Lucrative career prospects and creative opportunities often attract students to enroll in computer science majors and pursue advanced studies in the field. Consequently, there has been a significant surge in enrollment in computer science courses, resulting in large class sizes that can range from hundreds to even thousands of students. A common challenge in such large classrooms is the lack of engagement between students and both the instructor and the learning material. However, with advancements in technology and improvements in large language models (LLMs), there is a considerable opportunity to utilize LLM-based AI models, such as conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), to enhance student engagement with learning content in large classes. To explore the potential of CAI to support engagement, especially with learning content, we designed an activity in a software Engineering course (with a large class size) where students used CAI for an in-class activity. We conducted a within-subject investigation in a large classroom at a US university where we compared student engagement during an in-class activity that used CAI tool vs. one without CAI tool. The CAI tool we used was ChatGPT due to its widespread popularity and familiarity. Our results indicate that CAI (ChatGPT) has the potential to support engagement with learning content during in-class activities, especially in large class sizes. We further discuss the implications of our findings.

Strategic randomization is a key principle in game theory, yet it remains underexplored in large language models (LLMs). Prior work often conflates the cognitive decision to randomize with the mechanical generation of randomness, leading to incomplete evaluations. To address this, we propose a novel zero-sum game inspired by the Tian Ji Horse Race, where the Nash equilibrium corresponds to a maximal entropy strategy. The game's complexity masks this property from untrained humans and underdeveloped LLMs. We evaluate five LLMs across prompt styles -- framed, neutral, and hinted -- using competitive multi-tournament gameplay with system-provided random choices, isolating the decision to randomize. Results show that weaker models remain deterministic regardless of prompts, while stronger models exhibit increased randomization under explicit hints. When facing weaker models, strong LLMs adopt deterministic strategies to exploit biases, but converge toward equilibrium play when facing peers. Through win/loss outcomes and Bayes factor analysis, we demonstrate meaningful variation in LLMs' strategic reasoning capabilities, highlighting opportunities for improvement in abstract reasoning and adaptive learning. We make our implementation publicly available at https://github.com/ocelopus/llm-when-to-throw-coin to ensure full reproducibility.

Accurate and interpretable multi-disease diagnosis remains a critical challenge in medical research, particularly when leveraging heterogeneous multimodal medical data. Current approaches often rely on single-modal data, limiting their ability to comprehensively understand complex diseases. To address this, we propose MedTVT-R1, a novel Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) framework designed to integrate clinical multimodal data for reasoning and diagnosing multiple diseases. We construct MedTVT-QA, a curated instruction dataset that provides question-answer pairs for physiological-level interpretations and disease-level diagnoses with a Chain of Evidence approach. MedTVT-R1 incorporates a modality perception layer to capture inter-modal dependencies and adaptively weight modality contributions. Additionally, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-based Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with a Jaccard Reward function to enhance diagnostic reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate MedTVT-R1's superiority in multimodal feature utilization and multi-disease diagnosis, offering significant potential for clinical applications such as diagnostic report generation and comorbidity reasoning. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/keke-nice/MedTVT-R1.

Low-light image enhancement remains a challenging task, particularly in the absence of paired training data. In this study, we present LucentVisionNet, a novel zero-shot learning framework that addresses the limitations of traditional and deep learning-based enhancement methods. The proposed approach integrates multi-scale spatial attention with a deep curve estimation network, enabling fine-grained enhancement while preserving semantic and perceptual fidelity. To further improve generalization, we adopt a recurrent enhancement strategy and optimize the model using a composite loss function comprising six tailored components, including a novel no-reference image quality loss inspired by human visual perception. Extensive experiments on both paired and unpaired benchmark datasets demonstrate that LucentVisionNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised, unsupervised, and zero-shot methods across multiple full-reference and no-reference image quality metrics. Our framework achieves high visual quality, structural consistency, and computational efficiency, making it well-suited for deployment in real-world applications such as mobile photography, surveillance, and autonomous navigation.

Assessing the quality of LLM-generated text remains a fundamental challenge in natural language processing. Current evaluation approaches often rely on isolated metrics or simplistic aggregations that fail to capture the nuanced trade-offs between coherence, diversity, fluency, and other relevant indicators of text quality. In this work, we adapt a recently proposed framework for statistical inference based on Generalized Stochastic Dominance (GSD) that addresses three critical limitations in existing benchmarking methodologies: the inadequacy of single-metric evaluation, the incompatibility between cardinal automatic metrics and ordinal human judgments, and the lack of inferential statistical guarantees. The GSD-front approach enables simultaneous evaluation across multiple quality dimensions while respecting their different measurement scales, building upon partial orders of decoding strategies, thus avoiding arbitrary weighting of the involved metrics. By applying this framework to evaluate common decoding strategies against human-generated text, we demonstrate its ability to identify statistically significant performance differences while accounting for potential deviations from the i.i.d. assumption of the sampling design.

