Daily Papers

Recent advances in knowledge distillation (KD) have enabled smaller student models to approach the performance of larger teacher models. However, popular methods such as supervised KD and on-policy KD, are adversely impacted by the knowledge gaps between teacher-student in practical scenarios. Supervised KD suffers from a distribution mismatch between training with a static dataset and inference over final student-generated outputs. Conversely, on-policy KD, which uses student-generated samples for training, can suffer from low-quality training examples with which teacher models are not familiar, resulting in inaccurate teacher feedback. To address these limitations, we introduce Speculative Knowledge Distillation (SKD), a novel approach that leverages cooperation between student and teacher models to generate high-quality training data on-the-fly while aligning with the student's inference-time distribution. In SKD, the student proposes tokens, and the teacher replaces poorly ranked ones based on its own distribution, transferring high-quality knowledge adaptively. We evaluate SKD on various text generation tasks, including translation, summarization, math, and instruction following, and show that SKD consistently outperforms existing KD methods across different domains, data sizes, and model initialization strategies.

Multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) combines independently developed domain teachers into a single student by distilling their predictions on student-generated samples. We study a setting where teachers share a reference model but undergo different post-training procedures, and find that MOPD can struggle to recover some teacher capabilities. Because distillation occurs on student-generated prefixes, the student initialization can strongly affect subsequent recovery. However, initial benchmark performance is not a reliable predictor of a good MOPD initialization. For example, merge initialization can start below SFT warm-up yet finish higher after MOPD. We further find that effective merging depends on both the relative teacher contributions and the overall merge scale, with some strong configurations lying outside the simplex of convex parameter averaging. Thus, selecting a good merge initialization requires evaluating not only its immediate performance but also the learning it enables under MOPD, making one-shot coefficient search difficult. We propose Iterative Merging for MOPD (IM-MOPD), which starts from a uniform merge and progressively adds task-vector increments for under-recovered domains during distillation. In a 5-domain setting, IM-MOPD achieves higher average normalized recovery than MOPD with either uniform merge initialization or SFT warm-up, showing that effective teacher contributions can be determined progressively during training.

A common and effective means for improving language model capabilities involves finetuning a ``student'' language model's parameters on generations from a more proficient ``teacher'' model. Termed ``synthetic data'', these generations are often produced before any student finetuning, but some work has considered generating new synthetic samples as training progresses. This paper studies and advocates for the latter case, where data are generated in an iterative, closed-loop fashion that is guided by the current state of the student model. For a fixed budget of generated samples, or a budget in terms of compute spent querying a teacher, we show that this curation of finetuning data affords improved student performance over static generation. Further, while there have been several LLM-specific methods proposed that operate in this regime, we find that simple, inexpensive selection criteria from the active learning literature tend to be most performant. We validate these claims across four mathematical and logical reasoning datasets using four different small language models.

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become a leading architecture in image generation. However, the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms, which are responsible for modeling token-wise relationships, results in significant latency when generating high-resolution images. To address this issue, we aim at a linear attention mechanism in this paper that reduces the complexity of pre-trained DiTs to linear. We begin our exploration with a comprehensive summary of existing efficient attention mechanisms and identify four key factors crucial for successful linearization of pre-trained DiTs: locality, formulation consistency, high-rank attention maps, and feature integrity. Based on these insights, we introduce a convolution-like local attention strategy termed CLEAR, which limits feature interactions to a local window around each query token, and thus achieves linear complexity. Our experiments indicate that, by fine-tuning the attention layer on merely 10K self-generated samples for 10K iterations, we can effectively transfer knowledge from a pre-trained DiT to a student model with linear complexity, yielding results comparable to the teacher model. Simultaneously, it reduces attention computations by 99.5% and accelerates generation by 6.3 times for generating 8K-resolution images. Furthermore, we investigate favorable properties in the distilled attention layers, such as zero-shot generalization cross various models and plugins, and improved support for multi-GPU parallel inference. Models and codes are available here: https://github.com/Huage001/CLEAR.

Accelerating the sampling speed of diffusion models remains a significant challenge. Recent score distillation methods distill a heavy teacher model into an one-step student generator, which is optimized by calculating the difference between the two score functions on the samples generated by the student model. However, there is a score mismatch issue in the early stage of the distillation process, because existing methods mainly focus on using the endpoint of pre-trained diffusion models as teacher models, overlooking the importance of the convergence trajectory between the student generator and the teacher model. To address this issue, we extend the score distillation process by introducing the entire convergence trajectory of teacher models and propose Distribution Backtracking Distillation (DisBack) for distilling student generators. DisBask is composed of two stages: Degradation Recording and Distribution Backtracking. Degradation Recording is designed to obtain the convergence trajectory of teacher models, which records the degradation path from the trained teacher model to the untrained initial student generator. The degradation path implicitly represents the intermediate distributions of teacher models. Then Distribution Backtracking trains a student generator to backtrack the intermediate distributions for approximating the convergence trajectory of teacher models. Extensive experiments show that DisBack achieves faster and better convergence than the existing distillation method and accomplishes comparable generation performance. Notably, DisBack is easy to implement and can be generalized to existing distillation methods to boost performance. Our code is publicly available on https://github.com/SYZhang0805/DisBack.

Sampling from diffusion models involves a slow iterative process that hinders their practical deployment, especially for interactive applications. To accelerate generation speed, recent approaches distill a multi-step diffusion model into a single-step student generator via variational score distillation, which matches the distribution of samples generated by the student to the teacher's distribution. However, these approaches use the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence for distribution matching which is known to be mode seeking. In this paper, we generalize the distribution matching approach using a novel f-divergence minimization framework, termed f-distill, that covers different divergences with different trade-offs in terms of mode coverage and training variance. We derive the gradient of the f-divergence between the teacher and student distributions and show that it is expressed as the product of their score differences and a weighting function determined by their density ratio. This weighting function naturally emphasizes samples with higher density in the teacher distribution, when using a less mode-seeking divergence. We observe that the popular variational score distillation approach using the reverse-KL divergence is a special case within our framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that alternative f-divergences, such as forward-KL and Jensen-Shannon divergences, outperform the current best variational score distillation methods across image generation tasks. In particular, when using Jensen-Shannon divergence, f-distill achieves current state-of-the-art one-step generation performance on ImageNet64 and zero-shot text-to-image generation on MS-COCO. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/f-distill

In this paper, we present a novel approach for distilling math word problem solving capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient student models. Our approach is designed to consider the student model's weaknesses and foster a tailored learning experience by generating targeted exercises aligned with educational science principles, such as knowledge tracing and personalized learning. Concretely, we let GPT-3 be a math tutor and run two steps iteratively: 1) assessing the student model's current learning status on a GPT-generated exercise book, and 2) improving the student model by training it with tailored exercise samples generated by GPT-3. Experimental results reveal that our approach outperforms LLMs (e.g., GPT-3 and PaLM) in accuracy across three distinct benchmarks while employing significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the various components within our methodology to substantiate their efficacy.

Compression is fundamental to intelligence. A model that can represent its training data as a short code has discovered regularities that enable generalization. Large neural networks may learn functions far simpler than their parameter counts suggest, but it is challenging to construct codes that realize this simplicity. Parameter-based methods such as quantization produce code lengths that scale with model size, insensitive to how much information the parameters store. Prequential coding bypasses this issue by compressing the training trajectory, but codes the exact data sequence regardless of how much the model learns, yielding large codes when the data has high entropy. We introduce requential coding, where a teacher model selects training samples drawn from the student's own distribution. The student's code records only these selections, which cost bits only where teacher and student disagree. The resulting code length is independent of parameter count and data entropy, and often orders of magnitude shorter than the prequential counterpart, with an advantage that grows with scale. This compression sheds light on phenomena inaccessible to prior compressors. Holding loss fixed, larger models and ensembles compress to much smaller sizes despite more parameters. Plugged into a PAC-Bayes bound, the requential code yields state-of-the-art generalization guarantees for billion-parameter LLMs, outperforming bounds built on aggressive post-training quantization even granted zero error. The bound tightens with scale in the compute-optimal regime, as models become increasingly compressible relative to dataset size. The same code predicts that models gradually overfit when trained for multiple epochs. It also isolates the learnable information in a dataset from its unpredictable, random content, revealing that lower-entropy text holds far more learnable structure than higher-entropy image data.

Sampled-token on-policy distillation (OPD) efficiently transfers capabilities from teacher to student using student-generated tokens, requiring teacher probabilities only for sampled tokens. Yet it frequently suffers from diversity distillation failure: the student's pass@1 improves while its pass@k plateaus, failing to inherit the teacher's diversity. To explain this, we introduce First-Order Local Entropy Influence, a signed first-order proxy that decouples each update's entropy effect into the teacher--student log-probability gap and the student's local probability structure, and empirically links entropy contraction to negative-influence positions. Motivated by this, we propose Influence-Directed Adaptive On-Policy Distillation (IDA-OPD): rather than relying on costly full-vocabulary Forward-KL objectives, it preserves entropy-expanding updates while replacing entropy-contracting ones with divergence-adaptive advantage shrinkage, using only the teacher's sampled-token log-probability. Experiments on reasoning-oriented distillation show IDA-OPD consistently improves pass@k, inheriting the teacher's diversity through distillation, matches the strongest teacher-informed methods at strictly lower cost, and broadly maintains vanilla OPD's pass@1, all without full-vocabulary teacher information.

On-policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher knowledge on student-generated trajectories, but efficient sampled objectives reduce the teacher distribution to scalar credit on individual tokens. Such credit indicates whether a token should gain or lose probability, yet leaves the corresponding redistribution unspecified. We recast OPD as teacher-guided probability transport and propose RouteOPD (Routed On-Policy Distillation), which decomposes local teacher--student disagreement into student-excess sources and teacher-deficit destinations and couples them into explicit transport pairs. RouteOPD optimizes pairwise log-odds toward jointly realizable targets obtained from a bounded teacher potential, while adapting the transport budget to the concentration of teacher demand. This formulation directs updates toward teacher-preferred destinations and controls their magnitude within a single transport operator. Experiments across four teacher--student settings and four mathematical-reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that RouteOPD consistently outperforms sampled reverse-KL OPD, with improvements accompanied by higher routing fidelity and lower background leakage. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicitly modeling probability transport in on-policy distillation.

On-policy distillation (OPD) is appealing for large language model (LLM) post-training because it evaluates teacher feedback on student-generated rollouts rather than fixed teacher traces. In long-horizon settings, however, the common sampled-token variant is fragile: it reduces distribution matching to a one-token signal and becomes increasingly unreliable as rollouts drift away from prefixes the teacher commonly visits. We revisit OPD from the estimator and implementation sides. Theoretically, token-level OPD is biased relative to sequence-level reverse-KL, but it has a much tighter worst-case variance bound; our toy study shows the same tradeoff empirically, with stronger future-reward coupling producing higher gradient variance and less stable learning. Empirically, we identify three failure modes of sampled-token OPD: an imbalanced one-token signal, unreliable teacher guidance on student-generated prefixes, and distortions caused by tokenizer or special-token mismatch. We address these issues with teacher top-K local support matching, implemented as truncated reverse-KL with top-p rollout sampling and special-token masking. Across single-task math reasoning and multi-task agentic-plus-math training, this objective yields more stable optimization and better downstream performance than sampled-token OPD.

Model distillation has become essential for creating smaller, deployable language models that retain larger system capabilities. However, widespread deployment raises concerns about resilience to adversarial manipulation. This paper investigates vulnerability of distilled models to adversarial injection of biased content during training. We demonstrate that adversaries can inject subtle biases into teacher models through minimal data poisoning, which propagates to student models and becomes significantly amplified. We propose two propagation modes: Untargeted Propagation, where bias affects multiple tasks, and Targeted Propagation, focusing on specific tasks while maintaining normal behavior elsewhere. With only 25 poisoned samples (0.25% poisoning rate), student models generate biased responses 76.9% of the time in targeted scenarios - higher than 69.4% in teacher models. For untargeted propagation, adversarial bias appears 6x-29x more frequently in student models on unseen tasks. We validate findings across six bias types (targeted advertisements, phishing links, narrative manipulations, insecure coding practices), various distillation methods, and different modalities spanning text and code generation. Our evaluation reveals shortcomings in current defenses - perplexity filtering, bias detection systems, and LLM-based autorater frameworks - against these attacks. Results expose significant security vulnerabilities in distilled models, highlighting need for specialized safeguards. We propose practical design principles for building effective adversarial bias mitigation strategies.

On-policy distillation, in which a teacher corrects samples that the student itself generates, presupposes that the two models speak the same language: identical VAE latents, matching architectures, and a common timestep grid. We ask what happens when none of this holds, as when the strongest teacher available and the student one wishes to deploy come from different model families, and find that the standard recipes have no answer: teacher latents cannot serve as targets in a foreign coordinate system, per-pixel losses against a teacher that stochastically re-draws local detail degenerate into blur or divergence, and timestep indices lose their meaning across mismatched schedules. We present Any-OPD, to our knowledge the first framework for on-policy distillation between arbitrary pairs of latent flow-matching generators. Any-OPD treats the teacher purely as a black-box sampler and connects the two models at exactly one point: a frozen, model-agnostic vision representation in which their independently decoded outputs are compared, sidestepping every assumption about latents, features, or architecture. Trajectory correspondence is recovered by matching continuous noise levels instead of step indices, and a brief anchoring phase, in which teacher samples are re-encoded through the student's own VAE, ensures the on-policy gradient measures sample quality rather than domain mismatch. Distilling the 12B FLUX.1-dev into the 2.5B SD3.5-Medium, Any-OPD lifts the student's PickScore from 0.846 to 0.884 and HPSv3 from 9.12 to 10.97, rivaling the teacher at a fifth of its size, where direct latent regression fails to train at all.

