Education
More-than-Human Storytelling: Designing Longitudinal Narrative Engagements with Generative AI
Fabre, Émilie, Seaborn, Katie, Koiwai, Shuta, Watanabe, Mizuki, Riesch, Paul
Longitudinal engagement with generative AI (GenAI) storytelling agents is a timely but less charted domain. We explored multi-generational experiences with "Dreamsmithy," a daily dream-crafting app, where participants (N = 28) co-created stories with AI narrator "Makoto" every day. Reflections and interactions were captured through a two-week diary study. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed themes likes "oscillating ambivalence" and "socio-chronological bonding," highlighting the complex dynamics that emerged between individuals and the AI narrator over time. Findings suggest that while people appreciated the personal notes, opportunities for reflection, and AI creativity, limitations in narrative coherence and control occasionally caused frustration. The results underscore the potential of GenAI for longitudinal storytelling, but also raise critical questions about user agency and ethics. We contribute initial empirical insights and design considerations for developing adaptive, more-than-human storytelling systems.
A Mathematical Framework for AI-Human Integration in Work
Celis, L. Elisa, Huang, Lingxiao, Vishnoi, Nisheeth K.
The rapid rise of Generative AI (GenAI) tools has sparked debate over their role in complementing or replacing human workers across job contexts. We present a mathematical framework that models jobs, workers, and worker-job fit, introducing a novel decomposition of skills into decision-level and action-level subskills to reflect the complementary strengths of humans and GenAI. We analyze how changes in subskill abilities affect job success, identifying conditions for sharp transitions in success probability. We also establish sufficient conditions under which combining workers with complementary subskills significantly outperforms relying on a single worker. This explains phenomena such as productivity compression, where GenAI assistance yields larger gains for lower-skilled workers. We demonstrate the framework' s practicality using data from O*NET and Big-Bench Lite, aligning real-world data with our model via subskill-division methods. Our results highlight when and how GenAI complements human skills, rather than replacing them.
The Road to Generalizable Neuro-Symbolic Learning Should be Paved with Foundation Models
Stein, Adam, Naik, Aaditya, Velingker, Neelay, Naik, Mayur, Wong, Eric
Neuro-symbolic learning was proposed to address challenges with training neural networks for complex reasoning tasks with the added benefits of interpretability, reliability, and efficiency. Neuro-symbolic learning methods traditionally train neural models in conjunction with symbolic programs, but they face significant challenges that limit them to simplistic problems. On the other hand, purely-neural foundation models now reach state-of-the-art performance through prompting rather than training, but they are often unreliable and lack interpretability. Supplementing foundation models with symbolic programs, which we call neuro-symbolic prompting, provides a way to use these models for complex reasoning tasks. Doing so raises the question: What role does specialized model training as part of neuro-symbolic learning have in the age of foundation models? To explore this question, we highlight three pitfalls of traditional neuro-symbolic learning with respect to the compute, data, and programs leading to generalization problems. This position paper argues that foundation models enable generalizable neuro-symbolic solutions, offering a path towards achieving the original goals of neuro-symbolic learning without the downsides of training from scratch.