With the rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in recommendation systems, the computational and communication bottlenecks caused by their massive parameter sizes and large data volumes have become increasingly prominent. This paper systematically investigates two classes of optimization methods-model parallelism and data parallelism-for distributed training of LLMs in recommendation scenarios. For model parallelism, we implement both tensor parallelism and pipeline parallelism, and introduce an adaptive load-balancing mechanism to reduce cross-device communication overhead. For data parallelism, we compare synchronous and asynchronous modes, combining gradient compression and sparsification techniques with an efficient aggregation communication framework to significantly improve bandwidth utilization. Experiments conducted on a real-world recommendation dataset in a simulated service environment demonstrate that our proposed hybrid parallelism scheme increases training throughput by over 30% and improves resource utilization by approximately 20% compared to traditional single-mode parallelism, while maintaining strong scalability and robustness. Finally, we discuss trade-offs among different parallel strategies in online deployment and outline future directions involving heterogeneous hardware integration and automated scheduling technologies.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) encode knowledge and reasoning capabilities for robotic manipulation within high-dimensional representation spaces. However, current approaches often project them into compressed intermediate representations, discarding important task-specific information such as fine-grained spatial or semantic details. To address this, we propose AntiGrounding, a new framework that reverses the instruction grounding process. It lifts candidate actions directly into the VLM representation space, renders trajectories from multiple views, and uses structured visual question answering for instruction-based decision making. This enables zero-shot synthesis of optimal closed-loop robot trajectories for new tasks. We also propose an offline policy refinement module that leverages past experience to enhance long-term performance. Experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that our method outperforms baselines across diverse robotic manipulation tasks.

Outcome-rewarded Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in mathematical problem-solving. However, this success often masks a critical issue: models frequently achieve correct answers through fundamentally unsound reasoning processes, a phenomenon indicative of reward hacking. We introduce MathOlympiadEval, a new dataset with fine-grained annotations, which reveals a significant gap between LLMs' answer correctness and their low process correctness. Existing automated methods like LLM-as-a-judge struggle to reliably detect these reasoning flaws. To address this, we propose ParaStepVerifier, a novel methodology for meticulous, step-by-step verification of mathematical solutions. ParaStepVerifier identifies incorrect reasoning steps. Empirical results demonstrate that ParaStepVerifier substantially improves the accuracy of identifying flawed solutions compared to baselines, especially for complex, multi-step problems. This offers a more robust path towards evaluating and training LLMs with genuine mathematical reasoning.

True intelligence requires active capability acquisition, yet current LLM agents inject pre-defined tool schemas into prompts, reducing models to passive selectors and falling short of robust general-purpose agency. We introduce MCP-Zero, an active agent framework that restores tool discovery autonomy to LLMs themselves. Instead of overwhelming models with all available tools, MCP-Zero enables agents to actively identify capability gaps, and request specific tools on-demand, transforming them from large-scale retrievers into genuine autonomous agents. The framework operates through three core mechanisms: (1) Active Tool Request, where models autonomously generate structured requests specifying their exact tool requirements; (2) Hierarchical Semantic Routing, a two-stage algorithm that matches requests to relevant servers and tools through improved semantic alignment; (3) Iterative Capability Extension, enabling agents to progressively build cross-domain toolchains while maintaining minimal context footprint. We construct MCP-tools, a comprehensive dataset of 308 MCP servers and 2,797 tools from the official Model-Context-Protocol repository. Experiments demonstrate that MCP-Zero preserves agent autonomy while achieving substantial efficiency gains: (i) accurate tool selection from nearly 3k candidates across 248.1k tokens; (ii) 98\% reduction in token consumption on APIBank while maintaining high accuracy; and (iii) consistent multi-turn performance that scales with tool ecosystem growth. This work establishes active tool discovery as a fundamental design pattern for scalable autonomous agent systems.

Generative AI is showing early evidence of productivity gains for software developers, but concerns persist regarding workforce disruption and deskilling. We describe our research with 21 developers at the cutting edge of using AI, summarizing 12 of their work goals we uncovered, together with 75 associated tasks and the skills & knowledge for each, illustrating how developers use AI at work. From all of these, we distilled our findings in the form of 5 insights. We found that the skills & knowledge to be a successful AI-enhanced developer are organized into four domains (using Generative AI effectively, core software engineering, adjacent engineering, and adjacent non-engineering) deployed at critical junctures throughout a 6-step task workflow. In order to "future proof" developers for this age of AI, on-the-job learning initiatives and computer science degree programs will need to target both "soft" skills and the technical skills & knowledge in all four domains to reskill, upskill and safeguard against deskilling.