This study explores whether large language models (LLMs) can simulate valid student responses for educational measurement. Using GPT - 4o, 2000 virtual student personas were generated. Each persona completed the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS). Factor analys es(EFA and CFA) and clustering showed GPT - 4o reproduced the AMS structure and distinct motivational subgroups.

We propose a Bayesian variable selection method in the framework of modal regression for heavy-tailed responses. An efficient expectation-maximization algorithm is employed to expedite parameter estimation. A test statistic is constructed to exploit the shape of the model error distribution to effectively separate informative covariates from unimportant ones. Through simulations, we demonstrate and evaluate the efficacy of the proposed method in identifying important covariates in the presence of non-Gaussian model errors. Finally, we apply the proposed method to analyze two datasets arising in genetic and epigenetic studies.

Cognitive diagnosis (CD) models latent cognitive states of human learners by analyzing their response patterns on diagnostic tests, serving as a crucial machine learning technique for educational assessment and evaluation. Traditional cognitive diagnosis models typically follow a transductive prediction paradigm that optimizes parameters to fit response scores and extract learner abilities. These approaches face significant limitations as they cannot perform instant diagnosis for new learners without computationally expensive retraining and produce diagnostic outputs with limited reliability. In this study, we introduces a novel generative diagnosis paradigm that fundamentally shifts CD from predictive to generative modeling, enabling inductive inference of cognitive states without parameter re-optimization. We propose two simple yet effective instantiations of this paradigm: Generative Item Response Theory (G-IRT) and Generative Neural Cognitive Diagnosis Model (G-NCDM), which achieve excellent performance improvements over traditional methods. The generative approach disentangles cognitive state inference from response prediction through a well-designed generation process that incorporates identifiability and monotonicity conditions. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology in addressing scalability and reliability challenges, especially $\times 100$ speedup for the diagnosis of new learners. Our framework opens new avenues for cognitive diagnosis applications in artificial intelligence, particularly for intelligent model evaluation and intelligent education systems. The code is available at https://github.com/CSLiJT/Generative-CD.git.

The impressive linguistic abilities of large language models (LLMs) have recommended them as models of human sentence processing, with some conjecturing a positive 'quality-power' relationship (Wilcox et al., 2023), in which language models' (LMs') fit to psychometric data continues to improve as their ability to predict words in context increases. This is important because it suggests that elements of LLM architecture, such as veridical attention to context and a unique objective of predicting upcoming words, reflect the architecture of the human sentence processing faculty, and that any inadequacies in predicting human reading time and brain imaging data may be attributed to insufficient model complexity, which recedes as larger models become available. Recent studies (Oh and Schuler, 2023) have shown this scaling inverts after a point, as LMs become excessively large and accurate, when word prediction probability (as information-theoretic surprisal) is used as a predictor. Other studies propose the use of entire vectors from differently sized LLMs, still showing positive scaling (Schrimpf et al., 2021), casting doubt on the value of surprisal as a predictor, but do not control for the larger number of predictors in vectors from larger LMs. This study evaluates LLM scaling using entire LLM vectors, while controlling for the larger number of predictors in vectors from larger LLMs. Results show that inverse scaling obtains, suggesting that inadequacies in predicting human reading time and brain imaging data may be due to substantial misalignment between LLMs and human sentence processing, which worsens as larger models are used.

Deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) models have shown promise in drug response prediction (DRP), yet their ability to generalize across datasets remains an open question, raising concerns about their real-world applicability. Due to the lack of standardized benchmarking approaches, model evaluations and comparisons often rely on inconsistent datasets and evaluation criteria, making it difficult to assess true predictive capabilities. In this work, we introduce a benchmarking framework for evaluating cross-dataset prediction generalization in DRP models. Our framework incorporates five publicly available drug screening datasets, six standardized DRP models, and a scalable workflow for systematic evaluation. To assess model generalization, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics that quantify both absolute performance (e.g., predictive accuracy across datasets) and relative performance (e.g., performance drop compared to within-dataset results), enabling a more comprehensive assessment of model transferability. Our results reveal substantial performance drops when models are tested on unseen datasets, underscoring the importance of rigorous generalization assessments. While several models demonstrate relatively strong cross-dataset generalization, no single model consistently outperforms across all datasets. Furthermore, we identify CTRPv2 as the most effective source dataset for training, yielding higher generalization scores across target datasets. By sharing this standardized evaluation framework with the community, our study aims to establish a rigorous foundation for model comparison, and accelerate the development of robust DRP models for real-world applications.

Traditional three-dimensional magnetotelluric (MT) numerical forward modeling methods, such as the finite element method (FEM) and finite volume method (FVM), suffer from high computational costs and low efficiency due to limitations in mesh refinement and computational resources. We propose a novel neural network architecture named MTAGU-Net, which integrates an attention gating mechanism for 3D MT forward modeling. Specifically, a dual-path attention gating module is designed based on forward response data images and embedded in the skip connections between the encoder and decoder. This module enables the fusion of critical anomaly information from shallow feature maps during the decoding of deep feature maps, significantly enhancing the network's capability to extract features from anomalous regions. Furthermore, we introduce a synthetic model generation method utilizing 3D Gaussian random field (GRF), which accurately replicates the electrical structures of real-world geological scenarios with high fidelity. Numerical experiments demonstrate that MTAGU-Net outperforms conventional 3D U-Net in terms of convergence stability and prediction accuracy, with the structural similarity index (SSIM) of the forward response data consistently exceeding 0.98. Moreover, the network can accurately predict forward response data on previously unseen datasets models, demonstrating its strong generalization ability and validating the feasibility and effectiveness of this method in practical applications.

