We present SeePhys, a large-scale multimodal benchmark for LLM reasoning grounded in physics questions ranging from middle school to PhD qualifying exams. The benchmark covers 7 fundamental domains spanning the physics discipline, incorporating 21 categories of highly heterogeneous diagrams. In contrast to prior works where visual elements mainly serve auxiliary purposes, our benchmark features a substantial proportion of vision-essential problems (75%) that mandate visual information extraction for correct solutions. Through extensive evaluation, we observe that even the most advanced visual reasoning models (e.g., Gemini-2.5-pro and o4-mini) achieve sub-60% accuracy on our benchmark. These results reveal fundamental challenges in current large language models' visual understanding capabilities, particularly in: (i) establishing rigorous coupling between diagram interpretation and physics reasoning, and (ii) overcoming their persistent reliance on textual cues as cognitive shortcuts.

--Detection of carelessness in digital learning platforms has relied on the contextual slip model, which leverages conditional probability and Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) to identify careless errors, where students make mistakes despite having the knowledge. However, this model cannot effectively assess carelessness in questions tagged with multiple skills due to the use of conditional probability. This limitation narrows the scope within which the model can be applied. Thus, we propose a novel model, the Beyond-Knowledge Feature Carelessness (BKFC) model. The model detects careless errors using performance factor analysis (PF A) and behavioral features distilled from log data, controlling for knowledge when detecting carelessness. We applied the BKFC to detect carelessness in data from middle school students playing a learning game on decimal numbers and operations. We conducted analyses comparing the careless errors detected using contextual slip to the BKFC model. Unexpectedly, careless errors identified by these two approaches did not align. We found students' post-test performance was (corresponding to past results) positively associated with the carelessness detected using the contextual slip model, while negatively associated with the carelessness detected using the BKFC model. These results highlight the complexity of carelessness and underline a broader challenge in operationalizing carelessness and careless errors. Academic discussions of carelessness in classrooms date back to the 1950s [1]. Often viewed as the result of ineffective self-regulation, carelessness is thought to occur when students commit hurried or impulsive behaviors that result in mistakes on problems that could have been answered correctly. By distinguishing mistakes made due to carelessness from those caused by other factors, such as lack of knowledge, adaptive instruction can be provided to engage or reengage students in the effective use of self-regulation during the process of problem-solving. In the last several decades, two streams of work have run in parallel to investigate carelessness and detect careless behaviors.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is crucial in education assessment, which focuses on depicting students' learning states and assessing students' mastery of subjects. With the rise of modern online learning platforms, particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs), an abundance of interaction data has greatly advanced the development of the KT technology. Previous research commonly adopts deterministic representation to capture students' knowledge states, which neglects the uncertainty during student interactions and thus fails to model the true knowledge state in learning process. In light of this, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Tracing model (UKT) which employs stochastic distribution embeddings to represent the uncertainty in student interactions, with a Wasserstein self-attention mechanism designed to capture the transition of state distribution in student learning behaviors. Additionally, we introduce the aleatory uncertainty-aware contrastive learning loss, which strengthens the model's robustness towards different types of uncertainties. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that UKT not only significantly surpasses existing deep learning-based models in KT prediction, but also shows unique advantages in handling the uncertainty of student interactions.

In this work, we aim to improve transparency and efficacy in human-robot collaboration by developing machine teaching algorithms suitable for groups with varied learning capabilities. While previous approaches focused on tailored approaches for teaching individuals, our method teaches teams with various compositions of diverse learners using team belief representations to address personalization challenges within groups. We investigate various group teaching strategies, such as focusing on individual beliefs or the group's collective beliefs, and assess their impact on learning robot policies for different team compositions. Our findings reveal that team belief strategies yield less variation in learning duration and better accommodate diverse teams compared to individual belief strategies, suggesting their suitability in mixed-proficiency settings with limited resources. Conversely, individual belief strategies provide a more uniform knowledge level, particularly effective for homogeneously inexperienced groups. Our study indicates that the teaching strategy's efficacy is significantly influenced by team composition and learner proficiency, highlighting the importance of real-time assessment of learner proficiency and adapting teaching approaches based on learner proficiency for optimal teaching outcomes.