Backdoor attacks pose a serious security threat for training neural networks as they surreptitiously introduce hidden functionalities into a model. Such backdoors remain silent during inference on clean inputs, evading detection due to inconspicuous behavior. However, once a specific trigger pattern appears in the input data, the backdoor activates, causing the model to execute its concealed function. Detecting such poisoned samples within vast datasets is virtually impossible through manual inspection. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that enables model training on potentially poisoned datasets by utilizing the power of recent diffusion models. Specifically, we create synthetic variations of all training samples, leveraging the inherent resilience of diffusion models to potential trigger patterns in the data. By combining this generative approach with knowledge distillation, we produce student models that maintain their general performance on the task while exhibiting robust resistance to backdoor triggers.

Real-world tasks often require large language models (LLMs) to learn from complex task-specific context rather than pretrained parametric knowledge. This capability remains a weakness of LLMs, while human annotation for such task contexts is expensive and difficult to scale. Public high-quality documents are an abundant alternative, but much of the public web has already been consumed during pretraining: training on such documents naively would reward memorization rather than context learning. In this work, we attempt to make use of high-quality public documents with small perturbations and empirically find that LLMs can successfully generate context-dependent reasoning traces and answers, which are then used to train a student model. Specifically, we construct a synthesis pipeline that (i) rewrites source documents to reduce memorization risk, (ii) generates questions and rubrics that require reasoning over the document, (iii) answers the questions with the document as context, and (iv) admits only samples that genuinely depend on the document. Without any human annotators, our pipeline generates about 10k samples from 3.5k documents, and the resulting student model substantially improves the performance on CL-bench. SFT raises a Qwen3.6-35B-A3B student from 13.7% to 22.8%, and a subsequent rubric-reward RL stage reaches 24.6%, on CL-bench comparable with a frontier model of over a trillion parameters, Qwen3.8-2.4T (23.9%). We also observe a broad transfer of improvements to long-context understanding, instruction following, and reasoning, while code generation and knowledge remain mostly flat. We hope this work provides a reproducible and scalable way to improve the ability of LLMs to learn from context, and to facilitate further research on context-grounded reasoning.

We introduce a high-quality dataset that contains 3,397 samples comprising (i) multiple choice questions, (ii) answers (including distractors), and (iii) their source documents, from the educational domain. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and close. Correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom's taxonomy. All questions have been generated by educational experts rather than crowd workers to ensure they are maintaining educational and learning standards. Our analysis and experiments suggest distinguishable differences between our dataset and commonly used ones for question generation for educational purposes. We believe this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in the educational domain. The dataset and baselines will be released to support further research in question generation.

While Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP) with Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of the most effective zero-shot document ranking methods, it has a quadratic computational complexity with respect to the number of documents to be ranked, as it requires an enumeration over all possible document pairs. Consequently, the outstanding ranking performance of PRP has remained unreachable for most real-world ranking applications. In this work, we propose to harness the effectiveness of PRP through pairwise distillation. Specifically, we distill a pointwise student ranker from pairwise teacher labels generated by PRP, resulting in an efficient student model that retains the performance of PRP with substantially lower computational costs. Furthermore, we find that the distillation process can be made sample-efficient: with only 2% of pairs, we are able to obtain the same performance as using all pairs for teacher labels. Thus, our novel approach provides a solution to harness the ranking performance of PRP without incurring high computational costs during both distillation and serving.

Pretraining on human corpus and then finetuning in a simulator has become a standard pipeline for training a goal-oriented dialogue agent. Nevertheless, as soon as the agents are finetuned to maximize task completion, they suffer from the so-called language drift phenomenon: they slowly lose syntactic and semantic properties of language as they only focus on solving the task. In this paper, we propose a generic approach to counter language drift called Seeded iterated learning (SIL). We periodically refine a pretrained student agent by imitating data sampled from a newly generated teacher agent. At each time step, the teacher is created by copying the student agent, before being finetuned to maximize task completion. SIL does not require external syntactic constraint nor semantic knowledge, making it a valuable task-agnostic finetuning protocol. We evaluate SIL in a toy-setting Lewis Game, and then scale it up to the translation game with natural language. In both settings, SIL helps counter language drift as well as it improves the task completion compared to baselines.

Diffusion models have revolutionized image and video generation, achieving unprecedented visual quality. However, their reliance on transformer architectures incurs prohibitively high computational costs, particularly when extending generation to long videos. Recent work has explored autoregressive formulations for long video generation, typically by distilling from short-horizon bidirectional teachers. Nevertheless, given that teacher models cannot synthesize long videos, the extrapolation of student models beyond their training horizon often leads to pronounced quality degradation, arising from the compounding of errors within the continuous latent space. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to mitigate quality degradation in long-horizon video generation without requiring supervision from long-video teachers or retraining on long video datasets. Our approach centers on exploiting the rich knowledge of teacher models to provide guidance for the student model through sampled segments drawn from self-generated long videos. Our method maintains temporal consistency while scaling video length by up to 20x beyond teacher's capability, avoiding common issues such as over-exposure and error-accumulation without recomputing overlapping frames like previous methods. When scaling up the computation, our method shows the capability of generating videos up to 4 minutes and 15 seconds, equivalent to 99.9% of the maximum span supported by our base model's position embedding and more than 50x longer than that of our baseline model. Experiments on standard benchmarks and our proposed improved benchmark demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms baseline methods in both fidelity and consistency. Our long-horizon videos demo can be found at https://self-forcing-plus-plus.github.io/

Large foundation models trained on extensive datasets demonstrate strong zero-shot capabilities in various domains. To replicate their success when data and model size are constrained, knowledge distillation has become an established tool for transferring knowledge from foundation models to small student networks. However, the effectiveness of distillation is critically limited by the available training data. This work addresses the common practical issue of covariate shift in knowledge distillation, where spurious features appear during training but not at test time. We ask the question: when these spurious features are unknown, yet a robust teacher is available, is it possible for a student to also become robust to them? We address this problem by introducing a novel diffusion-based data augmentation strategy that generates images by maximizing the disagreement between the teacher and the student, effectively creating challenging samples that the student struggles with. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves worst group and mean group accuracy on CelebA and SpuCo Birds as well as the spurious mAUC on spurious ImageNet under covariate shift, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion-based data augmentation baselines

LLM training increasingly relies on teacher-generated supervision, from synthetic responses to reasoning traces and tool-use demonstrations. Current practice often chooses the highest-performing teacher to generate student training data, implicitly treating teacher test performance as a proxy for teaching quality. We show that this assumption can fail: even when multiple teachers provide correct answers to the same question, the answer from the strongest teacher is not necessarily the best supervision for a given student. To address this gap, we propose Student-Centric Answer Sampling (SCAS), a framework that selects from verified teacher-generated answers according to their estimated student-centric learning cost. Motivated by a token-wise gradient decomposition, we derive an efficient forward-only proxy for this cost and use it to guide answer selection during training. Experiments across 30 teacher models, 6 student base models, and 8 tasks show that SCAS consistently improves student performance, suggesting that effective distillation should prioritize supervision matched to the current student rather than teacher strength alone.

Using LLMs to give educational feedback to students for their assignments has attracted much attention in the AI in Education field. Yet, there is currently no large-scale open-source dataset of student assignments that includes detailed assignment descriptions, rubrics, and student submissions across various courses. As a result, research on generalisable methodology for automatic generation of effective and responsible educational feedback remains limited. In the current study, we constructed a large-scale dataset of Synthetic Computer science Assignments for LLM-generated Educational Feedback research (SCALEFeedback). We proposed a Sophisticated Assignment Mimicry (SAM) framework to generate the synthetic dataset by one-to-one LLM-based imitation from real assignment descriptions, student submissions to produce their synthetic versions. Our open-source dataset contains 10,000 synthetic student submissions spanning 155 assignments across 59 university-level computer science courses. Our synthetic submissions achieved BERTScore F1 0.84, PCC of 0.62 for assignment marks and 0.85 for length, compared to the corresponding real-world assignment dataset, while ensuring perfect protection of student private information. All these results of our SAM framework outperformed results of a naive mimicry method baseline. The LLM-generated feedback for our synthetic assignments demonstrated the same level of effectiveness compared to that of real-world assignment dataset. Our research showed that one-to-one LLM imitation is a promising method for generating open-source synthetic educational datasets that preserve the original dataset's semantic meaning and student data distribution, while protecting student privacy and institutional copyright. SCALEFeedback enhances our ability to develop LLM-based generalisable methods for offering high-quality, automated educational feedback in a scalable way.

We explore the problem of generating minority samples using diffusion models. The minority samples are instances that lie on low-density regions of a data manifold. Generating a sufficient number of such minority instances is important, since they often contain some unique attributes of the data. However, the conventional generation process of the diffusion models mostly yields majority samples (that lie on high-density regions of the manifold) due to their high likelihoods, making themselves ineffective and time-consuming for the minority generating task. In this work, we present a novel framework that can make the generation process of the diffusion models focus on the minority samples. We first highlight that Tweedie's denoising formula yields favorable results for majority samples. The observation motivates us to introduce a metric that describes the uniqueness of a given sample. To address the inherent preference of the diffusion models w.r.t. the majority samples, we further develop minority guidance, a sampling technique that can guide the generation process toward regions with desired likelihood levels. Experiments on benchmark real datasets demonstrate that our minority guidance can greatly improve the capability of generating high-quality minority samples over existing generative samplers. We showcase that the performance benefit of our framework persists even in demanding real-world scenarios such as medical imaging, further underscoring the practical significance of our work. Code is available at https://github.com/soobin-um/minority-guidance.

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing education, with LLM-based agents playing a key role in simulating student behavior. A major challenge in student simulation is modeling the diverse learning patterns of students at various cognitive levels. However, current LLMs, typically trained as ``helpful assistants'', target at generating perfect responses. As a result, they struggle to simulate students with diverse cognitive abilities, as they often produce overly advanced answers, missing the natural imperfections that characterize student learning and resulting in unrealistic simulations. To address this issue, we propose a training-free framework for student simulation. We begin by constructing a cognitive prototype for each student using a knowledge graph, which captures their understanding of concepts from past learning records. This prototype is then mapped to new tasks to predict student performance. Next, we simulate student solutions based on these predictions and iteratively refine them using a beam search method to better replicate realistic mistakes. To validate our approach, we construct the Student\_100 dataset, consisting of 100 students working on Python programming and 5,000 learning records. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms baseline models, achieving 100% improvement in simulation accuracy.

End of semester student evaluations of teaching are the dominant mechanism for providing feedback to academics on their teaching practice. For large classes, however, the volume of feedback makes these tools impractical for this purpose. This paper explores the use of open-source generative AI to synthesise factual, actionable and appropriate summaries of student feedback from these survey responses. In our setup, we have 742 student responses ranging over 75 courses in a Computer Science department. For each course, we synthesise a summary of the course evaluations and actionable items for the instructor. Our results reveal a promising avenue for enhancing teaching practices in the classroom setting. Our contribution lies in demonstrating the feasibility of using generative AI to produce insightful feedback for teachers, thus providing a cost-effective means to support educators' development. Overall, our work highlights the possibility of using generative AI to produce factual, actionable, and appropriate feedback for teachers in the classroom setting.

Modern generative models produce high-quality individual outputs but struggle to sample diversely, even when explicitly instructed to do so. We introduce MINE-SAMPLE-RENDER (MSR), a test-time approach that externalizes the diversity into an explicit, corpus-derived sampling procedure. Our pipeline (i) mines an interpretable categorical schema from a corpus of real artifacts and supplies statistics for sampling; (ii) samples attribute configurations from the corpus-derived statistics; (iii) uses a generative model purely as a conditional renderer of a sampled configuration. Across weather report generation, user simulation, webpage design, text-to-image generation, and agent-generated 3D assets, we evaluate the diversity and output quality of MSR-guided generation and show that MSR improves alignment with corpus distributions and diversity of generated outputs.

Knowledge distillation methods have recently shown to be a promising direction to speedup the synthesis of large-scale diffusion models by requiring only a few inference steps. While several powerful distillation methods were recently proposed, the overall quality of student samples is typically lower compared to the teacher ones, which hinders their practical usage. In this work, we investigate the relative quality of samples produced by the teacher text-to-image diffusion model and its distilled student version. As our main empirical finding, we discover that a noticeable portion of student samples exhibit superior fidelity compared to the teacher ones, despite the ``approximate'' nature of the student. Based on this finding, we propose an adaptive collaboration between student and teacher diffusion models for effective text-to-image synthesis. Specifically, the distilled model produces the initial sample, and then an oracle decides whether it needs further improvements with a slow teacher model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the designed pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art text-to-image alternatives for various inference budgets in terms of human preference. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be naturally used in popular applications such as text-guided image editing and controllable generation.

The astonishing growth of generative tools in recent years has empowered many exciting applications in text-to-image generation and text-to-video generation. The underlying principle behind these generative tools is the concept of diffusion, a particular sampling mechanism that has overcome some shortcomings that were deemed difficult in the previous approaches. The goal of this tutorial is to discuss the essential ideas underlying the diffusion models. The target audience of this tutorial includes undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in doing research on diffusion models or applying these models to solve other problems.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in diverse tasks using zero-shot and few-shot prompting. Even though their capabilities of data synthesis have been studied well in recent years, the generated data suffers from a lack of diversity, less adherence to the prompt, and potential biases that creep into the data from the generator model. In this work, we tackle the challenge of generating datasets with high diversity, upon which a student model is trained for downstream tasks. Taking the route of decoding-time guidance-based approaches, we propose CorrSynth, which generates data that is more diverse and faithful to the input prompt using a correlated sampling strategy. Further, our method overcomes the complexity drawbacks of some other guidance-based techniques like classifier-based guidance. With extensive experiments, we show the effectiveness of our approach and substantiate our claims. In particular, we perform intrinsic evaluation to show the improvements in diversity. Our experiments show that CorrSynth improves both student metrics and intrinsic metrics upon competitive baselines across four datasets, showing the innate advantage of our method.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their increased accessibility have made it easier than ever for students to automatically generate texts, posing new challenges for educational institutions. To enforce norms of academic integrity and ensure students' learning, learning analytics methods to automatically detect LLM-generated text appear increasingly appealing. This paper benchmarks the performance of different state-of-the-art detectors in educational contexts, introducing a novel dataset, called Generative Essay Detection in Education (GEDE), containing over 900 student-written essays and over 12,500 LLM-generated essays from various domains. To capture the diversity of LLM usage practices in generating text, we propose the concept of contribution levels, representing students' contribution to a given assignment. These levels range from purely human-written texts, to slightly LLM-improved versions, to fully LLM-generated texts, and finally to active attacks on the detector by "humanizing" generated texts. We show that most detectors struggle to accurately classify texts of intermediate student contribution levels, like LLM-improved human-written texts. Detectors are particularly likely to produce false positives, which is problematic in educational settings where false suspicions can severely impact students' lives. Our dataset, code, and additional supplementary materials are publicly available at https://github.com/lukasgehring/Assessing-LLM-Text-Detection-in-Educational-Contexts.

