, SuperGPQA, TheoremQA, BBEH and MATH AMC) demonstrates that General-Reasoner outperforms existing baseline methods, achieving robust and generalizable reasoning performance while maintaining superior effectiveness in mathematical reasoning tasks.

This paper investigates the potentials of Large Language Models (LLMs) as adaptive tutors in the context of second-language learning. In particular, we evaluate whether system prompting can reliably constrain LLMs to generate only text appropriate to the student's competence level. We simulate full teacher-student dialogues in Spanish using instruction-tuned, open-source LLMs ranging in size from 7B to 12B parameters. Dialogues are generated by having an LLM alternate between tutor and student roles with separate chat histories. The output from the tutor model is then used to evaluate the effectiveness of CEFR-based prompting to control text difficulty across three proficiency levels (A1, B1, C1). Our findings suggest that while system prompting can be used to constrain model outputs, prompting alone is too brittle for sustained, long-term interactional contexts - a phenomenon we term alignment drift. Our results provide insights into the feasibility of LLMs for personalized, proficiency-aligned adaptive tutors and provide a scalable method for low-cost evaluation of model performance without human participants.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate distractors for multiple-choice questions (MCQs), especially in domains like math education. However, existing approaches are limited in ensuring that the generated distractors are consistent with common student errors. We propose LookAlike, a method that improves error-distractor consistency via preference optimization. Our two main innovations are: (a) mining synthetic preference pairs from model inconsistencies, and (b) alternating supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to stabilize training. Unlike prior work that relies on heuristics or manually annotated preference data, LookAlike uses its own generation inconsistencies as dispreferred samples, thus enabling scalable and stable training. Evaluated on a real-world dataset of 1,400+ math MCQs, LookAlike achieves 51.6% accuracy in distractor generation and 57.2% in error generation under LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, outperforming an existing state-of-the-art method (45.6% / 47.7%). These improvements highlight the effectiveness of preference-based regularization and inconsistency mining for generating consistent math MCQ distractors at scale.

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has illuminated a promising pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence for both academic and industrial communities, owing to their unprecedented performance across various applications. As LLMs continue to gain prominence in both research and commercial domains, their security and safety implications have become a growing concern, not only for researchers and corporations but also for every nation. Currently, existing surveys on LLM safety primarily focus on specific stages of the LLM lifecycle, e.g., deployment phase or fine-tuning phase, lacking a comprehensive understanding of the entire "lifechain" of LLMs. To address this gap, this paper introduces, for the first time, the concept of "full-stack" safety to systematically consider safety issues throughout the entire process of LLM training, deployment, and eventual commercialization. Compared to the off-the-shelf LLM safety surveys, our work demonstrates several distinctive advantages: (I) Comprehensive Perspective. We define the complete LLM lifecycle as encompassing data preparation, pre-training, post-training, deployment and final commercialization. To our knowledge, this represents the first safety survey to encompass the entire lifecycle of LLMs. (II) Extensive Literature Support. Our research is grounded in an exhaustive review of over 800+ papers, ensuring comprehensive coverage and systematic organization of security issues within a more holistic understanding. (III) Unique Insights. Through systematic literature analysis, we have developed reliable roadmaps and perspectives for each chapter. Our work identifies promising research directions, including safety in data generation, alignment techniques, model editing, and LLM-based agent systems. These insights provide valuable guidance for researchers pursuing future work in this field.