Deep Learning
Report from Workshop on Dialogue alongside Artificial Intelligence
McKenna, Thomas J, Rasmussen, Ingvill, Ludvigsen, Sten, Arvatz, Avivit, Asterhan, Christa, Chen, Gaowei, Cohen, Julie, Flammia, Michele, Han, Dongkeun, Hayward, Emma, Hill, Heather, Kolikant, Yifat, Lehndorf, Helen, Li, Kexin, Matsumura, Lindsay Clare, Tjรธnn, Henrik, Wang, Pengjin, Wegerif, Rupert
Educational dialogue -- the collaborative exchange of ideas through talk -- is widely recognized as a catalyst for deeper learning and critical thinking in and across contexts. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a powerful force in education, with the potential to address major challenges, personalize learning, and innovate teaching practices. However, these advances come with significant risks: rapid AI development can undermine human agency, exacerbate inequities, and outpace our capacity to guide its use with sound policy. Human learning presupposes cognitive efforts and social interaction (dialogues). In response to this evolving landscape, an international workshop titled "Educational Dialogue: Moving Thinking Forward" convened 19 leading researchers from 11 countries in Cambridge (September 1-3, 2025) to examine the intersection of AI and educational dialogue. This AI-focused strand of the workshop centered on three critical questions: (1) When is AI truly useful in education, and when might it merely replace human effort at the expense of learning? (2) Under what conditions can AI use lead to better dialogic teaching and learning? (3) Does the AI-human partnership risk outpacing and displacing human educational work, and what are the implications? These questions framed two days of presentations and structured dialogue among participants.
A Certifiable Machine Learning-Based Pipeline to Predict Fatigue Life of Aircraft Structures
Ladrรณn, รngel, Sรกnchez-Domรญnguez, Miguel, Rozalรฉn, Javier, Sรกnchez, Fernando R., de Vicente, Javier, Lacasa, Lucas, Valero, Eusebio, Rubio, Gonzalo
Fatigue life prediction is essential in both the design and operational phases of any aircraft, and in this sense safety in the aerospace industry requires early detection of fatigue cracks to prevent in-flight failures. Robust and precise fatigue life predictors are thus essential to ensure safety. Traditional engineering methods, while reliable, are time consuming and involve complex workflows, including steps such as conducting several Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations, deriving the expected loading spectrum, and applying cycle counting techniques like peak-valley or rainflow counting. These steps often require collaboration between multiple teams and tools, added to the computational time and effort required to achieve fatigue life predictions. Machine learning (ML) offers a promising complement to traditional fatigue life estimation methods, enabling faster iterations and generalization, providing quick estimates that guide decisions alongside conventional simulations. In this paper, we present a ML-based pipeline that aims to estimate the fatigue life of different aircraft wing locations given the flight parameters of the different missions that the aircraft will be operating throughout its operational life. We validate the pipeline in a realistic use case of fatigue life estimation, yielding accurate predictions alongside a thorough statistical validation and uncertainty quantification. Our pipeline constitutes a complement to traditional methodologies by reducing the amount of costly simulations and, thereby, lowering the required computational and human resources.
Military AI Needs Technically-Informed Regulation to Safeguard AI Research and its Applications
Simmons-Edler, Riley, Dong, Jean, Lushenko, Paul, Rajan, Kanaka, Badman, Ryan P.
Military weapon systems and command-and-control infrastructure augmented by artificial intelligence (AI) have seen rapid development and deployment in recent years. However, the sociotechnical impacts of AI on combat systems, military decision-making, and the norms of warfare have been understudied. We focus on a specific subset of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) that use AI for targeting or battlefield decisions. We refer to this subset as AI-powered lethal autonomous weapon systems (AI-LAWS) and argue that they introduce novel risks -- including unanticipated escalation, poor reliability in unfamiliar environments, and erosion of human oversight -- all of which threaten both military effectiveness and the openness of AI research. These risks cannot be addressed by high-level policy alone; effective regulation must be grounded in the technical behavior of AI models. We argue that AI researchers must be involved throughout the regulatory lifecycle. Thus, we propose a clear, behavior-based definition of AI-LAWS -- systems that introduce unique risks through their use of modern AI -- as a foundation for technically grounded regulation, given that existing frameworks do not distinguish them from conventional LAWS. Using this definition, we propose several technically-informed policy directions and invite greater participation from the AI research community in military AI policy discussions.