This paper introduces the Adaptive Learning Path Navigation (ALPN) system, a novel approach for enhancing E-learning platforms by providing highly adaptive learning paths for students. The ALPN system integrates the Attentive Knowledge Tracing (AKT) model, which assesses students' knowledge states, with the proposed Entropy-enhanced Proximal Policy Optimization (EPPO) algorithm. This new algorithm optimizes the recommendation of learning materials. By harmonizing these models, the ALPN system tailors the learning path to students' needs, significantly increasing learning effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that the ALPN system outperforms previous research by 8.2% in maximizing learning outcomes and provides a 10.5% higher diversity in generating learning paths. The proposed system marks a significant advancement in adaptive E-learning, potentially transforming the educational landscape in the digital era.

Knowledge tracing aims to model students' past answer sequences to track the change in their knowledge acquisition during exercise activities and to predict their future learning performance. Most existing approaches ignore the fact that students' abilities are constantly changing or vary between individuals, and lack the interpretability of model predictions. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel model based on ability attributes and attention mechanism. We first segment the interaction sequences and captures students' ability attributes, then dynamically assign students to groups with similar abilities, and quantify the relevance of the exercises to the skill by calculating the attention weights between the exercises and the skill to enhance the interpretability of the model. We conducted extensive experiments and evaluate real online education datasets. The results confirm that the proposed model is better at predicting performance than five well-known representative knowledge tracing models, and the model prediction results are explained through an inference path.

Computers are quickly gaining on us. Artificial systems are now exceeding the performance of human experts in several domains. However, we do not yet have a deep definition of expertise. This paper examines the nature of expertise and presents an abstract knowledge-level and skill-level description of expertise. A new level lying above the Knowledge Level, called the Expertise Level, is introduced to describe the skills of an expert without having to worry about details of the knowledge required. The Model of Expertise is introduced combining the knowledge-level and expertise-level descriptions. Application of the model to the fields of cognitive architectures and human cognitive augmentation is demonstrated and several famous intelligent systems are analyzed with the model.

Providing appropriate questions according to a student's knowledge level is imperative in personalized learning. However, It requires a lot of manual effort for teachers to understand students' knowledge status and provide optimal questions accordingly. To address this problem, we introduce a question scheduling model that can effectively boost student knowledge level using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our proposed method first evaluates students' concept-level knowledge using knowledge tracing (KT) model. Given predicted student knowledge, RL-based recommender predicts the benefits of each question. With curriculum range restriction and duplicate penalty, the recommender selects questions sequentially until it reaches the predefined number of questions. In an experimental setting using a student simulator, which gives 20 questions per day for two weeks, questions recommended by the proposed method increased average student knowledge level by 21.3%, superior to an expert-designed schedule baseline with a 10% increase in student knowledge levels.

Existing e-learning environments primarily focus on the aspect of providing intuitive learning contents and to recommend learning units in a personalized fashion. The major focus of the KnowledgeCheckR environment is to take into account forgetting processes which immediately start after a learning unit has been completed. In this context, techniques are needed that are able to predict which learning units are the most relevant ones to be repeated in future learning sessions. In this paper, we provide an overview of the recommendation approaches integrated in KnowledgeCheckR. Examples thereof are utility-based recommendation that helps to identify learning contents to be repeated in the future, collaborative filtering approaches that help to implement session-based recommendation, and content-based recommendation that supports intelligent question answering. In order to show the applicability of the presented techniques, we provide an overview of the results of empirical studies that have been conducted in real-world scenarios.

This is the first presidential address of AAAI, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In the grand scheme of history of artificial intelligence (AI), this is surely a minor event. The field this scientific society represents has been thriving for quite some time. No doubt the society itself will make solid contributions to the health of our field. But it is too much to expect a presidential address to have a major impact.