The knowledge tracing (KT) problem is an extremely important topic in personalized education, which aims to predict whether students can correctly answer the next question based on their past question-answer records. Prior work on this task mainly focused on learning the sequence of behaviors based on the IDs or textual information. However, these studies usually fail to capture students' sufficient behavioral patterns without reasoning with rich world knowledge about questions. In this paper, we propose a large language models (LLMs)-based framework for KT, named \texttt{\textbf{LLM-KT}}, to integrate the strengths of LLMs and traditional sequence interaction models. For task-level alignment, we design Plug-and-Play instruction to align LLMs with KT, leveraging LLMs' rich knowledge and powerful reasoning capacity. For modality-level alignment, we design the plug-in context and sequence to integrate multiple modalities learned by traditional methods. To capture the long context of history records, we present a plug-in context to flexibly insert the compressed context embedding into LLMs using question-specific and concept-specific tokens. Furthermore, we introduce a plug-in sequence to enhance LLMs with sequence interaction behavior representation learned by traditional sequence models using a sequence adapter. Extensive experiments show that \texttt{\textbf{LLM-KT}} obtains state-of-the-art performance on four typical datasets by comparing it with approximately 20 strong baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence with capabilities in reasoning, coding, and communication, driving innovation across industries. Their true potential depends on effective alignment to ensure correct, trustworthy and ethical behavior, addressing challenges like misinformation, hallucinations, bias and misuse. While existing Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based alignment methods are notoriously complex, direct optimization approaches offer a simpler alternative. In this work, we introduce a novel direct optimization approach for LLM alignment by drawing on established Information Retrieval (IR) principles. We present a systematic framework that bridges LLM alignment and IR methodologies, mapping LLM generation and reward models to IR's retriever-reranker paradigm. Building on this foundation, we propose LLM Alignment as Retriever Preference Optimization (LarPO), a new alignment method that enhances overall alignment quality. Extensive experiments validate LarPO's effectiveness with 38.9 % and 13.7 % averaged improvement on AlpacaEval2 and MixEval-Hard respectively. Our work opens new avenues for advancing LLM alignment by integrating IR foundations, offering a promising direction for future research.

Disaggregated Large Language Model (LLM) inference has gained popularity as it separates the computation-intensive prefill stage from the memory-intensive decode stage, avoiding the prefill-decode interference and improving resource utilization. However, transmitting Key-Value (KV) data between the two stages can be a bottleneck, especially for long prompts. Additionally, the computation time overhead for prefill and decode is key for optimizing Job Completion Time (JCT), and KV data size can become prohibitive for long prompts and sequences. Existing KV quantization methods can alleviate the transmission bottleneck and reduce memory requirements, but they introduce significant dequantization overhead, exacerbating the computation time. We propose Homomorphic Acceleration via Compression of the KV cache (HACK) for disaggregated LLM inference. HACK eliminates the heavy KV dequantization step, and directly performs computations on quantized KV data to approximate and reduce the cost of the expensive matrix-multiplication step. Extensive trace-driven experiments show that HACK reduces JCT by up to 70.9% compared to disaggregated LLM inference baseline and by up to 52.3% compared to state-of-the-art KV quantization methods.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant successes across various applications, where the most noticeable is to a series of emerging capabilities, particularly in the areas of In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). To better understand and control model performance, many studies have begun investigating the underlying causes of these phenomena and their impact on task outcomes. However, existing explanatory frameworks predominantly focus on isolating and explaining ICL and CoT independently, leading to an incomplete understanding of their combined influence on model performance. To address this gap, we propose the Electronic Circuit Model (ECM), which provides a foundation for developing scalable, learnable policies and improving the management of AI-generated content. Specifically, ECM conceptualizes model behavior as an electronic circuit: ICL is represented as semantic magnetic field to providing an additional voltage following Faraday's Law, while CoT is modeled as series resistors to constrain the model output performance following Ohm's Law. Experimental results demonstrate that the ECM effectively predicts and explains LLM performance across a variety of prompting strategies. Furthermore, we apply ECM to advanced reasoning strategy optimization on a series of tasks, such as the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving competitive performance that surpasses nearly 80% of top human competitors.