As students increasingly adopt large language models (LLMs) as learning aids, it is crucial to build models that are adept at handling the nuances of tutoring: they need to identify the core needs of students, be adaptive, provide personalized guidance, and be accurate. To this end, we introduce TutorBench, a dataset and evaluation benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the core tutoring skills of LLMs. The dataset comprises 1,490 samples curated by human experts, focused on high-school and AP-level curricula. The samples are drawn from three common tutoring tasks: (i) generating adaptive explanations tailored to a student's confusion, (ii) providing actionable feedback on a student's work, and (iii) promoting active learning through effective hint generation. To account for the inherent complexity of tutoring, samples are accompanied by sample-specific rubrics which are used to judge model responses during evaluation. TutorBench uses a reliable and fine-grained automatic evaluation method that uses an LLM-judge and the sample-specific rubrics. We evaluate 16 frontier LLMs on TutorBench and present a detailed analysis of their performance and behavior. Our results show that none of the frontier LLMs achieve a score of greater than 56%, showing a large room for improvement. We find that LLMs fall short in exhibiting the full range of tutoring skills needed to guide, diagnose, and support students effectively, with all the frontier models achieving less than a 60% pass rate on rubric criteria related to these skills. We also find that different model families exhibit varied strengths and limitations: the Claude models outperform others in supporting active learning, while they lag behind in the other two use cases. By releasing TutorBench, we provide a comprehensive and unsaturated benchmark to guide the development of the next-generation of AI tutors.

We present a novel approach for generating minority samples that live on low-density regions of a data manifold. Our framework is built upon diffusion models, leveraging the principle of guided sampling that incorporates an arbitrary energy-based guidance during inference time. The key defining feature of our sampler lies in its self-contained nature, \ie, implementable solely with a pretrained model. This distinguishes our sampler from existing techniques that require expensive additional components (like external classifiers) for minority generation. Specifically, we first estimate the likelihood of features within an intermediate latent sample by evaluating a reconstruction loss w.r.t. its posterior mean. The generation then proceeds with the minimization of the estimated likelihood, thereby encouraging the emergence of minority features in the latent samples of subsequent timesteps. To further improve the performance of our sampler, we provide several time-scheduling techniques that properly manage the influence of guidance over inference steps. Experiments on benchmark real datasets demonstrate that our approach can greatly improve the capability of creating realistic low-likelihood minority instances over the existing techniques without the reliance on costly additional elements. Code is available at https://github.com/soobin-um/sg-minority.

Selecting a sample generation scheme from multiple prompt-based generative models, including large language models (LLMs) and prompt-guided image and video generation models, is typically addressed by choosing the model that maximizes an averaged evaluation score. However, this score-based selection overlooks the possibility that different models achieve the best generation performance for different types of text prompts. An online identification of the best generation model for various input prompts can reduce the costs associated with querying sub-optimal models. In this work, we explore the possibility of varying rankings of text-based generative models for different text prompts and propose an online learning framework to predict the best data generation model for a given input prompt. The proposed PAK-UCB algorithm addresses a contextual bandit (CB) setting with shared context variables across the arms, utilizing the generated data to update kernel-based functions that predict the score of each model available for unseen text prompts. Additionally, we leverage random Fourier features (RFF) to accelerate the online learning process of PAK-UCB. Our numerical experiments on real and simulated text-to-image and image-to-text generative models show that RFF-UCB performs successfully in identifying the best generation model across different sample types. The code is available at: github.com/yannxiaoyanhu/dgm-online-select.

Teachers and students are increasingly relying on online learning resources to supplement the ones provided in school. This increase in the breadth and depth of available resources is a great thing for students, but only provided they are able to find answers to their queries. Question-answering and information retrieval systems have benefited from public datasets to train and evaluate their algorithms, but most of these datasets have been in English text written by and for adults. We introduce a new public French question-answering dataset collected from Alloprof, a Quebec-based primary and high-school help website, containing 29 349 questions and their explanations in a variety of school subjects from 10 368 students, with more than half of the explanations containing links to other questions or some of the 2 596 reference pages on the website. We also present a case study of this dataset in an information retrieval task. This dataset was collected on the Alloprof public forum, with all questions verified for their appropriateness and the explanations verified both for their appropriateness and their relevance to the question. To predict relevant documents, architectures using pre-trained BERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated. This dataset will allow researchers to develop question-answering, information retrieval and other algorithms specifically for the French speaking education context. Furthermore, the range of language proficiency, images, mathematical symbols and spelling mistakes will necessitate algorithms based on a multimodal comprehension. The case study we present as a baseline shows an approach that relies on recent techniques provides an acceptable performance level, but more work is necessary before it can reliably be used and trusted in a production setting.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on programming tasks, but can they generate student-like code like real students - imperfect, iterative, and stylistically diverse? We present ParaStudent, a systematic study of LLM-based "student-like" code generation in an introductory programming course setting. Using a dataset of timestamped student submissions across multiple semesters, we design low- and high-resolution experiments to model student progress and evaluate code outputs along semantic, functional, and stylistic dimensions. Our results show that fine-tuning significantly improves alignment with real student trajectories and captures error patterns, incremental improvements, and stylistic variations more faithfully. This study shows that modeling realistic student code requires capturing learning dynamics through context-aware generation, temporal modeling, and multi-dimensional evaluation. Code for experiments and evaluation is available at https://github.com/mmiroyan/ParaStudent.

Recommender Systems are built to retrieve relevant items to satisfy users' information needs. The candidate corpus usually consists of a finite set of items that are ready to be served, such as videos, products, or articles. With recent advances in Generative AI such as GPT and Diffusion models, a new form of recommendation task is yet to be explored where items are to be created by generative models with personalized prompts. Taking image generation as an example, with a single prompt from the user and access to a generative model, it is possible to generate hundreds of new images in a few minutes. How shall we attain personalization in the presence of "infinite" items? In this preliminary study, we propose a two-stage framework, namely Prompt-Model Retrieval and Generated Item Ranking, to approach this new task formulation. We release GEMRec-18K, a prompt-model interaction dataset with 18K images generated by 200 publicly-available generative models paired with a diverse set of 90 textual prompts. Our findings demonstrate the promise of generative model recommendation as a novel personalization problem and the limitations of existing evaluation metrics. We highlight future directions for the RecSys community to advance towards generative recommender systems. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MAPS-research/GEMRec.

Designing high-quality educational questions is a challenging and time-consuming task. In this work, we propose a novel approach that utilizes prompt-based techniques to generate descriptive and reasoning-based questions. However, current question-answering (QA) datasets are inadequate for conducting our experiments on prompt-based question generation (QG) in an educational setting. Therefore, we curate a new QG dataset called EduProbe for school-level subjects, by leveraging the rich content of NCERT textbooks. We carefully annotate this dataset as quadruples of 1) Context: a segment upon which the question is formed; 2) Long Prompt: a long textual cue for the question (i.e., a longer sequence of words or phrases, covering the main theme of the context); 3) Short Prompt: a short textual cue for the question (i.e., a condensed representation of the key information or focus of the context); 4) Question: a deep question that aligns with the context and is coherent with the prompts. We investigate several prompt-based QG methods by fine-tuning pre-trained transformer-based large language models (LLMs), namely PEGASUS, T5, MBART, and BART. Moreover, we explore the performance of two general-purpose pre-trained LLMs such as Text-Davinci-003 and GPT-3.5-Turbo without any further training. By performing automatic evaluation, we show that T5 (with long prompt) outperforms all other models, but still falls short of the human baseline. Under human evaluation criteria, TextDavinci-003 usually shows better results than other models under various prompt settings. Even in the case of human evaluation criteria, QG models mostly fall short of the human baseline. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/my625/PromptQG

While the rise of large language models (LLMs) has created rich new opportunities to learn about digital technology, many on the margins of this technology struggle to gain and maintain competency due to lexical or conceptual barriers that prevent them from asking appropriate questions. Although there have been many efforts to understand factuality of LLM-created content and ability of LLMs to answer questions, it is not well understood how unclear or nonstandard language queries affect the model outputs. We propose the creation of a dataset that captures questions of digital newcomers and outsiders, utilizing data we have compiled from a decade's worth of one-on-one tutoring. In this paper we lay out our planned efforts and some potential uses of this dataset.

Code LLMs are being rapidly deployed and there is evidence that they can make professional programmers more productive. Current benchmarks for code generation measure whether models generate correct programs given an expert prompt. In this paper, we present a new benchmark containing multiple prompts per problem, written by a specific population of non-expert prompters: beginning programmers. StudentEval contains 1,749 prompts for 48 problems, written by 80 students who have only completed one semester of Python programming. Our students wrote these prompts while working interactively with a Code LLM, and we observed very mixed success rates. We use StudentEval to evaluate 5 Code LLMs and find that StudentEval is a better discriminator of model performance than existing benchmarks. We analyze the prompts and find significant variation in students' prompting techniques. We also find that nondeterministic LLM sampling could mislead students into thinking that their prompts are more (or less) effective than they actually are, which has implications for how to teach with Code LLMs.

On-policy distillation (OPD) can succeed with surprisingly few training questions, motivating a view of questions as carriers of distributional knowledge transfer. How can we assess whether a newly generated question is valuable for distillation, and learn to generate better questions---without access to its correct answer? We introduce Ask-to-Distill (\method), a framework that treats synthetic questions as distribution elicitors and optimizes the teacher supervision they expose along student-generated trajectories. A student-initialized synthesizer is optimized using a distributional surrogate for question value, computed from a frozen student--teacher pair without reference answers, correctness rewards, or per-candidate student updates. The reward combines teacher--student disagreement with teacher probability mass on the student's candidate support, together with length and diversity controls. The generated questions are filtered and deduplicated into a prompt-only bank for standard OPD. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and agentic tasks, our method improves average performance and teacher-gap recovery over unoptimized student-generated prompts and KL-filtered real questions, while matching or exceeding real-bank OPD in the evaluated settings. Signal analyses further show that optimized questions can elicit denser supervision and more total signal from shorter student responses, supporting elicited distributional supervision as an objective for synthetic distillation data. Our code, data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/GasolSun36/Ask_to_Distill.

We present a novel method for obtaining high-quality, domain-targeted multiple choice questions from crowd workers. Generating these questions can be difficult without trading away originality, relevance or diversity in the answer options. Our method addresses these problems by leveraging a large corpus of domain-specific text and a small set of existing questions. It produces model suggestions for document selection and answer distractor choice which aid the human question generation process. With this method we have assembled SciQ, a dataset of 13.7K multiple choice science exam questions (Dataset available at http://allenai.org/data.html). We demonstrate that the method produces in-domain questions by providing an analysis of this new dataset and by showing that humans cannot distinguish the crowdsourced questions from original questions. When using SciQ as additional training data to existing questions, we observe accuracy improvements on real science exams.

Developing an educational test can be expensive and time-consuming, as each item must be written by experts and then evaluated by collecting hundreds of student responses. Moreover, many tests require multiple distinct sets of questions administered throughout the school year to closely monitor students' progress, known as parallel tests. In this study, we focus on tests of silent sentence reading efficiency, used to assess students' reading ability over time. To generate high-quality parallel tests, we propose to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) to simulate how previous students would have responded to unseen items. With these simulated responses, we can estimate each item's difficulty and ambiguity. We first use GPT-4 to generate new test items following a list of expert-developed rules and then apply a fine-tuned LLM to filter the items based on criteria from psychological measurements. We also propose an optimal-transport-inspired technique for generating parallel tests and show the generated tests closely correspond to the original test's difficulty and reliability based on crowdworker responses. Our evaluation of a generated test with 234 students from grades 2 to 8 produces test scores highly correlated (r=0.93) to those of a standard test form written by human experts and evaluated across thousands of K-12 students.

Personalization in Information Retrieval (IR) is a topic studied by the research community since a long time. However, there is still a lack of datasets to conduct large-scale evaluations of personalized IR; this is mainly due to the fact that collecting and curating high-quality user-related information requires significant costs and time investment. Furthermore, the creation of datasets for Personalized IR (PIR) tasks is affected by both privacy concerns and the need for accurate user-related data, which are often not publicly available. Recently, researchers have started to explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets, which is a possible solution to generate data for low-resource tasks. In this paper, we investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating synthetic documents to train an IR system for a Personalized Community Question Answering task. To study the effectiveness of IR models fine-tuned on LLM-generated data, we introduce a new dataset, named Sy-SE-PQA. We build Sy-SE-PQA based on an existing dataset, SE-PQA, which consists of questions and answers posted on the popular StackExchange communities. Starting from questions in SE-PQA, we generate synthetic answers using different prompt techniques and LLMs. Our findings suggest that LLMs have high potential in generating data tailored to users' needs. The synthetic data can replace human-written training data, even if the generated data may contain incorrect information.