Robust and Diverse Multi-Agent Learning via Rational Policy Gradient
Lauffer, Niklas, Shah, Ameesh, Carroll, Micah, Seshia, Sanjit A., Russell, Stuart, Dennis, Michael
Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in multi-agent settings. However, the success of adversarial optimization has been largely limited to zero-sum settings because its naive application in cooperative settings leads to a critical failure mode: agents are irrationally incentivized to self-sabotage, blocking the completion of tasks and halting further learning. To address this, we introduce Rationality-preserving Policy Optimization (RPO), a formalism for adversarial optimization that avoids self-sabotage by ensuring agents remain rational--that is, their policies are optimal with respect to some possible partner policy. To solve RPO, we develop Rational Policy Gradient (RPG), which trains agents to maximize their own reward in a modified version of the original game in which we use opponent shaping techniques to optimize the adversarial objective. RPG enables us to extend a variety of existing adversarial optimization algorithms that, no longer subject to the limitations of self-sabotage, can find adversarial examples, improve robustness and adaptability, and learn diverse policies. We empirically validate that our approach achieves strong performance in several popular cooperative and general-sum environments. Our project page can be found at https://rational-policy-gradient.github.io.
DreamPose3D: Hallucinative Diffusion with Prompt Learning for 3D Human Pose Estimation
Bright, Jerrin, Chen, Yuhao, Zelek, John S.
Accurate 3D human pose estimation remains a critical yet unresolved challenge, requiring both temporal coherence across frames and fine-grained modeling of joint relationships. However, most existing methods rely solely on geometric cues and predict each 3D pose independently, which limits their ability to resolve ambiguous motions and generalize to real-world scenarios. Inspired by how humans understand and anticipate motion, we introduce DreamPose3D, a diffusion-based framework that combines action-aware reasoning with temporal imagination for 3D pose estimation. DreamPose3D dynamically conditions the denoising process using task-relevant action prompts extracted from 2D pose sequences, capturing high-level intent. To model the structural relationships between joints effectively, we introduce a representation encoder that incorporates kinematic joint affinity into the attention mechanism. Finally, a hallucinative pose decoder predicts temporally coherent 3D pose sequences during training, simulating how humans mentally reconstruct motion trajectories to resolve ambiguity in perception. Extensive experiments on benchmarked Human3.6M and MPI-3DHP datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across all metrics. To further validate DreamPose3D's robustness, we tested it on a broadcast baseball dataset, where it demonstrated strong performance despite ambiguous and noisy 2D inputs, effectively handling temporal consistency and intent-driven motion variations.
Consensus Sampling for Safer Generative AI
Kalai, Adam Tauman, Kalai, Yael Tauman, Zamir, Or
Many approaches to AI safety rely on inspecting model outputs or activations, yet certain risks are inherently undetectable by inspection alone. We propose a complementary, architecture-agnostic approach that enhances safety through the aggregation of multiple generative models, with the aggregated model inheriting its safety from the safest subset of a given size among them. Specifically, we present a consensus sampling algorithm that, given $k$ models and a prompt, achieves risk competitive with the average risk of the safest $s$ of the $k$ models, where $s$ is a chosen parameter, while abstaining when there is insufficient agreement between them. The approach leverages the models' ability to compute output probabilities, and we bound the probability of abstention when sufficiently many models are safe and exhibit adequate agreement. The algorithm is inspired by the provable copyright protection algorithm of Vyas et al. (2023). It requires some overlap among safe models, offers no protection when all models are unsafe, and may accumulate risk over repeated use. Nonetheless, our results provide a new, model-agnostic approach for AI safety by amplifying safety guarantees from an unknown subset of models within a collection to that of a single reliable model.
How does the Performance of the Data-driven Traffic Flow Forecasting Models deteriorate with Increasing Forecasting Horizon? An Extensive Approach Considering Statistical, Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models
Sherfenaz, Amanta, Haque, Nazmul, Prova, Protiva Sadhukhan, Raihan, Md Asif, Hadiuzzaman, Md.