Personalized learning represents a promising educational strategy within intelligent educational systems, aiming to enhance learners' practice efficiency. However, the discrepancy between offline metrics and online performance significantly impedes their progress. To address this challenge, we introduce Agent4Edu, a novel personalized learning simulator leveraging recent advancements in human intelligence through large language models (LLMs). Agent4Edu features LLM-powered generative agents equipped with learner profile, memory, and action modules tailored to personalized learning algorithms. The learner profiles are initialized using real-world response data, capturing practice styles and cognitive factors. Inspired by human psychology theory, the memory module records practice facts and high-level summaries, integrating reflection mechanisms. The action module supports various behaviors, including exercise understanding, analysis, and response generation. Each agent can interact with personalized learning algorithms, such as computerized adaptive testing, enabling a multifaceted evaluation and enhancement of customized services. Through a comprehensive assessment, we explore the strengths and weaknesses of Agent4Edu, emphasizing the consistency and discrepancies in responses between agents and human learners. The code, data, and appendix are publicly available at https://github.com/bigdata-ustc/Agent4Edu.

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used to simulate human-like responses in scenarios where accurately mimicking a population's behavior can guide decision-making, such as in developing educational materials and designing public policies. The objective of these simulations is for LMs to capture the variations in human responses, rather than merely providing the expected correct answers. Prior work has shown that LMs often generate unrealistically accurate responses, but there are no established metrics to quantify how closely the knowledge distribution of LMs aligns with that of humans. To address this, we introduce "psychometric alignment," a metric that measures the extent to which LMs reflect human knowledge distribution. Assessing this alignment involves collecting responses from both LMs and humans to the same set of test items and using Item Response Theory to analyze the differences in item functioning between the groups. We demonstrate that our metric can capture important variations in populations that traditional metrics, like differences in accuracy, fail to capture. We apply this metric to assess existing LMs for their alignment with human knowledge distributions across three real-world domains. We find significant misalignment between LMs and human populations, though using persona-based prompts can improve alignment. Interestingly, smaller LMs tend to achieve greater psychometric alignment than larger LMs. Further, training LMs on human response data from the target distribution enhances their psychometric alignment on unseen test items, but the effectiveness of such training varies across domains.

Personalized learner modeling using cognitive diagnosis (CD), which aims to model learners' cognitive states by diagnosing learner traits from behavioral data, is a fundamental yet significant task in many web learning services. Existing cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) follow the proficiency-response paradigm that views learner traits and question parameters as trainable embeddings and learns them through learner performance prediction. However, we notice that this paradigm leads to the inevitable non-identifiability and explainability overfitting problem, which is harmful to the quantification of learners' cognitive states and the quality of web learning services. To address these problems, we propose an identifiable cognitive diagnosis framework (ID-CDF) based on a novel response-proficiency-response paradigm inspired by encoder-decoder models. Specifically, we first devise the diagnostic module of ID-CDF, which leverages inductive learning to eliminate randomness in optimization to guarantee identifiability and captures the monotonicity between overall response data distribution and cognitive states to prevent explainability overfitting. Next, we propose a flexible predictive module for ID-CDF to ensure diagnosis preciseness. We further present an implementation of ID-CDF, i.e., ID-CDM, to illustrate its usability. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets with different characteristics demonstrate that ID-CDF can effectively address the problems without loss of diagnosis preciseness.

Deep learning-based drug response prediction (DRP) methods can accelerate the drug discovery process and reduce R\&D costs. Although the mainstream methods achieve high accuracy in predicting response regression values, the regression-aware representations of these methods are fragmented and fail to capture the continuity of the sample order. This phenomenon leads to models optimized to sub-optimal solution spaces, reducing generalization ability and may result in significant wasted costs in the drug discovery phase. In this paper, we propose \MN, a contrastive learning framework with natural language supervision for the DRP. The \MN~converts regression labels into text, which is merged with the captions text of the drug response as a second modality of the samples compared to the traditional modalities (graph, sequence). In each batch, two modalities of one sample are considered positive pairs and the other pairs are considered negative pairs. At the same time, in order to enhance the continuous representation capability of the numerical text, a common-sense numerical knowledge graph is introduced. We validated several hundred thousand samples from the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer dataset, observing the average improvement of the DRP method ranges from 7.8\% to 31.4\% with the application of our framework. The experiments prove that the \MN~effectively constrains the samples to a continuous distribution in the representation space, and achieves impressive prediction performance with only a few epochs of fine-tuning after pre-training. The code is available at: \url{https://gitee.com/xiaoyibang/clipdrug.git}.