As large language models (LLMs) are applied to more use cases, creating high quality, task-specific datasets for fine-tuning becomes a bottleneck for model improvement. Using high quality human data has been the most common approach to unlock model performance, but is prohibitively expensive in many scenarios. Several alternative methods have also emerged, such as generating synthetic or hybrid data, but the effectiveness of these approaches remain unclear, especially in resource-constrained scenarios and tasks that are not easily verified. To investigate this, we group various synthetic data generation strategies into three representative categories -- Answer Augmentation, Question Rephrase and New Question -- and study the performance of student LLMs trained under various constraints, namely seed instruction set size and query budget. We demonstrate that these strategies are not equally effective across settings. Notably, the optimal data generation strategy depends strongly on the ratio between the available teacher query budget and the size of the seed instruction set. When this ratio is low, generating new answers to existing questions proves most effective, but as this ratio increases, generating new questions becomes optimal. Across all tasks, we find that choice of augmentation method and other design choices matter substantially more in low to mid data regimes than in high data regimes. We provide a practical framework for selecting the appropriate augmentation method across settings, taking into account additional factors such as the scalability of each method, the importance of verifying synthetic data, and the use of different LLMs for synthetic data generation.

The issue of copyright in generative models, particularly diffusion models, has become a prominent concern in recent years. Previous studies have predominantly focused on copyright violation at the image level, where generative models replicate copyrighted images entirely. Furthermore, these earlier studies have examined copyright infringements mainly using prompts that are semantically similar to target topics. However, copyright infringement can be more nuanced than mere replication of whole images and can be triggered with prompts that are less directly related to copyright topics. In our work, we tackle the limitations of previous studies by delving into partial copyright infringement, which treats parts of images as copyrighted content, using prompts that are considerably different from copyrighted topics. We develop a data generation pipeline that facilitates the creation of datasets for copyright research in diffusion models. Using our pipeline, we create datasets containing copyright infringement samples for different diffusion models. We conduct evaluations on generated data under various criteria. Our results show the prevalence of generating copyright-infringing content across a range of diffusion models, including the latest Stable Diffusion XL.

Based on powerful Large Language Models (LLMs), recent generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have gained prominence as a pivotal research area, exhibiting remarkable capability for both comprehension and generation. In this work, we address the evaluation of generative comprehension in MLLMs as a preliminary step towards a comprehensive assessment of generative models, by introducing a benchmark named SEED-Bench. SEED-Bench consists of 19K multiple choice questions with accurate human annotations (x 6 larger than existing benchmarks), which spans 12 evaluation dimensions including the comprehension of both the image and video modality. We develop an advanced pipeline for generating multiple-choice questions that target specific evaluation dimensions, integrating both automatic filtering and manual verification processes. Multiple-choice questions with groundtruth options derived from human annotation enables an objective and efficient assessment of model performance, eliminating the need for human or GPT intervention during evaluation. We further evaluate the performance of 18 models across all 12 dimensions, covering both the spatial and temporal understanding. By revealing the limitations of existing MLLMs through evaluation results, we aim for SEED-Bench to provide insights for motivating future research. We will launch and consistently maintain a leaderboard to provide a platform for the community to assess and investigate model capability.

Training student models on synthetic data generated by strong teacher models is a promising way to distilling the capabilities of teachers. However, recent studies show that stronger models are not always optimal teachers, revealing a mismatch between teacher outputs and student learnability. To address this issue, we propose PerSyn (Personalized data Synthesis), a novel synthesis strategy that operates under a new ``Route then Generate'' paradigm to create data tailored to each student model, enabling it to learn more effectively. Specifically, PerSyn first assigns each prompt to its optimal teacher via a query-level router that jointly considers student learnability and teacher response quality. Each teacher then synthesizes data only for its assigned prompts, making the process more efficient than the conventional ``Generate then Select'' paradigm, where all teachers must generate parallel responses for the entire prompt set before constructing the final dataset. Extensive experiments across different model families and scales demonstrate that PerSyn consistently achieves superior or comparable performance to all baselines in instruct tuning and math reasoning settings. Further analysis verifies the effectiveness of PerSyn and offers extra insights to propel future research.

Personalized text generation is an emerging research area that has attracted much attention in recent years. Most studies in this direction focus on a particular domain by designing bespoke features or models. In this work, we propose a general approach for personalized text generation using large language models (LLMs). Inspired by the practice of writing education, we develop a multistage and multitask framework to teach LLMs for personalized generation. In writing instruction, the task of writing from sources is often decomposed into multiple steps that involve finding, evaluating, summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating information. Analogously, our approach to personalized text generation consists of multiple stages: retrieval, ranking, summarization, synthesis, and generation. In addition, we introduce a multitask setting that helps the model improve its generation ability further, which is inspired by the observation in education that a student's reading proficiency and writing ability are often correlated. We evaluate our approach on three public datasets, each of which covers a different and representative domain. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines.

We introduce Noise2Music, where a series of diffusion models is trained to generate high-quality 30-second music clips from text prompts. Two types of diffusion models, a generator model, which generates an intermediate representation conditioned on text, and a cascader model, which generates high-fidelity audio conditioned on the intermediate representation and possibly the text, are trained and utilized in succession to generate high-fidelity music. We explore two options for the intermediate representation, one using a spectrogram and the other using audio with lower fidelity. We find that the generated audio is not only able to faithfully reflect key elements of the text prompt such as genre, tempo, instruments, mood, and era, but goes beyond to ground fine-grained semantics of the prompt. Pretrained large language models play a key role in this story -- they are used to generate paired text for the audio of the training set and to extract embeddings of the text prompts ingested by the diffusion models. Generated examples: https://google-research.github.io/noise2music

AI tutors are most useful when they adapt to each student's strengths, weaknesses, and preferred guidance, but evidence about which guidance works for which student is sparse, slow, and costly to collect from real learners. Student simulators can provide this signal as a proxy, yet existing approaches are limited: state-tracking models fit student behavior but struggle to process explanations or corrections, while LLM role-play follows guidance fluently but does not reliably match the competence of the student being imitated. We present StudentSim, a training framework that turns sparse per-student data into individualized simulators through pooled training followed by per-student specialization. The resulting simulators both mirror a student's own responses and update them under tutor guidance. We also introduce StudentSimEval, a standardized protocol covering 60 students across chess, second-language English writing, and mathematics, using public learner datasets with de-identified records shared for research. StudentSimEval measures behavioral fidelity (F), or how well a simulator matches a student's responses, and guidance responsiveness (R), or how readily it updates under tutor guidance, with all methods fit and evaluated on the same records. Across all three domains, StudentSim outperforms GPT-5.4 on both metrics. In chess, StudentSim reaches F=0.51 and R=0.91, compared with 0.23 and 0.72 for GPT-5.4 and 0.45 and 0.27 for Maia2. As a proof of concept, using StudentSim as a reward model for tutor reinforcement learning produces a chess tutor that expert humans rate as more accurate, better-guided, and more personalized than a no-RL baseline and a tutor trained against a GPT-5.4 simulator reward. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/StudentSim.

We demonstrate that a neural network pre-trained on text and fine-tuned on code solves mathematics course problems, explains solutions, and generates new questions at a human level. We automatically synthesize programs using few-shot learning and OpenAI's Codex transformer and execute them to solve course problems at 81% automatic accuracy. We curate a new dataset of questions from MIT's largest mathematics courses (Single Variable and Multivariable Calculus, Differential Equations, Introduction to Probability and Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Mathematics for Computer Science) and Columbia University's Computational Linear Algebra. We solve questions from a MATH dataset (on Prealgebra, Algebra, Counting and Probability, Intermediate Algebra, Number Theory, and Precalculus), the latest benchmark of advanced mathematics problems designed to assess mathematical reasoning. We randomly sample questions and generate solutions with multiple modalities, including numbers, equations, and plots. The latest GPT-3 language model pre-trained on text automatically solves only 18.8% of these university questions using zero-shot learning and 30.8% using few-shot learning and the most recent chain of thought prompting. In contrast, program synthesis with few-shot learning using Codex fine-tuned on code generates programs that automatically solve 81% of these questions. Our approach improves the previous state-of-the-art automatic solution accuracy on the benchmark topics from 8.8% to 81.1%. We perform a survey to evaluate the quality and difficulty of generated questions. This work is the first to automatically solve university-level mathematics course questions at a human level and the first work to explain and generate university-level mathematics course questions at scale, a milestone for higher education.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise as copilots in various tasks. Local deployment of LLMs on edge devices is necessary when handling privacy-sensitive data or latency-sensitive tasks. The computational constraints of such devices make direct deployment of powerful large-scale LLMs impractical, necessitating the Knowledge Distillation from large-scale models to lightweight models. Lots of work has been done to elicit diversity and quality training examples from LLMs, but little attention has been paid to aligning teacher instructional content based on student preferences, akin to "responsive teaching" in pedagogy. Thus, we propose ARTE, dubbed Aligning TeacheR with StudenT PreferencEs, a framework that aligns the teacher model with student preferences to generate tailored training examples for Knowledge Distillation. Specifically, we elicit draft questions and rationales from the teacher model, then collect student preferences on these questions and rationales using students' performance with in-context learning as a proxy, and finally align the teacher model with student preferences. In the end, we repeat the first step with the aligned teacher model to elicit tailored training examples for the student model on the target task. Extensive experiments on academic benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ARTE over existing instruction-tuning datasets distilled from powerful LLMs. Moreover, we thoroughly investigate the generalization of ARTE, including the generalization of fine-tuned student models in reasoning ability and the generalization of aligned teacher models to generate tailored training data across tasks and students. In summary, our contributions lie in proposing a novel framework for tailored training example generation, demonstrating its efficacy in experiments, and investigating the generalization of both student & aligned teacher models in ARTE.

Large language models show great potential in generating and optimizing code. Widely used sampling methods such as Nucleus Sampling increase the diversity of generation but often produce repeated samples for low temperatures and incoherent samples for high temperatures. Furthermore, the temperature coefficient has to be tuned for each task, limiting its usability. We present Priority Sampling, a simple and deterministic sampling technique that produces unique samples ordered by the model's confidence. Each new sample expands the unexpanded token with the highest probability in the augmented search tree. Additionally, Priority Sampling supports generation based on regular expression that provides a controllable and structured exploration process. Priority Sampling outperforms Nucleus Sampling for any number of samples, boosting the performance of the original model from 2.87% to 5% improvement over -Oz. Moreover, it outperforms the autotuner used for the generation of labels for the training of the original model in just 30 samples.

Compositional generalization requires models to produce novel configurations from familiar parts. In diffusion models, prior compositional generation methods typically assume that the relevant concepts or conditioning signals are already available. We instead ask whether a pretrained diffusion model can discover query-specific concepts from the time-indexed scores it learns for the noisy marginals p_t(x_t) and compose them at test time. Given a single out-of-distribution query, our method performs gradient ascent on s_θ(x_t,t) approx nabla_{x_t}log p_t(x_t) at multiple noising timesteps to recover local density modes, maps these modes into clean-space Gaussians, greedily selects relevant prototypes with a submodular likelihood objective, and combines them into a product-of-experts (PoE) teacher model with an analytic score. This teacher model can be sampled directly through classifier-free guidance or used to generate a sample pool for training a new class embedding and low-rank adapter. On held-out composition benchmarks built from ColorMNIST and CelebA, both the analytic PoE sampler and the low-rank adapted model outperform query-only and nearest trained-class baselines. These results suggest that the time-indexed score geometry of the diffusion model contains reusable density-mode concepts that support test-time compositional generation without a predefined concept library.

Recorded lecture videos, often enhanced with search and summarization features, are a standard study resource. However, students cannot easily ask course specific questions or verify answers against an instructor's lecture. We report a semester-long deployment of VideoPoints platform with a retrieval-augmented chatbot that answers from course lecture materials and returns timestamped citations. The chatbot retrieves only from the active course, uses chapter summaries to guide transcript ranking, and returns clickable timestamped citations. Students used it for quick lookups and exam review. Across 833 messages, 70.5% included citations, none crossed a course boundary, and when no lecture evidence matched, the chatbot usually declined rather than answering. Among the users, citations were the most consistently useful feature, while practice-question generation was the strongest unmet request. We also evaluated the design on the real-world test split of EduVidQA, a public multimodal benchmark for lecture-video question answering. Our design improved correct-lecture retrieval by 6.3 percentage points over dense-only retrieval. Together, the results show that effective deployment depends on course isolation, supported citations, and alignment with students' study practices.

Discrete diffusion models (DDMs) have shown powerful generation ability for discrete data modalities like text and molecules. However, their practical application is hindered by inefficient sampling, requiring a large number of sampling steps. Accelerating DDMs by using larger step sizes typically introduces significant problems in generation quality, as it amplifies the impact of both the compounding decoding error due to factorized predictions and discretization error from numerical approximations, leading to a significant decrease in sampling quality. To address these challenges, we propose learnable sampler distillation (LSD), a novel approach to train fast and high-fidelity samplers for DDMs. LSD employs a distillation approach where a student sampler with a few steps learns to align its intermediate score trajectory with that of a high-quality teacher sampler with numerous steps. This alignment is achieved by optimizing learnable sampler coefficients that adaptively adjust sampling dynamics. Additionally, we further propose LSD+, which also learns time schedules that allocate steps non-uniformly. Experiments across text generation, image generation, and synthetic tasks demonstrate that our proposed approaches outperform existing samplers for DDMs, achieving substantially higher sampling quality with significantly fewer sampling steps. Our code is available at https://github.com/feiyangfu/LSD{https://github.com/feiyangfu/LSD}.

While automatic dialogue tutors hold great potential in making education personalized and more accessible, research on such systems has been hampered by a lack of sufficiently large and high-quality datasets. Collecting such datasets remains challenging, as recording tutoring sessions raises privacy concerns and crowdsourcing leads to insufficient data quality. To address this, we propose a framework to generate such dialogues by pairing human teachers with a Large Language Model (LLM) prompted to represent common student errors. We describe how we use this framework to collect MathDial, a dataset of 3k one-to-one teacher-student tutoring dialogues grounded in multi-step math reasoning problems. While models like GPT-3 are good problem solvers, they fail at tutoring because they generate factually incorrect feedback or are prone to revealing solutions to students too early. To overcome this, we let teachers provide learning opportunities to students by guiding them using various scaffolding questions according to a taxonomy of teacher moves. We demonstrate MathDial and its extensive annotations can be used to finetune models to be more effective tutors (and not just solvers). We confirm this by automatic and human evaluation, notably in an interactive setting that measures the trade-off between student solving success and telling solutions. The dataset is released publicly.