With rapid urbanization in recent decades, traffic congestion has intensified due to increased movement of people and goods. As planning shifts from demand-based to supply-oriented strategies, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have become essential for managing traffic within existing infrastructure. A core ITS function is traffic forecasting, enabling proactive measures like ramp metering, signal control, and dynamic routing through platforms such as Google Maps. This study assesses the performance of statistical, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) models in forecasting traffic speed and flow using real-world data from California's Harbor Freeway, sourced from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS). Each model was evaluated over 20 forecasting windows (up to 1 hour 40 minutes) using RMSE, MAE, and R-Square metrics. Results show ANFIS-GP performs best at early windows with RMSE of 0.038, MAE of 0.0276, and R-Square of 0.9983, while Bi-LSTM is more robust for medium-term prediction due to its capacity to model long-range temporal dependencies, achieving RMSE of 0.1863, MAE of 0.0833, and R-Square of 0.987 at a forecasting of 20. The degradation in model performance was quantified using logarithmic transformation, with slope values used to measure robustness. Among DL models, Bi-LSTM had the flattest slope (0.0454 RMSE, 0.0545 MAE for flow), whereas ANFIS-GP had 0.1058 for RMSE and 0.1037 for flow MAE. The study concludes by identifying hybrid models as a promising future direction.
MCAD: Multimodal Context-Aware Audio Description Generation For Soccer
Chaudhary, Lipisha, Mittal, Trisha, Gopalakrishnan, Subhadra, Nwogu, Ifeoma, Pytlarz, Jaclyn
Abstract--Audio Descriptions (AD) are essential for making visual content accessible to individuals with visual impairments. Recent works have shown a promising step towards automating AD, but they have been limited to describing high-quality movie content using human-annotated ground truth AD in the process. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline, MCAD, that extends AD generation beyond movies to the domain of sports, with a focus on soccer games, without relying on ground truth AD. T o address the absence of domain-specific AD datasets, we fine-tune a Video Large Language Model on publicly available movie AD datasets so that it learns the narrative structure and conventions of AD. During inference, MCAD incorporates multimodal contextual cues such as player identities, soccer events/actions, and commentary from the game. These cues, combined with input prompts to the fine-tuned Video-LLM, allow the system to produce complete AD text for each video segment. We further introduce a new evaluation metric, ARGE-AD, designed to accurately assess the quality of generated AD. ARGE-AD evaluates the generated AD for the presence of five characteristics: (i) usage of people's names, (ii) mention of actions/events, (iii) appropriate length of AD, (iv) absence of pronouns, and (v) overlap from commentary/subtitles. We present an in-depth analysis of our approach on both movie and soccer datasets. We also validate the use of this metric to quantitatively comment on the quality of generated AD using our metric across domains. Additionally, we contribute audio descriptions for 100 soccer game clips annotated by two AD experts. Audio Description (AD) is the descriptive spoken narration of visual content, primarily for assisting visual impairments in accessing visual content [1].
BIG5-TPoT: Predicting BIG Five Personality Traits, Facets, and Items Through Targeted Preselection of Texts
Le, Triet M., Chandra, Arjun, Rytting, C. Anton, Karuzis, Valerie P., Rife, Vladimir, Simpson, William A.
Predicting an individual's personalities from their generated texts is a challenging task, especially when the text volume is large. In this paper, we introduce a straightforward yet effective novel strategy called targeted preselection of texts (TPoT). This method semantically filters the texts as input to a deep learning model, specifically designed to predict a Big Five personality trait, facet, or item, referred to as the BIG5-TPoT model. By selecting texts that are semantically relevant to a particular trait, facet, or item, this strategy not only addresses the issue of input text limits in large language models but also improves the Mean Absolute Error and accuracy metrics in predictions for the Stream of Consciousness Essays dataset.
Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming for d-dimensional Symbolic Regression Problems
Anthes, Philipp, Sobania, Dominik, Rothlauf, Franz
Transformer Semantic Genetic Programming (TSGP) is a semantic search approach that uses a pre-trained transformer model as a variation operator to generate offspring programs with controlled semantic similarity to a given parent. Unlike other semantic GP approaches that rely on fixed syntactic transformations, TSGP aims to learn diverse structural variations that lead to solutions with similar semantics. We find that a single transformer model trained on millions of programs is able to generalize across symbolic regression problems of varying dimension. Evaluated on 24 real-world and synthetic datasets, TSGP significantly outperforms standard GP, SLIM_GSGP, Deep Symbolic Regression, and Denoising Autoencoder GP, achieving an average rank of 1.58 across all benchmarks. Moreover, TSGP produces more compact solutions than SLIM_GSGP, despite its higher accuracy. In addition, the target semantic distance $\mathrm{SD}_t$ is able to control the step size in the semantic space: small values of $\mathrm{SD}_t$ enable consistent improvement in fitness but often lead to larger programs, while larger values promote faster convergence and compactness. Thus, $\mathrm{SD}_t$ provides an effective mechanism for balancing exploration and exploitation.