AlphaOne: Reasoning Models Thinking Slow and Fast at Test Time
Zhang, Junyu, Dong, Runpei, Wang, Han, Ning, Xuying, Geng, Haoran, Li, Peihao, He, Xialin, Bai, Yutong, Malik, Jitendra, Gupta, Saurabh, Zhang, Huan
This paper presents AlphaOne ($α$1), a universal framework for modulating reasoning progress in large reasoning models (LRMs) at test time. $α$1 first introduces $α$ moment, which represents the scaled thinking phase with a universal parameter $α$. Within this scaled pre-$α$ moment phase, it dynamically schedules slow thinking transitions by modeling the insertion of reasoning transition tokens as a Bernoulli stochastic process. After the $α$ moment, $α$1 deterministically terminates slow thinking with the end-of-thinking token, thereby fostering fast reasoning and efficient answer generation. This approach unifies and generalizes existing monotonic scaling methods by enabling flexible and dense slow-to-fast reasoning modulation. Extensive empirical studies on various challenging benchmarks across mathematical, coding, and scientific domains demonstrate $α$1's superior reasoning capability and efficiency. Project page: https://alphaone-project.github.io/
Chameleon: A Flexible Data-mixing Framework for Language Model Pretraining and Finetuning
Xie, Wanyun, Tonin, Francesco, Cevher, Volkan
Training data mixtures greatly impact the generalization performance of large language models. Existing domain reweighting methods often rely on costly weight computations and require retraining when new data is introduced. To this end, we introduce a flexible and efficient data mixing framework, Chameleon, that employs leverage scores to quantify domain importance within a learned embedding space. We first construct a domain affinity matrix over domain embeddings. The induced leverage scores determine a mixture that upweights domains sharing common representations in embedding space. This formulation allows direct transfer to new data by computing the new domain embeddings. In experiments, we demonstrate improvements over three key scenarios: (i) our computed weights improve performance on pretraining domains with a fraction of the compute of existing methods; (ii) Chameleon can adapt to data changes without proxy retraining, boosting few-shot reasoning accuracies when transferred to new data; (iii) our method enables efficient domain reweighting in finetuning, consistently improving test perplexity on all finetuning domains over uniform mixture. Our code is available at https://github.com/LIONS-EPFL/Chameleon.
Don't Reinvent the Wheel: Efficient Instruction-Following Text Embedding based on Guided Space Transformation
Feng, Yingchaojie, Sun, Yiqun, Sun, Yandong, Zhu, Minfeng, Huang, Qiang, Tung, Anthony K. H., Chen, Wei
In this work, we investigate an important task named instruction-following text embedding, which generates dynamic text embeddings that adapt to user instructions, highlighting specific attributes of text. Despite recent advancements, existing approaches suffer from significant computational overhead, as they require re-encoding the entire corpus for each new instruction. To address this challenge, we propose GSTransform, a novel instruction-following text embedding framework based on Guided Space Transformation. Our key observation is that instruction-relevant information is inherently encoded in generic embeddings but remains underutilized. Instead of repeatedly encoding the corpus for each instruction, GSTransform is a lightweight transformation mechanism that adapts pre-computed embeddings in real time to align with user instructions, guided by a small amount of text data with instruction-focused label annotation. We conduct extensive experiments on three instruction-awareness downstream tasks across nine real-world datasets, demonstrating that GSTransform improves instruction-following text embedding quality over state-of-the-art methods while achieving dramatic speedups of 6~300x in real-time processing on large-scale datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/YingchaojieFeng/GSTransform.
Krikri: Advancing Open Large Language Models for Greek
Roussis, Dimitris, Voukoutis, Leon, Paraskevopoulos, Georgios, Sofianopoulos, Sokratis, Prokopidis, Prokopis, Papavasileiou, Vassilis, Katsamanis, Athanasios, Piperidis, Stelios, Katsouros, Vassilis
We introduce Llama-Krikri-8B, a cutting-edge Large Language Model tailored for the Greek language, built on Meta's Llama 3.1-8B. Llama-Krikri-8B has been extensively trained on high-quality Greek data to ensure superior adaptation to linguistic nuances. With 8 billion parameters, it offers advanced capabilities while maintaining efficient computational performance. Llama-Krikri-8B supports both Modern Greek and English, and is also equipped to handle polytonic text and Ancient Greek. The chat version of Llama-Krikri-8B features a multi-stage post-training pipeline, utilizing both human and synthetic instruction and preference data, by applying techniques such as MAGPIE. In addition, for evaluation, we propose three novel public benchmarks for Greek. Our evaluation on existing as well as the proposed benchmarks shows notable improvements over comparable Greek and multilingual LLMs in both natural language understanding and generation as well as code generation.
