While Generative AI has demonstrated strong potential and versatility in content generation, its application to educational contexts presents several challenges. Models often fail to align with curriculum standards and maintain grade-appropriate reading levels consistently. Furthermore, STEM education poses additional challenges in balancing scientific explanations with everyday language when introducing complex and abstract ideas and phenomena to younger students. In this work, we propose COGENT, a curriculum-oriented framework for generating grade-appropriate educational content. We incorporate three curriculum components (science concepts, core ideas, and learning objectives), control readability through length, vocabulary, and sentence complexity, and adopt a ``wonder-based'' approach to increase student engagement and interest. We conduct a multi-dimensional evaluation via both LLM-as-a-judge and human expert analysis. Experimental results show that COGENT consistently produces grade-appropriate passages that are comparable or superior to human references. Our work establishes a viable approach for scaling adaptive and high-quality learning resources.

Access to digital information is a driver of economic development. But although 85% of sub-Saharan Africa's population is covered by mobile broadband signal, only 37% use the internet, and those who do seldom use the web. We investigate whether AI can bridge this gap by analyzing how 469 teachers use an AI chatbot in Sierra Leone. The chatbot, accessible via a common messaging app, is compared against traditional web search. Teachers use AI more frequently than web search for teaching assistance. Data cost is the most frequently cited reason for low internet usage across Africa. The average web search result consumes 3,107 times more data than an AI response, making AI 87% less expensive than web search. Additionally, only 2% of results for corresponding web searches contain content from Sierra Leone. In blinded evaluations, an independent sample of teachers rate AI responses as more relevant, helpful, and correct than web search results. These findings suggest that AI-driven solutions can cost-effectively bridge information gaps in low-connectivity regions.

While there are some drawbacks to the specific algorithm presented here, the core idea is flexible and seems likely to inspire further investigation.

Strong artificial intelligence (AI) is envisioned to possess general cognitive abilities and scientific creativity comparable to human intelligence, encompassing both knowledge acquisition and problem-solving. While remarkable progress has been made in weak AI, the realization of strong AI remains a topic of intense debate and critical examination. In this paper, we explore pivotal innovations in the history of astronomy and physics, focusing on the discovery of Neptune and the concept of scientific revolutions as perceived by philosophers of science. Building on these insights, we introduce a simple theoretical and statistical framework of weak beliefs, termed the Transformational Belief (TB) framework, designed as a foundation for modeling scientific creativity. Through selected illustrative examples in statistical science, we demonstrate the TB framework's potential as a promising foundation for understanding, analyzing, and even fostering creativity -- paving the way toward the development of strong AI. We conclude with reflections on future research directions and potential advancements.

This paper presents the Long Context and Form Output (LCFO) benchmark, a novel evaluation framework for assessing gradual summarization and summary expansion capabilities across diverse domains. LCFO consists of long input documents (5k words average length), each of which comes with three summaries of different lengths (20%, 10%, and 5% of the input text), as well as approximately 15 questions and answers (QA) related to the input content. Notably, LCFO also provides alignments between specific QA pairs and corresponding summaries in 7 domains. The primary motivation behind providing summaries of different lengths is to establish a controllable framework for generating long texts from shorter inputs, i.e. summary expansion. To establish an evaluation metric framework for summarization and summary expansion, we provide human evaluation scores for human-generated outputs, as well as results from various state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). GPT-4o-mini achieves best human scores among automatic systems in both summarization and summary expansion tasks (~ +10% and +20%, respectively). It even surpasses human output quality in the case of short summaries (~ +7%). Overall automatic metrics achieve low correlations with human evaluation scores (~ 0.4) but moderate correlation on specific evaluation aspects such as fluency and attribution (~ 0.6). The LCFO benchmark offers a standardized platform for evaluating summarization and summary expansion performance, as well as corresponding automatic metrics, thereby providing an important evaluation framework to advance generative AI.

This paper approaches model compression using a group sparsity prior, to allow entire columns rather than just individual weights to be dropped out. They also use the variance of the posterior distribution over weights to automatically set the precision for fixed point weight quantization. The underlying ideas seem good, and the experimental results seem promising. However, the paper supports the core idea with a great deal of mathematical complexity. The math was presented in a way that I often found confusing, and in several places seems either wrong or poorly motivated (e.g., KL divergences are negative, right and left side of equations are not equal, primary motivation for model compression given in terms of minimum description length).

Deep learning and machine learning courses that I've taken along the way in learning deep learning. It's time to introduce the courses that I've used along this way that helped me get started and grow in the field. You should also keep in mind that there are probably many more and newer courses out there as the community keeps providing interesting educational material every day. So, keep on searching too. This fact aside, I believe the following list introduces high quality courses for many fields that most of you will be okay to start with and learn lots of new things from.

Welcome to the June edition of the ‚Machine-Learning-Collage' series, where I provide an overview of the different Deep Learning research streams. So what is a ML collage? Simply put, I draft one-slide visual summaries of one of my favourite recent papers. At the end of the month all of the resulting visual collages are collected in a summary blog post. Thereby, I hope to give you a visual and intuitive deep dive into some of the coolest trends. May has been quite the month including the virtual ICLR 2021 conference, ICML review decisions as well as the NeurIPS deadlines.

Paper Digest is a new research tool that uses artificial intelligence to produce summaries of research papers. In this post David Beer tests out this tool on his own research and reflects on what the increasing penetration of AI into cognition and research tells us about the current state of academic research. When you arrive at Paper Digest you are welcomed with a stark message: 'Artificial Intelligence summarizes academic articles for you'. Conjuring a vision of automated thinking and a world in which technology does the heavy lifting for us. These types of messages are everywhere, folded into the projected promises of what AI might yet achieve.