As generative AI models, particularly large language models (LLMs), transform educational feedback practices in higher education (HE) contexts, understanding students' perceptions of different sources of feedback becomes crucial for their effective implementation and adoption. This study addresses a critical gap by comparing undergraduate students' trust in LLM, human, and human-AI co-produced feedback in their authentic HE context. More specifically, through a within-subject experimental design involving 91 participants, we investigated factors that predict students' ability to distinguish between feedback types, their perceptions of feedback quality, and potential biases related to the source of feedback. Findings revealed that when the source was blinded, students generally preferred AI and co-produced feedback over human feedback regarding perceived usefulness and objectivity. However, they presented a strong bias against AI when the source of feedback was disclosed. In addition, only AI feedback suffered a decline in perceived genuineness when feedback sources were revealed, while co-produced feedback maintained its positive perception. Educational AI experience improved students' ability to identify LLM-generated feedback and increased their trust in all types of feedback. More years of students' experience using AI for general purposes were associated with lower perceived usefulness and credibility of feedback. These insights offer substantial evidence of the importance of source credibility and the need to enhance both feedback literacy and AI literacy to mitigate bias in student perceptions for AI-generated feedback to be adopted and impact education.

Molecule optimization is a critical task in drug discovery to optimize desired properties of a given molecule through chemical modification. Despite Large Language Models (LLMs) holding the potential to efficiently simulate this task by using natural language to direct the optimization, straightforwardly utilizing them shows limited performance. In this work, we facilitate utilizing LLMs in an iterative paradigm by proposing a simple yet highly effective domain feedback provider, namely $\text{Re}^3$DF. In detail, $\text{Re}^3$DF harnesses an external toolkit, RDKit, to handle the molecule hallucination, if the modified molecule is chemically invalid. Otherwise, its desired properties are computed and compared to the original one, establishing reliable domain feedback with correct direction and distance towards the objective, followed by a retrieved example, to guide the LLM to refine the modified molecule. We conduct experiments across both single- and multi-property objectives with 2 thresholds, where $\text{Re}^3$DF shows significant improvements. Particularly, for 20 single-property objectives, $\text{Re}^3$DF enhances Hit ratio by 16.96% and 20.76% under loose (\texttt{l}) and strict (\texttt{s}) thresholds, respectively. For 32 multi-property objectives, $\text{Re}^3$DF enhances Hit ratio by 6.04% and 5.25%.

Tampering problems, where an AI agent interferes with whatever represents or communicates its intended objective and pursues the resulting corrupted objective instead, are a staple concern in the AGI safety literature [Amodei et al., 2016, Bostrom, 2014, Everitt and Hutter, 2016, Everitt et al., 2017, Armstrong and O'Rourke, 2017, Everitt and Hutter, 2019, Armstrong et al., 2020]. Variations on the idea of tampering include wireheading, where an agent learns how to stimulate its reward mechanism directly, and the off-switch or shutdown problem, where an agent interferes with its supervisor's ability to halt the agent's operation. Many real-world concerns can be formulated as tampering problems, as we will show (§2.1, §4.1). However, what constitutes tampering can be tricky to define precisely, despite clear intuitions in specific cases. We have developed a platform, REALab, to model tampering problems.