HESEIA: A community-based dataset for evaluating social biases in large language models, co-designed in real school settings in Latin America
Ivetta, Guido, Gomez, Marcos J., Martinelli, Sofía, Palombini, Pietro, Echeveste, M. Emilia, Mazzeo, Nair Carolina, Busaniche, Beatriz, Benotti, Luciana
Most resources for evaluating social biases in Large Language Models are developed without co-design from the communities affected by these biases, and rarely involve participatory approaches. We introduce HESEIA, a dataset of 46,499 sentences created in a professional development course. The course involved 370 high-school teachers and 5,370 students from 189 Latin-American schools. Unlike existing benchmarks, HESEIA captures intersectional biases across multiple demographic axes and school subjects. It reflects local contexts through the lived experience and pedagogical expertise of educators. Teachers used minimal pairs to create sentences that express stereotypes relevant to their school subjects and communities. We show the dataset diversity in term of demographic axes represented and also in terms of the knowledge areas included. We demonstrate that the dataset contains more stereotypes unrecognized by current LLMs than previous datasets. HESEIA is available to support bias assessments grounded in educational communities.
Generative Knowledge Production Pipeline Driven by Academic Influencers
Feher, Katalin, Demeter, Marton
ABSTRACT Generative AI transforms knowledge production, validation, and dissemination, raising academic integrity and credibility concerns. This study examines 53 academic influencer videos that reached 5.3 million viewers to identify an emerging, structured, implementation-ready pipeline balancing originality, ethical compliance, and human-AI collaboration despite the disruptive impacts. Findings highlight generative AI's potential to automate publication workflows and democratize participation in knowledge production while challenging traditional scientific norms. Academic influencers emerge as key intermediaries in this paradigm shift, connecting bottom-up practices with institutional policies to improve adaptability. Accordingly, the study proposes a generative publication production pipeline and a policy framework for co-intelligence adaptation and reinforcing credibility-centered standards in AI-powered research. These insights support scholars, educators, and policymakers in understanding AI's transformative impact by advocating responsible and innovation-driven knowledge production. Additionally, they reveal pathways for automating best practices, optimizing scholarly workflows, and fostering creativity in academic research and publication. Keywords: generative AI, ChatPGT, academic integrity, influencers, knowledge production, social media, policy implications, academic policy 1. INTRODUCTION The advent of generative AI (GenAI) transforms knowledge production, increasingly supporting and partially automating the academic workflow (Bolanos et al. 2024). This trend suggests a paradigm shift where researchers utilize effectively and productively generative AI tools, potentially leading to more automated scientific workflows. However, we have also identified a human component in this process: the impact of the academic influencers via social media promoting hands-on knowledge about GenAI in academic projects.
TRIDENT: Enhancing Large Language Model Safety with Tri-Dimensional Diversified Red-Teaming Data Synthesis
Wu, Xiaorui, Mao, Xiaofeng, Li, Fei, Zhang, Xin, Li, Xuanhong, Teng, Chong, Ji, Donghong, Li, Zhuang
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various natural language processing tasks but remain vulnerable to generating harmful content or being exploited for malicious purposes. Although safety alignment datasets have been introduced to mitigate such risks through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these datasets often lack comprehensive risk coverage. Most existing datasets focus primarily on lexical diversity while neglecting other critical dimensions. To address this limitation, we propose a novel analysis framework to systematically measure the risk coverage of alignment datasets across three essential dimensions: Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. We further introduce TRIDENT, an automated pipeline that leverages persona-based, zero-shot LLM generation to produce diverse and comprehensive instructions spanning these dimensions. Each harmful instruction is paired with an ethically aligned response, resulting in two datasets: TRIDENT-Core, comprising 26,311 examples, and TRIDENT-Edge, with 18,773 examples. Fine-tuning Llama 3.1-8B on TRIDENT-Edge demonstrates substantial improvements, achieving an average 14.29% reduction in Harm Score, and a 20% decrease in Attack Success Rate compared to the best-performing baseline model fine-tuned on the WildBreak dataset.