This work reflects upon what Immersion can mean from the perspective of an Artificial Intelligence (AI). Applying the lens of immersive learning theory, it seeks to understand whether this new perspective supports ways for AI participation in cognitive ecologies. By treating AI as a participant rather than a tool, it explores what other participants (humans and other AIs) need to consider in environments where AI can meaningfully engage and contribute to the cognitive ecology, and what the implications are for designing such learning environments. Drawing from the three conceptual dimensions of immersion - System, Narrative, and Agency - this work reinterprets AIs in immersive learning contexts. It outlines practical implications for designing learning environments where AIs are surrounded by external digital services, can interpret a narrative of origins, changes, and structural developments in data, and dynamically respond, making operational and tactical decisions that shape human-AI collaboration. Finally, this work suggests how these insights might influence the future of AI training, proposing that immersive learning theory can inform the development of AIs capable of evolving beyond static models. This paper paves the way for understanding AI as an immersive learner and participant in evolving human-AI cognitive ecosystems.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for their adoption as evaluative judges. This paper introduces Themis, a fine-tuned LLM judge that delivers sophisticated context-aware evaluations. We provide a comprehensive overview of the development pipeline for Themis, highlighting its scenario-dependent evaluation prompts and two novel methods for controlled instruction generation. These designs enable Themis to effectively distill evaluative skills from teacher models, while retaining flexibility for continuous development. We introduce two human-labeled benchmarks for meta-evaluation, demonstrating that Themis can achieve high alignment with human preferences in an economical manner. Additionally, we explore insights into the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm, revealing nuances in performance and the varied effects of reference answers. Notably, we observe that pure knowledge distillation from strong LLMs, though common, does not guarantee performance improvement through scaling. We propose a mitigation strategy based on instruction-following difficulty. Furthermore, we provide practical guidelines covering data balancing, prompt customization, multi-objective training, and metric aggregation. We aim for our method and findings, along with the fine-tuning data, benchmarks, and model checkpoints, to support future research and development in this area.

In real-world recommender systems, different tasks are typically addressed using supervised learning on task-specific datasets with carefully designed model architectures. We demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) can function as universal recommendation learners, capable of handling multiple tasks within a unified input-output framework, eliminating the need for specialized model designs. To improve the recommendation performance of LLMs, we introduce a multimodal fusion module for item representation and a sequence-in-set-out approach for efficient candidate generation. When applied to industrial-scale data, our LLM achieves competitive results with expert models elaborately designed for different recommendation tasks. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that recommendation outcomes are highly sensitive to text input, highlighting the potential of prompt engineering in optimizing industrial-scale recommender systems.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for tasks like fact extraction in support of knowledge graph construction frequently involves computing accuracy metrics using a ground truth benchmark based on a knowledge graph (KG). These evaluations assume that errors represent factual disagreements. However, human discourse frequently features metalinguistic disagreement, where agents differ not on facts but on the meaning of the language used to express them. Given the complexity of natural language processing and generation using LLMs, we ask: do metalinguistic disagreements occur between LLMs and KGs? Based on an investigation using the T-REx knowledge alignment dataset, we hypothesize that metalinguistic disagreement does in fact occur between LLMs and KGs, with potential relevance for the practice of knowledge graph engineering. We propose a benchmark for evaluating the detection of factual and metalinguistic disagreements between LLMs and KGs. An initial proof of concept of such a benchmark is available on Github.

How effectively can LLM-based AI assistants utilize their memory (context) to perform various tasks? Traditional data benchmarks, which are often manually crafted, suffer from several limitations: they are static, susceptible to overfitting, difficult to interpret, and lack actionable insights--failing to pinpoint the specific capabilities a model lacks when it does not pass a test. In this paper, we present a framework for automatically generating a comprehensive set of tests to evaluate models' abilities to use their memory effectively. Our framework extends the range of capability tests beyond the commonly explored (passkey, key-value, needle in the haystack) search, a dominant focus in the literature. Specifically, we evaluate models on atomic tasks such as searching, recalling, editing, matching, comparing information in context memory, and performing basic operations when inputs are structured into distinct blocks, simulating real-world data. Additionally, we design composite tests to investigate the models' ability to maintain state while operating on memory. Our benchmark enables an interpretable, detailed assessment of memory capabilities of LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable generalizability across diverse tasks, yet genomic foundation models (GFMs) still require separate finetuning for each downstream application, creating significant overhead as model sizes grow. Moreover, existing GFMs are constrained by rigid output formats, limiting their applicability to various genomic tasks. In this work, we revisit the transformer-based auto-regressive models and introduce Omni-DNA, a family of cross-modal multi-task models ranging from 20 million to 1 billion parameters. Our approach consists of two stages: (i) pretraining on DNA sequences with next token prediction objective, and (ii) expanding the multi-modal task-specific tokens and finetuning for multiple downstream tasks simultaneously. When evaluated on the Nucleotide Transformer and GB benchmarks, Omni-DNA achieves state-of-the-art performance on 18 out of 26 tasks. Through multi-task finetuning, Omni-DNA addresses 10 acetylation and methylation tasks at once, surpassing models trained on each task individually. Finally, we design two complex genomic tasks, DNA2Function and Needle-in-DNA, which map DNA sequences to textual functional descriptions and images, respectively, indicating Omni-DNA's cross-modal capabilities to broaden the scope of genomic applications. All the models are available through https://huggingface.co/collections/zehui127