Synthetic data is a standard component in training large language models, yet systematic comparisons across design dimensions, including rephrasing strategy, generator model, and source data, remain absent. We conduct extensive controlled experiments, generating over one trillion tokens, to identify critical factors in rephrasing web text into synthetic pretraining data. Our results reveal that structured output formats, such as tables, math problems, FAQs, and tutorials, consistently outperform both curated web baselines and prior synthetic methods. Notably, increasing the size of the generator model beyond 1B parameters provides no additional benefit. Our analysis also demonstrates that the selection of the original data used for mixing substantially influences performance. By applying our findings, we develop \textsc{FinePhrase}, a 486-billion-token open dataset of rephrased web text. We show that FinePhrase outperforms all existing synthetic data baselines while reducing generation costs by up to 30 times. We provide the dataset, all prompts, and the generation framework to the research community.

The process of creating training data to teach models is currently driven by humans, who manually analyze model weaknesses and plan how to create data that improves a student model. Recent approaches using LLMs as annotators reduce human effort, but still require humans to interpret feedback from evaluations and control the LLM to produce data the student needs. Automating this labor-intensive process by creating autonomous data generation agents - or teachers - is desirable, but requires environments that can simulate the feedback-driven, iterative, closed loop of data creation. To enable rapid and scalable testing for such agents and their modules, we introduce DataEnvGym, a testbed of teacher environments for data generation agents. DataEnvGym frames data generation as a sequential decision-making task, involving an agent consisting of a data generation policy (which generates a plan for creating training data) and a data generation engine (which transforms the plan into data), inside an environment that provides student feedback. The agent's goal is to improve student performance. Students are iteratively trained and evaluated on generated data, with their feedback (in the form of errors or weak skills) being reported to the agent after each iteration. DataEnvGym includes multiple teacher environment instantiations across 3 levels of structure in the state representation and action space. More structured environments are based on inferred skills and offer more interpretability and curriculum control. We support 3 diverse tasks (math, code, and VQA) and test multiple students and teachers. Example agents in our teaching environments can iteratively improve students across tasks and settings. Moreover, we show that environments teach different skill levels and test variants of key modules, pointing to future work in improving data generation agents, engines, and feedback mechanisms.

This paper presents teaching materials, particularly assignments and ideas for classroom activities, from a new course on large language models (LLMs) taught at Charles University. The assignments include experiments with LLM inference for weather report generation and machine translation. The classroom activities include class quizzes, focused research on downstream tasks and datasets, and an interactive "best paper" session aimed at reading and comprehension of research papers.

Adapting instruction to the fine-grained needs of individual students is a powerful application of recent advances in large language models. These generative AI models can create tasks that correspond to students' interests and enact context personalization, enhancing students' interest in learning academic content. However, when there is a teacher in-the-loop creating or modifying tasks with generative AI, it is unclear how efficient this process might be, despite commercial generative AI tools' claims that they will save teachers time. In the present study, we teamed 7 middle school mathematics teachers with ChatGPT to create personalized versions of problems in their curriculum, to correspond to their students' interests. We look at the prompting moves teachers made, their efficiency when creating problems, and the reactions of their 521 7th grade students who received the personalized assignments. We find that having a teacher-in-the-loop results in generative AI-enhanced personalization being enacted at a relatively broad grain size, whereas students tend to prefer a smaller grain size where they receive specific popular culture references that interest them. Teachers spent a lot of effort adjusting popular culture references and addressing issues with the depth or realism of the problems generated, giving higher or lower levels of ownership to the generative AI. Teachers were able to improve in their ability to craft interesting problems in partnership with generative AI, but this process did not appear to become particularly time efficient as teachers learned and reflected on their students' data, iterating their approaches.

State-of-the-art flow models achieve remarkable quality but require slow, iterative sampling. To accelerate this, flow maps can be distilled from pre-trained teachers, a procedure that conventionally requires sampling from an external dataset. We argue that this data-dependency introduces a fundamental risk of Teacher-Data Mismatch, as a static dataset may provide an incomplete or even misaligned representation of the teacher's full generative capabilities. This leads us to question whether this reliance on data is truly necessary for successful flow map distillation. In this work, we explore a data-free alternative that samples only from the prior distribution, a distribution the teacher is guaranteed to follow by construction, thereby circumventing the mismatch risk entirely. To demonstrate the practical viability of this philosophy, we introduce a principled framework that learns to predict the teacher's sampling path while actively correcting for its own compounding errors to ensure high fidelity. Our approach surpasses all data-based counterparts and establishes a new state-of-the-art by a significant margin. Specifically, distilling from SiT-XL/2+REPA, our method reaches an impressive FID of 1.45 on ImageNet 256x256, and 1.49 on ImageNet 512x512, both with only 1 sampling step. We hope our work establishes a more robust paradigm for accelerating generative models and motivates the broader adoption of flow map distillation without data.

Text-to-Image (T2I) generation is primarily driven by Diffusion Models (DM) which rely on random Gaussian noise. Thus, like playing the slots at a casino, a DM will produce different results given the same user-defined inputs. This imposes a gambler's burden: To perform multiple generation cycles to obtain a satisfactory result. However, even though DMs use stochastic sampling to seed generation, the distribution of generated content quality highly depends on the prompt and the generative ability of a DM with respect to it. To account for this, we propose Naïve PAINE for improving the generative quality of Diffusion Models by leveraging T2I preference benchmarks. We directly predict the numerical quality of an image from the initial noise and given prompt. Naïve PAINE then selects a handful of quality noises and forwards them to the DM for generation. Further, Naïve PAINE provides feedback on the DM generative quality given the prompt and is lightweight enough to seamlessly fit into existing DM pipelines. Experimental results demonstrate that Naïve PAINE outperforms existing approaches on several prompt corpus benchmarks.

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.

We introduce the text-to-instrument task, which aims at generating sample-based musical instruments based on textual prompts. Accordingly, we propose InstrumentGen, a model that extends a text-prompted generative audio framework to condition on instrument family, source type, pitch (across an 88-key spectrum), velocity, and a joint text/audio embedding. Furthermore, we present a differentiable loss function to evaluate the intra-instrument timbral consistency of sample-based instruments. Our results establish a foundational text-to-instrument baseline, extending research in the domain of automatic sample-based instrument generation.

The use of deep learning methods to automatically detect students' classroom behavior is a promising approach for analyzing their class performance and improving teaching effectiveness. However, the lack of publicly available datasets on student behavior poses a challenge for researchers in this field. To address this issue, we propose the Student Classroom Behavior dataset (SCB-dataset3), which represents real-life scenarios. Our dataset comprises 5686 images with 45578 labels, focusing on six behaviors: hand-raising, reading, writing, using a phone, bowing the head, and leaning over the table. We evaluated the dataset using the YOLOv5, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8 algorithms, achieving a mean average precision (map) of up to 80.3%. We believe that our dataset can serve as a robust foundation for future research in student behavior detection and contribute to advancements in this field. Our SCB-dataset3 is available for download at: https://github.com/Whiffe/SCB-dataset

Providing high-quality feedback is crucial for student success but is constrained by time, cost, and limited data availability. We introduce Synthetic Educational Feedback Loops (SEFL), a novel framework designed to deliver immediate, on-demand feedback at scale without relying on extensive, real-world student data. In SEFL, two large language models (LLMs) operate in teacher--student roles to simulate assignment completion and formative feedback, generating abundant synthetic pairs of student work and corresponding critiques. We then fine-tune smaller, more computationally efficient LLMs on these synthetic pairs, enabling them to replicate key features of high-quality, goal-oriented feedback. Unlike personalized tutoring approaches that offer multi-turn, individualized instruction, SEFL specifically focuses on replicating the teacher-->student feedback loop for diverse assignments. Through both LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluations, we demonstrate that SEFL-tuned models outperform their non-tuned counterparts in feedback quality, clarity, and timeliness. These findings reveal SEFL's potential to transform feedback processes for higher education and beyond, offering an ethical and scalable alternative to conventional manual feedback cycles.

Two-step approaches, in which summary candidates are generated-then-reranked to return a single summary, can improve ROUGE scores over the standard single-step approach. Yet, standard decoding methods (i.e., beam search, nucleus sampling, and diverse beam search) produce candidates with redundant, and often low quality, content. In this paper, we design a novel method to generate candidates for re-ranking that addresses these issues. We ground each candidate abstract on its own unique content plan and generate distinct plan-guided abstracts using a model's top beam. More concretely, a standard language model (a BART LM) auto-regressively generates elemental discourse unit (EDU) content plans with an extractive copy mechanism. The top K beams from the content plan generator are then used to guide a separate LM, which produces a single abstractive candidate for each distinct plan. We apply an existing re-ranker (BRIO) to abstractive candidates generated from our method, as well as baseline decoding methods. We show large relevance improvements over previously published methods on widely used single document news article corpora, with ROUGE-2 F1 gains of 0.88, 2.01, and 0.38 on CNN / Dailymail, NYT, and Xsum, respectively. A human evaluation on CNN / DM validates these results. Similarly, on 1k samples from CNN / DM, we show that prompting GPT-3 to follow EDU plans outperforms sampling-based methods by 1.05 ROUGE-2 F1 points. Code to generate and realize plans is available at https://github.com/griff4692/edu-sum.

Automatic survey generation has emerged as a key task in scientific document processing. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating survey texts, the lack of standardized evaluation datasets critically hampers rigorous assessment of their performance against human-written surveys. In this work, we present SurveyGen, a large-scale dataset comprising over 4,200 human-written surveys across diverse scientific domains, along with 242,143 cited references and extensive quality-related metadata for both the surveys and the cited papers. Leveraging this resource, we build QUAL-SG, a novel quality-aware framework for survey generation that enhances the standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline by incorporating quality-aware indicators into literature retrieval to assess and select higher-quality source papers. Using this dataset and framework, we systematically evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs under varying levels of human involvement - from fully automatic generation to human-guided writing. Experimental results and human evaluations show that while semi-automatic pipelines can achieve partially competitive outcomes, fully automatic survey generation still suffers from low citation quality and limited critical analysis.

We investigate the generation of minority samples using pretrained text-to-image (T2I) latent diffusion models. Minority instances, in the context of T2I generation, can be defined as ones living on low-density regions of text-conditional data distributions. They are valuable for various applications of modern T2I generators, such as data augmentation and creative AI. Unfortunately, existing pretrained T2I diffusion models primarily focus on high-density regions, largely due to the influence of guided samplers (like CFG) that are essential for high-quality generation. To address this, we present a novel framework to counter the high-density-focus of T2I diffusion models. Specifically, we first develop an online prompt optimization framework that encourages emergence of desired properties during inference while preserving semantic contents of user-provided prompts. We subsequently tailor this generic prompt optimizer into a specialized solver that promotes generation of minority features by incorporating a carefully-crafted likelihood objective. Extensive experiments conducted across various types of T2I models demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the capability to produce high-quality minority instances compared to existing samplers. Code is available at https://github.com/soobin-um/MinorityPrompt.

A common way of assessing language learners' mastery of vocabulary is via multiple-choice cloze (i.e., fill-in-the-blank) questions. But the creation of test items can be laborious for individual teachers or in large-scale language programs. In this paper, we evaluate a new method for automatically generating these types of questions using large language models (LLM). The VocaTT (vocabulary teaching and training) engine is written in Python and comprises three basic steps: pre-processing target word lists, generating sentences and candidate word options using GPT, and finally selecting suitable word options. To test the efficiency of this system, 60 questions were generated targeting academic words. The generated items were reviewed by expert reviewers who judged the well-formedness of the sentences and word options, adding comments to items judged not well-formed. Results showed a 75% rate of well-formedness for sentences and 66.85% rate for suitable word options. This is a marked improvement over the generator used earlier in our research which did not take advantage of GPT's capabilities. Post-hoc qualitative analysis reveals several points for improvement in future work including cross-referencing part-of-speech tagging, better sentence validation, and improving GPT prompts.

Math word problems (MWPs) are critical K-12 educational tools, and customizing them to students' interests and ability levels can increase learning outcomes. However, teachers struggle to find time to customize MWPs for each student given large class sizes and increasing burnout. We propose that LLMs can support math education by generating MWPs customized to student interests and math education standards. To this end, we use a joint human expert-LLM judge approach to evaluate over 11,000 MWPs generated by open and closed LLMs and develop the first teacher-annotated dataset for standards-aligned educational MWP generation. We show the value of our data by using it to train a 12B open model that matches the performance of larger and more capable open models. We also use our teacher-annotated data to train a text classifier that enables a 30B open LLM to outperform existing closed baselines without any training. Next, we show our models' MWPs are more similar to human-written MWPs than those from existing models. We conclude by conducting the first study of customized LLM-generated MWPs with grade school students, finding they perform similarly on our models' MWPs relative to human-written MWPs but consistently prefer our customized MWPs.

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. To 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. To 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.

Large language models (LLMs) are versatile and can address many tasks, but for computational efficiency, it is often desirable to distill their capabilities into smaller student models. One way to do this for classification tasks is via dataset synthesis, which can be accomplished by generating examples of each label from the LLM. Prior approaches to synthesis use few-shot prompting, which relies on the LLM's parametric knowledge to generate usable examples. However, this leads to issues of repetition, bias towards popular entities, and stylistic differences from human text. In this work, we propose Synthesize by Retrieval and Refinement (SynthesizRR), which uses retrieval augmentation to introduce variety into the dataset synthesis process: as retrieved passages vary, the LLM is "seeded" with different content to generate its examples. We empirically study the synthesis of six datasets, covering topic classification, sentiment analysis, tone detection, and humor, requiring complex synthesis strategies. We find SynthesizRR greatly improves lexical and semantic diversity, similarity to human-written text, and distillation performance, when compared to standard 32-shot prompting and six baseline approaches.

