Deep Learning
Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Tracing Models
Mitton, Joshua, Bhattacharyya, Prarthana, Abboud, Ralph, Woodhead, Simon
The main focus of research on Knowledge Tracing (KT) models is on model developments with the aim of improving predictive accuracy. Most of these models make the most incorrect predictions when students choose a distractor, leading to student errors going undetected. We present an approach to add new capabilities to KT models by capturing predictive uncertainty and demonstrate that a larger predictive uncertainty aligns with model incorrect predictions. We show that uncertainty in KT models is informative and that this signal would be pedagogically useful for application in an educational learning platform that can be used in a limited resource setting where understanding student ability is necessary.
LLM Agent Meets Agentic AI: Can LLM Agents Simulate Customers to Evaluate Agentic-AI-based Shopping Assistants?
Sun, Lu, Fu, Shihan, Yao, Bingsheng, Lu, Yuxuan, Li, Wenbo, Gu, Hansu, Gesi, Jiri, Huang, Jing, Luo, Chen, Wang, Dakuo
Agentic AI is emerging, capable of executing tasks through natural language, such as Copilot for coding or Amazon Rufus for shopping. Evaluating these systems is challenging, as their rapid evolution outpaces traditional human evaluation. Researchers have proposed LLM Agents to simulate participants as digital twins, but it remains unclear to what extent a digital twin can represent a specific customer in multi-turn interaction with an agentic AI system. In this paper, we recruited 40 human participants to shop with Amazon Rufus, collected their personas, interaction traces, and UX feedback, and then created digital twins to repeat the task. Pairwise comparison of human and digital-twin traces shows that while agents often explored more diverse choices, their action patterns aligned with humans and yielded similar design feedback. This study is the first to quantify how closely LLM agents can mirror human multi-turn interaction with an agentic AI system, highlighting their potential for scalable evaluation.
Score-based Idempotent Distillation of Diffusion Models
Zaman, Shehtab, Liu, Chengyan, Chiu, Kenneth
Idempotent generative networks (IGNs) are a new line of generative models based on idempotent mapping to a target manifold. IGNs support both single-and multi-step generation, allowing for a flexible trade-off between computational cost and sample quality. But similar to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), conventional IGNs require adversarial training and are prone to training instabilities and mode collapse. Diffusion and score-based models are popular approaches to generative modeling that iteratively transport samples from one distribution, usually a Gaussian, to a target data distribution. These models have gained popularity due to their stable training dynamics and high-fidelity generation quality. However, this stability and quality come at the cost of high computational cost, as the data must be transported incrementally along the entire trajectory. New sampling methods, model distillation, and consistency models have been developed to reduce the sampling cost and even perform one-shot sampling from diffusion models. In this work, we unite diffusion and IGNs by distilling idempotent models from diffusion model scores, called SIGN. Our proposed method is highly stable and does not require adversarial losses. We provide a theoretical analysis of our proposed score-based training methods and empirically show that IGNs can be effectively distilled from a pre-trained diffusion model, enabling faster inference than iterative score-based models. SIGNs can perform multi-step sampling, allowing users to trade off quality for efficiency. These models operate directly on the source domain; they can project corrupted or alternate distributions back onto the target manifold, enabling zero-shot editing of inputs. We validate our models on multiple image datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results for idempotent models on the CIFAR and CelebA datasets.
Gender Stereotypes in Professional Roles Among Saudis: An Analytical Study of AI-Generated Images Using Language Models
AlKhalifah, Khaloud S., Mashaabi, Malak, Al-Khalifa, Hend
This study investigates the extent to which contemporary Text-to-Image artificial intelligence (AI) models perpetuate gender stereotypes and cultural inaccuracies when generating depictions of professionals in Saudi Arabia. We analyzed 1,006 images produced by ImageFX, DALL-E V3, and Grok for 56 diverse Saudi professions using neutral prompts. Two trained Saudi annotators evaluated each image on five dimensions: perceived gender, clothing and appearance, background and setting, activities and interactions, and age. A third senior researcher adjudicated whenever the two primary raters disagreed, yielding 10,100 individual judgements. The results reveal a strong gender imbalance, with ImageFX outputs being 85\% male, Grok 86.6\% male, and DALL-E V3 96\% male, indicating that DALL-E V3 exhibited the strongest overall gender stereotyping. This imbalance was most evident in leadership and technical roles. Moreover, cultural inaccuracies in clothing, settings, and depicted activities were frequently observed across all three models. Counter-stereotypical images often arise from cultural misinterpretations rather than genuinely progressive portrayals. We conclude that current models mirror societal biases embedded in their training data, generated by humans, offering only a limited reflection of the Saudi labour market's gender dynamics and cultural nuances. These findings underscore the urgent need for more diverse training data, fairer algorithms, and culturally sensitive evaluation frameworks to ensure equitable and authentic visual outputs.
Talking Trees: Reasoning-Assisted Induction of Decision Trees for Tabular Data
Yakushev, George, Shutova, Alina, Rubachev, Ivan, Sergazinov, Renat, Babenko, Artem
Tabular foundation models are becoming increasingly popular for low-resource tabular problems. These models make up for small training datasets by pretraining on large volumes of synthetic data. The prior knowledge obtained via pretraining provides the exceptional performance, but the resulting model becomes a black box that is difficult to interpret and costly to inference. In this work, we explore an alternative strategy: using reasoning-capable LLMs to induce decision trees for small tabular datasets in agentic setup. We design a minimal set of tools for constructing, analyzing and manipulating decision trees. By using these tools, LLMs combine their prior knowledge with learning from data to create a lightweight decision tree that outperforms traditional CART on low-resource tabular problems. While a single decision tree does not outperform state-of-the-art black box models, it comes with a human-readable reasoning trace that can be checked for biases and data leaks. Furthermore, the reasoning-based LLM's creation process allows for additional human input: correcting biases or incorporating domain-specific intuition that is not captured in the data.
