--In AI-facilitated teaching, leveraging various query styles to interpret abstract educational content is crucial for delivering effective and accessible learning experiences. However, existing retrieval systems predominantly focus on natural text-image matching and lack the capacity to address the diversity and ambiguity inherent in real-world educational scenarios. T o address this limitation, we develop a lightweight and efficient multi-modal retrieval module, named Uni-Retrieval, which extracts query-style prototypes and dynamically matches them with tokens from a continually updated Prompt Bank. This Prompt Bank encodes and stores domain-specific knowledge by leveraging a Mixture-of-Expert Low-Rank Adaptation (MoE-LoRA) module and can be adapted to enhance Uni-Retrieval's capability to accommodate unseen query types at test time. T o enable natural language educational content generation, we integrate the original Uni-Retrieval with a compact instruction-tuned language model, forming a complete retrieval-augmented generation pipeline named Uni-RAG. Given a style-conditioned query, Uni-RAG first retrieves relevant educational materials and then generates human-readable explanations, feedback, or instructional content aligned with the learning objective. Experimental results on SER and other multi-modal benchmarks show that Uni-RAG outperforms baseline retrieval and RAG systems in both retrieval accuracy and generation quality, while maintaining low computational cost. Our framework provides a scalable, pedagogically grounded solution for intelligent educational systems, bridging retrieval and generation to support personalized, explainable, and efficient learning assistance across diverse STEM scenarios. RTIFICIAL Intelligence for Education (AI4EDU) has emerged as a transformative force, harnessing advanced AI techniques to enhance instructional design, learning processes, and assessment across diverse educational contexts, demonstrating tremendous potential in various educational scenarios [1], [2].

In AI-facilitated teaching, leveraging various query styles to interpret abstract text descriptions is crucial for ensuring high-quality teaching. However, current retrieval models primarily focus on natural text-image retrieval, making them insufficiently tailored to educational scenarios due to the ambiguities in the retrieval process. In this paper, we propose a diverse expression retrieval task tailored to educational scenarios, supporting retrieval based on multiple query styles and expressions. We introduce the STEM Education Retrieval Dataset (SER), which contains over 24,000 query pairs of different styles, and the Uni-Retrieval, an efficient and style-diversified retrieval vision-language model based on prompt tuning. Uni-Retrieval extracts query style features as prototypes and builds a continuously updated Prompt Bank containing prompt tokens for diverse queries. This bank can updated during test time to represent domain-specific knowledge for different subject retrieval scenarios. Our framework demonstrates scalability and robustness by dynamically retrieving prompt tokens based on prototype similarity, effectively facilitating learning for unknown queries. Experimental results indicate that Uni-Retrieval outperforms existing retrieval models in most retrieval tasks. This advancement provides a scalable and precise solution for diverse educational needs.

While instruction fine-tuned LLMs are effective text generators, sensitivity to prompt construction makes performance unstable and sub-optimal in practice. Relying on a single "best" prompt cannot capture all differing approaches to a generation problem. Using this observation, we propose multi-prompt decoding, where many candidate generations are decoded from a prompt bank at inference-time. To ensemble candidates, we use Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding, which selects a final output using a trained value metric. We show multi-prompt improves MBR across a comprehensive set of conditional generation tasks, and show this is a result of estimating a more diverse and higher quality candidate space than that of a single prompt. Further experiments confirm multi-prompt improves generation across tasks, models and metrics.

This paper studies the problem of continual learning in an open-world scenario, referred to as Open-world Continual Learning (OwCL). OwCL is increasingly rising while it is highly challenging in two-fold: i) learning a sequence of tasks without forgetting knowns in the past, and ii) identifying unknowns (novel objects/classes) in the future. Existing OwCL methods suffer from the adaptability of task-aware boundaries between knowns and unknowns, and do not consider the mechanism of knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose Pro-KT, a novel prompt-enhanced knowledge transfer model for OwCL. Pro-KT includes two key components: (1) a prompt bank to encode and transfer both task-generic and task-specific knowledge, and (2) a task-aware open-set boundary to identify unknowns in the new tasks. Experimental results using two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed Pro-KT outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts in both the detection of unknowns and the classification of knowns markedly.