Experimental studies of generative AI in education mostly report average effects, yet field evidence shows that AI can narrow attainment gaps or widen them. We argue that the direction depends on the judgement burden, the expertise a learner must supply to screen AI output before learning from it, and that expert verification before release moves this burden from students to an accountable tutor. We test the argument in a two-cohort difference-in-differences design in which one half of a compulsory firstyear university economics course received AI-generated podcasts, FAQs and quiz-based study guides, produced with a source-grounded model and checked by a named graduate teaching assistant (170 students; 340 examination marks). Access was associated with a 2.34-mark advantage on a 50-mark component. The share of marks below the upper-second classification boundary fell by 24.7 percentage points relative to the counterfactual, effects were significant at every threshold from 23 to 31 marks and at none above, and roughly three-quarters of the average originated in the bottom quintile. The threshold estimate is robust to removing the lowest-scoring students from the pre-intervention cohort; the average effect is not. Interviews and feedback from 36 students indicate that the verification label gave students a reason to engage with AI-generated material without ending their scrutiny of it. Evaluations of AI learning resources that report only mean effects cannot detect whether the students the resources are meant to help are the ones who gain.

Mathematics is often perceived as a complex subject by students, leading to high failure rates in exams. To improve Mathematics skills, it is important to provide sample questions for students to practice problem-solving. Manually creating Math Word Problems (MWPs) is time consuming for tutors, because they have to type in natural language while adhering to grammar and spelling rules of the language. Existing Deep Learning techniques for MWP generation either require a tutor to provide the initial portion of the MWP, and/or additional information such as an equation. In this paper, we present an MWP generation system based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that overcome the need for additional input - the only input to our system is the number of MWPs needed, the grade and the type of question (e.g. addition, subtraction). Unlike the existing LLM-based solutions for MWP generation, we carried out an extensive set of experiments involving different LLMs, prompting strategies, techniques to improve the diversity of questions, as well as techniques that employ human feedback to improve LLM performance. Human and automated evaluations confirmed that the generated MWPs are high in quality, with minimal spelling and grammar issues. However, LLMs still struggle to generate questions that adhere to the specified grade and question type requirements.

We introduce a large scale MAchine Reading COmprehension dataset, which we name MS MARCO. The dataset comprises of 1,010,916 anonymized questions---sampled from Bing's search query logs---each with a human generated answer and 182,669 completely human rewritten generated answers. In addition, the dataset contains 8,841,823 passages---extracted from 3,563,535 web documents retrieved by Bing---that provide the information necessary for curating the natural language answers. A question in the MS MARCO dataset may have multiple answers or no answers at all. Using this dataset, we propose three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (i) predict if a question is answerable given a set of context passages, and extract and synthesize the answer as a human would (ii) generate a well-formed answer (if possible) based on the context passages that can be understood with the question and passage context, and finally (iii) rank a set of retrieved passages given a question. The size of the dataset and the fact that the questions are derived from real user search queries distinguishes MS MARCO from other well-known publicly available datasets for machine reading comprehension and question-answering. We believe that the scale and the real-world nature of this dataset makes it attractive for benchmarking machine reading comprehension and question-answering models.

A recent focus of large language model (LLM) development, as exemplified by generative search engines, is to incorporate external references to generate and support their claims. However, evaluating the attribution, i.e., verifying whether the generated statement is indeed fully supported by the cited reference, remains an open problem. Although human evaluation is common practice, it is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we investigate the automatic evaluation of attribution by LLMs. We begin by providing a definition of attribution and then explore two approaches for automatic evaluation: prompting LLMs and fine-tuning smaller LMs. The fine-tuning data is repurposed from related tasks, such as question answering, fact-checking, natural language inference, and summarization. To facilitate the evaluation, we manually curate a set of test examples covering 12 domains from a generative search engine, New Bing. Our results on the curated test set and simulated test examples from existing benchmark questions highlight both promising signals as well as remaining challenges for the automatic evaluation of attribution. We hope our testbed, modeling methodology, and insights will help lay the foundation for future studies on this important problem.

Large language models (LLMs) are aligned with human preferences by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Effective data sampling is crucial for RLHF, as it determines the efficiency of model training, ensuring that models learn from the informative samples. To achieve better data generation, we propose a new sampling method called Preference-Guided Reflective Sampling (PRS). PRS frames the response generation as an optimization process to the explicitly specified user preference described in natural language. It employs a tree-based generation framework to enable an efficient sampling process, which guides the direction of generation through preference and better explores the sampling space with adaptive self-refinement. Notably, PRS can align LLMs to diverse preferences. We study preference-controlled text generation for instruction following and keyword-focused document summarization. Our findings indicate that PRS, across different LLM policies, generates training data with much higher rewards than strong baselines. PRS also excels in post-RL training.

Pretrained language models have shown superior performance on many natural language processing tasks, yet they still struggle at multi-step formal reasoning tasks like grade school math problems. One key challenge of finetuning them to solve such math reasoning problems is that many existing datasets only contain one reference solution for each problem, despite the fact that there are often alternative solutions resembling different reasoning paths to the final answer. This way, the finetuned models are biased towards the limited reference solutions, which limits their generalization to unseen examples. To mitigate this issue, we propose to let the model perform sampling during training and learn from both self-sampled fully-correct solutions, which yield the correct answer upon execution, and partially-correct solutions, whose intermediate state matches an intermediate state of a known correct solution. We show that our use of self-sampled correct and partially-correct solutions can benefit learning and help guide the sampling process, leading to more efficient exploration of the solution space. Additionally, we explore various training objectives to support learning from multiple solutions per example and find they greatly affect the performance. Experiments on two math reasoning datasets show the effectiveness of our method compared to learning from a single reference solution with MLE, where we improve PASS@100 from 35.5% to 44.5% for GSM8K, and 27.6% to 36.2% PASS@80 for MathQA. Such improvements are also consistent across different model sizes. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/TraceCodegen.

In subject-driven text-to-image generation, recent works have achieved superior performance by training the model on synthetic datasets containing numerous image pairs. Trained on these datasets, generative models can produce text-aligned images for specific subject from arbitrary testing image in a zero-shot manner. They even outperform methods which require additional fine-tuning on testing images. However, the cost of creating such datasets is prohibitive for most researchers. To generate a single training pair, current methods fine-tune a pre-trained text-to-image model on the subject image to capture fine-grained details, then use the fine-tuned model to create images for the same subject based on creative text prompts. Consequently, constructing a large-scale dataset with millions of subjects can require hundreds of thousands of GPU hours. To tackle this problem, we propose Toffee, an efficient method to construct datasets for subject-driven editing and generation. Specifically, our dataset construction does not need any subject-level fine-tuning. After pre-training two generative models, we are able to generate infinite number of high-quality samples. We construct the first large-scale dataset for subject-driven image editing and generation, which contains 5 million image pairs, text prompts, and masks. Our dataset is 5 times the size of previous largest dataset, yet our cost is tens of thousands of GPU hours lower. To test the proposed dataset, we also propose a model which is capable of both subject-driven image editing and generation. By simply training the model on our proposed dataset, it obtains competitive results, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed dataset construction framework.

Recent work has shown that distilling reasoning traces from a larger teacher model via supervised finetuning outperforms reinforcement learning with the smaller student model alone (Guo et al. 2025). However, there has not been a systematic study of what kind of reasoning demonstrations from the teacher are most effective in improving the student model's reasoning capabilities. In this work we curate high-quality "NaturalThoughts" by selecting reasoning traces from a strong teacher model based on a large pool of questions from NaturalReasoning (Yuan et al. 2025). We first conduct a systematic analysis of factors that affect distilling reasoning capabilities, in terms of sample efficiency and scalability for general reasoning tasks. We observe that simply scaling up data size with random sampling is a strong baseline with steady performance gains. Further, we find that selecting difficult examples that require more diverse reasoning strategies is more sample-efficient to transfer the teacher model's reasoning skills. Evaluated on both Llama and Qwen models, training with NaturalThoughts outperforms existing reasoning datasets such as OpenThoughts, LIMO, etc. on general STEM reasoning benchmarks including GPQA-Diamond, MMLU-Pro and SuperGPQA.

Exploiting the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, showcased by ChatGPT and DALL-E, in real-world applications necessitates vast, domain-specific, and publicly accessible datasets. Unfortunately, the scarcity of such datasets poses a significant challenge for researchers aiming to apply these breakthroughs in engineering design. Synthetic datasets emerge as a viable alternative. However, practitioners are often uncertain about generating high-quality datasets that accurately represent real-world data and are suitable for the intended downstream applications. This study aims to fill this knowledge gap by proposing comprehensive guidelines for generating, annotating, and validating synthetic datasets. The trade-offs and methods associated with each of these aspects are elaborated upon. Further, the practical implications of these guidelines are illustrated through the creation of a turbo-compressors dataset. The study underscores the importance of thoughtful sampling methods to ensure the appropriate size, diversity, utility, and realism of a dataset. It also highlights that design diversity does not equate to performance diversity or realism. By employing test sets that represent uniform, real, or task-specific samples, the influence of sample size and sampling strategy is scrutinized. Overall, this paper offers valuable insights for researchers intending to create and publish synthetic datasets for engineering design, thereby paving the way for more effective applications of AI advancements in the field. The code and data for the dataset and methods are made publicly accessible at https://github.com/cyrilpic/radcomp .

The promise of generative AI to revolutionize education is constrained by the pedagogical limits of large language models (LLMs). A major issue is the lack of access to high-quality training data that reflect the learning of actual students. Prompt engineering has emerged as a stopgap, but the ability of prompts to encode complex pedagogical strategies in rule-based natural language is inherently limited. To address this gap we introduce TeachLM - an LLM optimized for teaching through parameter-efficient fine-tuning of state-of-the-art models. TeachLM is trained on a dataset comprised of 100,000 hours of one-on-one, longitudinal student-tutor interactions maintained by Polygence, which underwent a rigorous anonymization process to protect privacy. We use parameter-efficient fine-tuning to develop an authentic student model that enables the generation of high-fidelity synthetic student-tutor dialogues. Building on this capability, we propose a novel multi-turn evaluation protocol that leverages synthetic dialogue generation to provide fast, scalable, and reproducible assessments of the dialogical capabilities of LLMs. Our evaluations demonstrate that fine-tuning on authentic learning data significantly improves conversational and pedagogical performance - doubling student talk time, improving questioning style, increasing dialogue turns by 50%, and greater personalization of instruction.

The task of annotating data into concise summaries poses a significant challenge across various domains, frequently requiring the allocation of significant time and specialized knowledge by human experts. Despite existing efforts to use large language models for annotation tasks, significant problems such as limited applicability to unlabeled data, the absence of self-supervised methods, and the lack of focus on complex structured data still persist. In this work, we propose a GPT self-supervision annotation method, which embodies a generating-recovering paradigm that leverages the one-shot learning capabilities of the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT). The proposed approach comprises a one-shot tuning phase followed by a generation phase. In the one-shot tuning phase, we sample a data from the support set as part of the prompt for GPT to generate a textual summary, which is then used to recover the original data. The alignment score between the recovered and original data serves as a self-supervision navigator to refine the process. In the generation stage, the optimally selected one-shot sample serves as a template in the prompt and is applied to generating summaries from challenging datasets. The annotation performance is evaluated by tuning several human feedback reward networks and by calculating alignment scores between original and recovered data at both sentence and structure levels. Our self-supervised annotation method consistently achieves competitive scores, convincingly demonstrating its robust strength in various data-to-summary annotation tasks.

Mapping sequences of discrete data to a point in a continuous space makes it difficult to retrieve those sequences via random sampling. Mapping the input to a volume would make it easier to retrieve at test time, and that's the strategy followed by the family of approaches based on Variational Autoencoder. However the fact that they are at the same time optimizing for prediction and for smoothness of representation, forces them to trade-off between the two. We improve on the performance of some of the standard methods in deep learning to generate sentences by uniformly sampling a continuous space. We do it by proposing AriEL, that constructs volumes in a continuous space, without the need of encouraging the creation of volumes through the loss function. We first benchmark on a toy grammar, that allows to automatically evaluate the language learned and generated by the models. Then, we benchmark on a real dataset of human dialogues. Our results indicate that the random access to the stored information is dramatically improved, and our method AriEL is able to generate a wider variety of correct language by randomly sampling the latent space. VAE follows in performance for the toy dataset while, AE and Transformer follow for the real dataset. This partially supports to the hypothesis that encoding information into volumes instead of into points, can lead to improved retrieval of learned information with random sampling. This can lead to better generators and we also discuss potential disadvantages.

Survey paper plays a crucial role in scientific research, especially given the rapid growth of research publications. Recently, researchers have begun using LLMs to automate survey generation for better efficiency. However, the quality gap between LLM-generated surveys and those written by human remains significant, particularly in terms of outline quality and citation accuracy. To close these gaps, we introduce SurveyForge, which first generates the outline by analyzing the logical structure of human-written outlines and referring to the retrieved domain-related articles. Subsequently, leveraging high-quality papers retrieved from memory by our scholar navigation agent, SurveyForge can automatically generate and refine the content of the generated article. Moreover, to achieve a comprehensive evaluation, we construct SurveyBench, which includes 100 human-written survey papers for win-rate comparison and assesses AI-generated survey papers across three dimensions: reference, outline, and content quality. Experiments demonstrate that SurveyForge can outperform previous works such as AutoSurvey.

Solving tabular math word problems (TMWPs) has become a critical role in evaluating the mathematical reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), where large-scale TMWP samples are commonly required for LLM fine-tuning. Since the collection of high-quality TMWP datasets is costly and time-consuming, recent research has concentrated on automatic TMWP generation. However, current generated samples usually suffer from issues of either correctness or diversity. In this paper, we propose a Template-driven LLM-paraphrased (TeLL) framework for generating high-quality TMWP samples with diverse backgrounds and accurate tables, questions, answers, and solutions. To this end, we first extract templates from existing real samples to generate initial problems, ensuring correctness. Then, we adopt an LLM to extend templates and paraphrase problems, obtaining diverse TMWP samples. Furthermore, we find the reasoning annotation is important for solving TMWPs. Therefore, we propose to enrich each solution with illustrative reasoning steps. Through the proposed framework, we construct a high-quality dataset TabMWP-TeLL by adhering to the question types in the TabMWP dataset, and we conduct extensive experiments on a variety of LLMs to demonstrate the effectiveness of TabMWP-TeLL in improving TMWP solving performance. The code and data of this paper are available at: https://github.com/Jason8Kang/TELL.