A State-of-the-Art SQL Reasoning Model using RLVR
Ali, Alnur, Baheti, Ashutosh, Chang, Jonathan, Chi, Ta-Chung, Cui, Brandon, Drozdov, Andrew, Frankle, Jonathan, Gupta, Abhay, Koppol, Pallavi, Kulinski, Sean, Li, Jonathan, Misra, Dipendra, Opsahl-Ong, Krista, Ortiz, Jose Javier Gonzalez, Zaharia, Matei, Zhang, Yue
Developing custom reasoning models via Reinforcement Learning (RL) that can incorporate organization-specific knowledge has great potential to address problems faced by enterprise customers. In many of these problems, the reward function is verifiable, a setting termed RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). We apply RLVR to a popular data science benchmark called BIRD that measures the ability of an AI agent to convert a natural language query for a database to SQL executions. We apply a simple and general-purpose training recipe involving careful prompt and model selection, a warm-up stage using our offline RL approach called TAO, followed by rigorous online RLVR training. With no additional training data beyond the BIRD training set and no use of proprietary models, our very first submission to the BIRD leaderboard reached state-of-the-art accuracy on the private test set: 73.56% without self-consistency and 75.68% with self-consistency. In the latter case, our model also required fewer generations than the second-best approach. While BIRD is only a proxy task, the simplicity of our framework makes it broadly applicable to enterprise domains such as business intelligence, data science, and coding.
One Model, Many Morals: Uncovering Cross-Linguistic Misalignments in Computational Moral Reasoning
Farid, Sualeha, Lin, Jayden, Chen, Zean, Kumar, Shivani, Jurgens, David
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multilingual and multicultural environments where moral reasoning is essential for generating ethically appropriate responses. Yet, the dominant pretraining of LLMs on English-language data raises critical concerns about their ability to generalize judgments across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. In this work, we systematically investigate how language mediates moral decision-making in LLMs. We translate two established moral reasoning benchmarks into five culturally and typologically diverse languages, enabling multilingual zero-shot evaluation. Our analysis reveals significant inconsistencies in LLMs' moral judgments across languages, often reflecting cultural misalignment. Through a combination of carefully constructed research questions, we uncover the underlying drivers of these disparities, ranging from disagreements to reasoning strategies employed by LLMs. Finally, through a case study, we link the role of pretraining data in shaping an LLM's moral compass. Through this work, we distill our insights into a structured typology of moral reasoning errors that calls for more culturally-aware AI.
DyME: Dynamic Multi-Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models with Bi-Level Orthogonal LoRA Adaptation
Liu, Jiaqi, Zhang, Lan, Yuan, Xiaoyong
Text-to-image diffusion models (DMs) inadvertently reproduce copyrighted styles and protected visual concepts, raising legal and ethical concerns. Concept erasure has emerged as a safeguard, aiming to selectively suppress such concepts through fine-tuning. However, existing methods do not scale to practical settings where providers must erase multiple and possibly conflicting concepts. The core bottleneck is their reliance on static erasure: a single checkpoint is fine-tuned to remove all target concepts, regardless of the actual erasure needs at inference. This rigid design mismatches real-world usage, where requests vary per generation, leading to degraded erasure success and reduced fidelity for non-target content. We propose DyME, an on-demand erasure framework that trains lightweight, concept-specific LoRA adapters and dynamically composes only those needed at inference. This modular design enables flexible multi-concept erasure, but naive composition causes interference among adapters, especially when many or semantically related concepts are suppressed. To overcome this, we introduce bi-level orthogonality constraints at both the feature and parameter levels, disentangling representation shifts and enforcing orthogonal adapter subspaces. We further develop ErasureBench-H, a new hierarchical benchmark with brand-series-character structure, enabling principled evaluation across semantic granularities and erasure set sizes. Experiments on ErasureBench-H and standard datasets (e.g., CIFAR-100, Imagenette) demonstrate that DyME consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving higher multi-concept erasure fidelity with minimal collateral degradation.
Object Identification Under Known Dynamics: A PIRNN Approach for UAV Classification
Aung, Nyi Nyi, Muralles, Neil, Stein, Adrian
Abstract--This work addresses object identification under known dynamics in unmanned aerial vehicle applications, where learning and classification are combined through a physics-informed residual neural network. The proposed framework leverages physics-informed learning for state mapping and state-derivative prediction, while a softmax layer enables multi-class confidence estimation. Quadcopter, fixed-wing, and helicopter aerial vehicles are considered as case studies. The results demonstrate high classification accuracy with reduced training time, offering a promising solution for system identification problems in domains where the underlying dynamics are well understood. I. INTRODUCTION The increasing deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) in civilian and defense sectors has elevated the importance of dynamic modeling and intent inference for tasks such as control, classification, and anomaly detection. Traditional approaches to UA V identification rely primarily on visual, radio-frequency, or pattern-based features, which are vulnerable in contested or adversarial environments [1], [2].
How Large Language Models Need Symbolism
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs) [1], have achieved remarkable success. This progress stems from "scaling laws" -- performance improves with greater computation, data, and model size [2]. They now excel at mathematics, medical, legal, and coding exams and competitions. Y et, this paradigm has a crucial vulnerability: scaling laws are effective only when data is abundant. Human reasoning, which relies on logical operations and abstractions rather than brute-force pattern matching on vast data, proves critical in tackling complex frontier domains, where usable data is often inherently scarce.