Recently, reading comprehension models achieved near-human performance on large-scale datasets such as SQuAD, CoQA, MS Macro, RACE, etc. This is largely due to the release of pre-trained contextualized representations such as BERT and ELMo, which can be fine-tuned for the target task. Despite those advances and the creation of more challenging datasets, most of the work is still done for English. Here, we study the effectiveness of multilingual BERT fine-tuned on large-scale English datasets for reading comprehension (e.g., for RACE), and we apply it to Bulgarian multiple-choice reading comprehension. We propose a new dataset containing 2,221 questions from matriculation exams for twelfth grade in various subjects -history, biology, geography and philosophy-, and 412 additional questions from online quizzes in history. While the quiz authors gave no relevant context, we incorporate knowledge from Wikipedia, retrieving documents matching the combination of question + each answer option. Moreover, we experiment with different indexing and pre-training strategies. The evaluation results show accuracy of 42.23%, which is well above the baseline of 24.89%.

Repeated Sampling (RS) is a simple inference-time algorithm that has been shown to improve model performance on complex tasks. Although it is an effective way of scaling inference time, it often struggles to generate diverse solution candidates, frequently relying on the same underlying approach to solve the problem and thus producing redundant samples. To address this limitation, we propose a new inference algorithm, GuidedSampling, which decouples the exploration and generation phases during inference, increasing diversity of generated candidate solutions. The exploration phase identifies multiple concepts that can be utilized to solve the problem, while the generation phase applies a specific concept to provide final solution candidates. We first define the theoretical bounds of GuidedSampling and then empirically demonstrate that it improves the performance of base model at pass@50 by on an average ~21.6% across various benchmarks compared to RS. Furthermore, models trained on trajectories of GuidedSampling exhibit substantial performance improvements at pass@5 by on an average ~9.7%, compared to models trained on traditional RS. Additionally, models trained with GuidedSampling increases the average number of concepts per instance (1.67 -> 3.03), yielding a diverse set of candidates than traditional RS.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with capabilities like In-Context Learning (ICL) has ushered in new possibilities for data generation across various domains while minimizing the need for extensive data collection and modeling techniques. Researchers have explored ways to use this generated synthetic data to optimize smaller student models for reduced deployment costs and lower latency in downstream tasks. However, ICL-generated data often suffers from low quality as the task specificity is limited with few examples used in ICL. In this paper, we propose GeMQuAD - a semi-supervised learning approach, extending the WeakDAP framework, applied to a dataset generated through ICL with just one example in the target language using AlexaTM 20B Seq2Seq LLM. Through our approach, we iteratively identify high-quality data to enhance model performance, especially for low-resource multilingual setting in the context of Extractive Question Answering task. Our framework outperforms the machine translation-augmented model by 0.22/1.68 F1/EM (Exact Match) points for Hindi and 0.82/1.37 F1/EM points for Spanish on the MLQA dataset, and it surpasses the performance of model trained on an English-only dataset by 5.05/6.50 F1/EM points for Hindi and 3.81/3.69 points F1/EM for Spanish on the same dataset. Notably, our approach uses a pre-trained LLM for generation with no fine-tuning (FT), utilizing just a single annotated example in ICL to generate data, providing a cost-effective development process.

A recent line of synthetic-data work reconstructs the thinking behind existing text rather than rewriting the text itself, but it operates on short web passages, recovers only local thoughts, and leaves the structure of whole documents untouched. Scientific papers are written to a clear and largely uniform structure and make a natural substrate for lifting this paradigm to the document level. We present a pipeline that unfolds each paper into a multi-turn generation trajectory in which a teacher model reconstructs the writing process of the whole paper: a writing request, a global plan, and pre-writing deliberation for each section. All section texts and the abstract are kept verbatim from the source paper. We apply the pipeline to 1.8M quality-filtered arXiv papers and obtain a 60B-token corpus for continued pre-training (CPT) that is roughly twice the source text. The same reverse construction extends to instruction data and evaluation. We build an SFT dataset of 200K samples using answers derived from paper text. We also use held-out papers to construct PAW-Bench, a benchmark of 2,940 academic writing tasks with per-task rubrics and checklists. In controlled experiments, CPT on our corpus followed by SFT on public datasets improves writing performance while preserving general reasoning and improving long document reading. Replacing part of the writing SFT data with our synthetic instruction data further improves performance on PAW-Bench.

This work presents Fair4Free, a novel generative model to generate synthetic fair data using data-free distillation in the latent space. Fair4Free can work on the situation when the data is private or inaccessible. In our approach, we first train a teacher model to create fair representation and then distil the knowledge to a student model (using a smaller architecture). The process of distilling the student model is data-free, i.e. the student model does not have access to the training dataset while distilling. After the distillation, we use the distilled model to generate fair synthetic samples. Our extensive experiments show that our synthetic samples outperform state-of-the-art models in all three criteria (fairness, utility and synthetic quality) with a performance increase of 5% for fairness, 8% for utility and 12% in synthetic quality for both tabular and image datasets.

This is the fifth year of the TREC Deep Learning track. As in previous years, we leverage the MS MARCO datasets that made hundreds of thousands of human-annotated training labels available for both passage and document ranking tasks. We mostly repeated last year's design, to get another matching test set, based on the larger, cleaner, less-biased v2 passage and document set, with passage ranking as primary and document ranking as a secondary task (using labels inferred from passage). As we did last year, we sample from MS MARCO queries that were completely held out, unused in corpus construction, unlike the test queries in the first three years. This approach yields a more difficult test with more headroom for improvement. Alongside the usual MS MARCO (human) queries from MS MARCO, this year we generated synthetic queries using a fine-tuned T5 model and using a GPT-4 prompt. The new headline result this year is that runs using Large Language Model (LLM) prompting in some way outperformed runs that use the "nnlm" approach, which was the best approach in the previous four years. Since this is the last year of the track, future iterations of prompt-based ranking can happen in other tracks. Human relevance assessments were applied to all query types, not just human MS MARCO queries. Evaluation using synthetic queries gave similar results to human queries, with system ordering agreement of τ=0.8487. However, human effort was needed to select a subset of the synthetic queries that were usable. We did not see clear evidence of bias, where runs using GPT-4 were favored when evaluated using synthetic GPT-4 queries, or where runs using T5 were favored when evaluated on synthetic T5 queries.

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. However, there are many analytic choices which must be made to produce these samples. Though many of these choices are defensible, their impact on sample quality is poorly understood. I map out these analytic choices and demonstrate how a very small number of decisions can dramatically change the correspondence between silicon samples and human data. Configurations (N = 252) varied substantially in their capacity to estimate (i) rank ordering of participants, (ii) response distributions, and (iii) between-scale correlations. Most critically, configurations were not consistent in quality: those that performed well on one dimension often performed poorly on another, implying that there is no "one-size-fits-all" configuration that optimises the accuracy of these samples. I call for greater attention to the threat of analytic flexibility in using silicon samples.

Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires models to answer questions about an image by integrating external knowledge, posing significant challenges due to noisy retrieval and the structured, encyclopedic nature of the knowledge base. These characteristics create a distributional gap from pretrained multimodal large language models (MLLMs), making effective reasoning and domain adaptation difficult in the post-training stage. In this work, we propose Wiki-R1, a data-generation-based curriculum reinforcement learning framework that systematically incentivizes reasoning in MLLMs for KB-VQA. Wiki-R1 constructs a sequence of training distributions aligned with the model's evolving capability, bridging the gap from pretraining to the KB-VQA target distribution. We introduce controllable curriculum data generation, which manipulates the retriever to produce samples at desired difficulty levels, and a curriculum sampling strategy that selects informative samples likely to yield non-zero advantages during RL updates. Sample difficulty is estimated using observed rewards and propagated to unobserved samples to guide learning. Experiments on two KB-VQA benchmarks, Encyclopedic VQA and InfoSeek, demonstrate that Wiki-R1 achieves new state-of-the-art results, improving accuracy from 35.5\% to 37.1\% on Encyclopedic VQA and from 40.1\% to 44.1\% on InfoSeek. The project page is available at https://artanic30.github.io/project_pages/WikiR1/.

High-quality conversational datasets are integral to the successful development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that employ a Large Language Model (LLM) backend. These datasets, when used to fine-tune the LLM backend, significantly enhance the quality of interactions between students and ITS. A common strategy for developing these datasets involves generating synthetic student-teacher dialogues using advanced GPT-4 models. However, challenges arise when these dialogues demand complex calculations, common in subjects like physics. Despite its advanced capabilities, GPT-4's performance falls short in reliably handling even simple multiplication tasks, marking a significant limitation in its utility for these subjects. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an innovative stateful prompt design. Our approach generates a mock conversation between a student and a tutorbot, both roles simulated by GPT-4. Each student response triggers a soliloquy (an inner monologue) in the GPT-tutorbot, which assesses whether its response would necessitate calculations. If so, it proceeds to script the required code in Python and then uses the resulting output to construct its response to the student. Our approach notably enhances the quality of synthetic conversation datasets, especially for subjects that are calculation-intensive. Our findings show that our Higgs model -- a LLaMA finetuned with datasets generated through our novel stateful prompt design -- proficiently utilizes Python for computations. Consequently, finetuning with our datasets enriched with code soliloquies enhances not just the accuracy but also the computational reliability of Higgs' responses.

The rapid progress in generative models has resulted in impressive leaps in generation quality, blurring the lines between synthetic and real data. Web-scale datasets are now prone to the inevitable contamination by synthetic data, directly impacting the training of future generated models. Already, some theoretical results on self-consuming generative models (a.k.a., iterative retraining) have emerged in the literature, showcasing that either model collapse or stability could be possible depending on the fraction of generated data used at each retraining step. However, in practice, synthetic data is often subject to human feedback and curated by users before being used and uploaded online. For instance, many interfaces of popular text-to-image generative models, such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, produce several variations of an image for a given query which can eventually be curated by the users. In this paper, we theoretically study the impact of data curation on iterated retraining of generative models and show that it can be seen as an implicit preference optimization mechanism. However, unlike standard preference optimization, the generative model does not have access to the reward function or negative samples needed for pairwise comparisons. Moreover, our study doesn't require access to the density function, only to samples. We prove that, if the data is curated according to a reward model, then the expected reward of the iterative retraining procedure is maximized. We further provide theoretical results on the stability of the retraining loop when using a positive fraction of real data at each step. Finally, we conduct illustrative experiments on both synthetic datasets and on CIFAR10 showing that such a procedure amplifies biases of the reward model.

LLMs demonstrate remarkable capabilities in following natural language instructions, largely due to instruction-tuning on high-quality datasets. While synthetic data generation has emerged as a scalable approach for creating such datasets, maintaining consistent quality standards remains challenging. Recent approaches incorporate feedback to improve data quality, but typically operate at the sample level, generating and applying feedback for each response individually. In this work, we propose Reference-Level Feedback, a novel methodology that instead collects feedback based on high-quality reference samples from carefully curated seed data. We use this feedback to capture rich signals of desirable characteristics and propagate it throughout the data synthesis process. We present REFED, a dataset of 10K instruction-response pairs synthesized using such feedback. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by showing that Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct finetuned on REFED achieves state-of-the-art performance among similar-sized SFT-based models on AlpacaEval 2.0 and strong results on Arena-Hard. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach consistently outperforms traditional sample-level feedback methods with significantly fewer feedback collections and improves performance across different model architectures.

Reading is integral to everyday life, and yet learning to read is a struggle for many young learners. During lessons, teachers can use comprehension questions to increase engagement, test reading skills, and improve retention. Historically such questions were written by skilled teachers, but recently language models have been used to generate comprehension questions. However, many existing Question Generation (QG) systems focus on generating literal questions from the text, and have no way to control the type of the generated question. In this paper, we study QG for reading comprehension where inferential questions are critical and extractive techniques cannot be used. We propose a two-step model (HTA-WTA) that takes advantage of previous datasets, and can generate questions for a specific targeted comprehension skill. We propose a new reading comprehension dataset that contains questions annotated with story-based reading comprehension skills (SBRCS), allowing for a more complete reader assessment. Across several experiments, our results show that HTA-WTA outperforms multiple strong baselines on this new dataset. We show that the HTA-WTA model tests for strong SCRS by asking deep inferential questions.

Much recent research on information retrieval has focused on how to transfer from one task (typically with abundant supervised data) to various other tasks where supervision is limited, with the implicit assumption that it is possible to generalize from one task to all the rest. However, this overlooks the fact that there are many diverse and unique retrieval tasks, each targeting different search intents, queries, and search domains. In this paper, we suggest to work on Few-shot Dense Retrieval, a setting where each task comes with a short description and a few examples. To amplify the power of a few examples, we propose Prompt-base Query Generation for Retriever (Promptagator), which leverages large language models (LLM) as a few-shot query generator, and creates task-specific retrievers based on the generated data. Powered by LLM's generalization ability, Promptagator makes it possible to create task-specific end-to-end retrievers solely based on a few examples {without} using Natural Questions or MS MARCO to train %question generators or dual encoders. Surprisingly, LLM prompting with no more than 8 examples allows dual encoders to outperform heavily engineered models trained on MS MARCO like ColBERT v2 by more than 1.2 nDCG on average on 11 retrieval sets. Further training standard-size re-rankers using the same generated data yields another 5.0 point nDCG improvement. Our studies determine that query generation can be far more effective than previously observed, especially when a small amount of task-specific knowledge is given.

Recent advances in text-to-image synthesis largely benefit from sophisticated sampling strategies and classifier-free guidance (CFG) to ensure high-quality generation. However, CFG's reliance on two forward passes, especially when combined with intricate sampling algorithms, results in prohibitively high inference costs. To address this, we introduce TeEFusion (Text Embeddings Fusion), a novel and efficient distillation method that directly incorporates the guidance magnitude into the text embeddings and distills the teacher model's complex sampling strategy. By simply fusing conditional and unconditional text embeddings using linear operations, TeEFusion reconstructs the desired guidance without adding extra parameters, simultaneously enabling the student model to learn from the teacher's output produced via its sophisticated sampling approach. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models such as SD3 demonstrate that our method allows the student to closely mimic the teacher's performance with a far simpler and more efficient sampling strategy. Consequently, the student model achieves inference speeds up to 6times faster than the teacher model, while maintaining image quality at levels comparable to those obtained through the teacher's complex sampling approach. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/TeEFusion{github.com/AIDC-AI/TeEFusion}.

Developing questions that are pedagogically sound, relevant, and promote learning is a challenging and time-consuming task for educators. Modern-day large language models (LLMs) generate high-quality content across multiple domains, potentially helping educators to develop high-quality questions. Automated educational question generation (AEQG) is important in scaling online education catering to a diverse student population. Past attempts at AEQG have shown limited abilities to generate questions at higher cognitive levels. In this study, we examine the ability of five state-of-the-art LLMs of different sizes to generate diverse and high-quality questions of different cognitive levels, as defined by Bloom's taxonomy. We use advanced prompting techniques with varying complexity for AEQG. We conducted expert and LLM-based evaluations to assess the linguistic and pedagogical relevance and quality of the questions. Our findings suggest that LLms can generate relevant and high-quality educational questions of different cognitive levels when prompted with adequate information, although there is a significant variance in the performance of the five LLms considered. We also show that automated evaluation is not on par with human evaluation.

We present GSM-MC, a multiple-choice (MC) dataset constructed by collecting answers and incorrect predictions on GSM8K from 60 open-source models. Through extensive experiments, we show that LLMs' performance on the MC version of this popular benchmark is strongly correlated with their performance on the original version and is quite robust to distractor choices and option orders, while the evaluation time is reduced by a factor of up to 30. Following similar procedures, we introduce MATH-MC, constructed from MATH, and PythonIO, a new program reasoning MC dataset constructed from HumanEval and MBPP. Experimental results indicate that LLMs' performance on these MC benchmarks leaves much room for improvement. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Geralt-Targaryen/MC-Evaluation.

Large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to scale high-quality personalized education to all. A promising approach towards this means is to build dialog tutoring models that scaffold students' problem-solving. However, even though existing LLMs perform well in solving reasoning questions, they struggle to precisely detect student's errors and tailor their feedback to these errors. Inspired by real-world teaching practice where teachers identify student errors and customize their response based on them, we focus on verifying student solutions and show how grounding to such verification improves the overall quality of tutor response generation. We collect a dataset of 1K stepwise math reasoning chains with the first error step annotated by teachers. We show empirically that finding the mistake in a student solution is challenging for current models. We propose and evaluate several verifiers for detecting these errors. Using both automatic and human evaluation we show that the student solution verifiers steer the generation model towards highly targeted responses to student errors which are more often correct with less hallucinations compared to existing baselines.

Generative models (e.g., GANs, diffusion models) learn the underlying data distribution in an unsupervised manner. However, many applications of interest require sampling from a particular region of the output space or sampling evenly over a range of characteristics. For efficient sampling in these scenarios, we propose Generative Visual Prompt (PromptGen), a framework for distributional control over pre-trained generative models by incorporating knowledge of other off-the-shelf models. PromptGen defines control as energy-based models (EBMs) and samples images in a feed-forward manner by approximating the EBM with invertible neural networks, avoiding optimization at inference. Our experiments demonstrate how PromptGen can efficiently sample from several unconditional generative models (e.g., StyleGAN2, StyleNeRF, diffusion autoencoder, NVAE) in a controlled or/and de-biased manner using various off-the-shelf models: (1) with the CLIP model as control, PromptGen can sample images guided by text, (2) with image classifiers as control, PromptGen can de-bias generative models across a set of attributes or attribute combinations, and (3) with inverse graphics models as control, PromptGen can sample images of the same identity in different poses. (4) Finally, PromptGen reveals that the CLIP model shows a "reporting bias" when used as control, and PromptGen can further de-bias this controlled distribution in an iterative manner. The code is available at https://github.com/ChenWu98/Generative-Visual-Prompt.

Building high-quality datasets for specialized tasks is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process that often requires specialized domain knowledge. We propose Corpus Retrieval and Augmentation for Fine-Tuning (CRAFT), a method for generating synthetic datasets, given a small number of user-written few-shots that demonstrate the task to be performed. Given the few-shot examples, we use large-scale public web-crawled corpora and similarity-based document retrieval to find other relevant human-written documents. Lastly, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) augment the retrieved documents into custom-formatted task samples, which then can be used for fine-tuning. We demonstrate that CRAFT can efficiently generate large-scale task-specific training datasets for four diverse tasks: biology question-answering (QA), medicine QA and commonsense QA as well as summarization. Our experiments show that CRAFT-based models outperform or achieve comparable performance to general LLMs for QA tasks, while CRAFT-based summarization models outperform models trained on human-curated data by 46 preference points.

We present ToTTo, an open-domain English table-to-text dataset with over 120,000 training examples that proposes a controlled generation task: given a Wikipedia table and a set of highlighted table cells, produce a one-sentence description. To obtain generated targets that are natural but also faithful to the source table, we introduce a dataset construction process where annotators directly revise existing candidate sentences from Wikipedia. We present systematic analyses of our dataset and annotation process as well as results achieved by several state-of-the-art baselines. While usually fluent, existing methods often hallucinate phrases that are not supported by the table, suggesting that this dataset can serve as a useful research benchmark for high-precision conditional text generation.

Large language models increasingly tackle hard reasoning problems by spending more test-time compute, yet the dominant strategy remains naive repeated sampling: draw many independent solutions and hope one is correct. Because such sampling explores only through local decoding noise, it tends to produce many near duplicate attempts rather than genuinely different ideas. We ask whether exploration can instead be steered at a semantic level, by first sampling problem specific concepts, hints, or strategies and then conditioning answer generation on them. We refine this into a simple, more exploratory procedure that emits many diverse concepts in a single trajectory, and evaluate it on hard problems where repeated sampling struggles. We then go a step further and make concept generation trainable: a small concept generator is optimized with reinforcement learning so that its concepts maximize the downstream success of a larger, frozen answer generator. On hard mathematical reasoning problems, the trained concept generator substantially improves the answer generator's pass@k over naive repeated sampling at the same answer generation allocation, surpasses concepts drawn from much larger untuned models, and transfers to answer generators it was never trained against, including a model from a different family. A small model can thus be trained into an effective, reusable search policy for a much larger one.

GenAI Units In Digital Design Education (GUIDE) is an open courseware repository with runnable Google Colab labs and other materials. We describe the repository's architecture and educational approach based on standardized teaching units comprising slides, short videos, runnable labs, and related papers. This organization enables consistency for both the students' learning experience and the reuse and grading by instructors. We demonstrate GUIDE in practice with three representative units: VeriThoughts for reasoning and formal-verification-backed RTL generation, enhanced LLM-aided testbench generation, and LLMPirate for IP Piracy. We also provide details for four example course instances (GUIDE4ChipDesign, Build your ASIC, GUIDE4HardwareSecurity, and Hardware Design) that assemble GUIDE units into full semester offerings, learning outcomes, and capstone projects, all based on proven materials. For example, the GUIDE4HardwareSecurity course includes a project on LLM-aided hardware Trojan insertion that has been successfully deployed in the classroom and in Cybersecurity Games and Conference (CSAW), a student competition and academic conference for cybersecurity. We also organized an NYU Cognichip Hackathon, engaging students across 24 international teams in AI-assisted RTL design workflows. The GUIDE repository is open for contributions and available at: https://github.com/FCHXWH823/LLM4ChipDesign.

We present RACE, a new dataset for benchmark evaluation of methods in the reading comprehension task. Collected from the English exams for middle and high school Chinese students in the age range between 12 to 18, RACE consists of near 28,000 passages and near 100,000 questions generated by human experts (English instructors), and covers a variety of topics which are carefully designed for evaluating the students' ability in understanding and reasoning. In particular, the proportion of questions that requires reasoning is much larger in RACE than that in other benchmark datasets for reading comprehension, and there is a significant gap between the performance of the state-of-the-art models (43%) and the ceiling human performance (95%). We hope this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in machine comprehension. The dataset is freely available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~glai1/data/race/ and the code is available at https://github.com/qizhex/RACE_AR_baselines.

This paper introduces the MERIT Dataset, a multimodal (text + image + layout) fully labeled dataset within the context of school reports. Comprising over 400 labels and 33k samples, the MERIT Dataset is a valuable resource for training models in demanding Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU) tasks. By its nature (student grade reports), the MERIT Dataset can potentially include biases in a controlled way, making it a valuable tool to benchmark biases induced in Language Models (LLMs). The paper outlines the dataset's generation pipeline and highlights its main features in the textual, visual, layout, and bias domains. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we present a benchmark with token classification models, showing that the dataset poses a significant challenge even for SOTA models and that these would greatly benefit from including samples from the MERIT Dataset in their pretraining phase.

With the rapid adoption of AI writing assistants in education, educators and researchers need empirical evidence to understand the impact on student writing and inform effective pedagogical design. Despite widespread use, we lack systematic understanding of how students engage with these tools during authentic writing tasks: when they seek assistance, what they ask, and how they incorporate AI-generated content into their essays. This gap limits evidence-based policy development and rigorous evaluation of generative AI's learning effects. To address this gap, we introduce NIRVANA, a dataset capturing how university students use generative AI while writing an analytical essay. The dataset includes 77 students who completed an essay task with access to ChatGPT, recording keystroke-level writing behavior, full ChatGPT conversation histories, and all text copied from ChatGPT, enabling a complete reconstruction of the writing process and revealing how AI assistance shapes student work. Our analysis identifies key behavioral patterns, including variation in ChatGPT query frequency and its relationship to essay characteristics such as length and readability. We identify four writing profiles based on students' contribution and revision patterns: Lead Authors, Collaborators, Drafters, and Vibe Writers. To support deeper investigation, we developed a replay interface that reconstructs the writing process; qualitative analysis of sampled replays demonstrates how this tool enables systematic examination of student-AI interactions.

The recent application of LLMs to the legal field has spurred the creation of benchmarks across various jurisdictions and languages. However, no benchmark has yet been specifically designed for the Portuguese legal system. In this work, we present LegalBench.PT, the first comprehensive legal benchmark covering key areas of Portuguese law. To develop LegalBench.PT, we first collect long-form questions and answers from real law exams, and then use GPT-4o to convert them into multiple-choice, true/false, and matching formats. Once generated, the questions are filtered and processed to improve the quality of the dataset. To ensure accuracy and relevance, we validate our approach by having a legal professional review a sample of the generated questions. Although the questions are synthetically generated, we show that their basis in human-created exams and our rigorous filtering and processing methods applied result in a reliable benchmark for assessing LLMs' legal knowledge and reasoning abilities. Finally, we evaluate the performance of leading LLMs on LegalBench.PT and investigate potential biases in GPT-4o's responses. We also assess the performance of Portuguese lawyers on a sample of questions to establish a baseline for model comparison and validate the benchmark.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is revolutionizing education and workforce development, profoundly shaping how students learn, engage, and prepare for their future. Outpacing the development of uniform policies and structures, GenAI has heralded a unique era and given rise to the GenAI Generation. We define the GenAI Generation as a cohort of students whose education has been increasingly shaped by the opportunities and challenges GenAI presents during its widespread adoption within society. This study examines students' perceptions of GenAI through a concise survey with optional open-ended questions, focusing on their awareness, preparedness, and concerns. Notably, readiness appears increasingly tied to exposure to GenAI through one's coursework. Students with greater curricular exposure to GenAI tend to feel more prepared, while those without it more often express vulnerability and uncertainty, highlighting a new and growing divide in readiness that goes beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. Evaluation of more than 250 responses, with over 40% providing detailed qualitative feedback, reveals a core dual sentiment: while most students express enthusiasm for GenAI, an even greater proportion voice a spectrum of concerns about ethics, job displacement, and the adequacy of educational structures given the highly transformative technology. These findings offer critical insights into how students view the potential and pitfalls of GenAI for future career impacts. The challenge ahead involves implementing associated recommendations for educational institutions, moving beyond the baseline of access toward more informed guidance on the use of these tools, while preserving critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and adaptive learning.

We introduce a new challenge to test the STEM skills of neural models. The problems in the real world often require solutions, combining knowledge from STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Unlike existing datasets, our dataset requires the understanding of multimodal vision-language information of STEM. Our dataset features one of the largest and most comprehensive datasets for the challenge. It includes 448 skills and 1,073,146 questions spanning all STEM subjects. Compared to existing datasets that often focus on examining expert-level ability, our dataset includes fundamental skills and questions designed based on the K-12 curriculum. We also add state-of-the-art foundation models such as CLIP and GPT-3.5-Turbo to our benchmark. Results show that the recent model advances only help master a very limited number of lower grade-level skills (2.5% in the third grade) in our dataset. In fact, these models are still well below (averaging 54.7%) the performance of elementary students, not to mention near expert-level performance. To understand and increase the performance on our dataset, we teach the models on a training split of our dataset. Even though we observe improved performance, the model performance remains relatively low compared to average elementary students. To solve STEM problems, we will need novel algorithmic innovations from the community.

As large language models continue to advance, their application in educational contexts remains underexplored and under-optimized. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing the first diverse benchmark tailored for educational scenarios, incorporating synthetic data containing 9 major scenarios and over 4,000 distinct educational contexts. To enable comprehensive assessment, we propose a set of multi-dimensional evaluation metrics that cover 12 critical aspects relevant to both teachers and students. We further apply human annotation to ensure the effectiveness of the model-generated evaluation responses. Additionally, we succeed to train a relatively small-scale model on our constructed dataset and demonstrate that it can achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art large models (e.g., Deepseek V3, Qwen Max) on the test set. Overall, this work provides a practical foundation for the development and evaluation of education-oriented language models. Code and data are released at https://github.com/ybai-nlp/EduBench.

We explore the automatic generation of interactive, scenario-based lessons designed to train novice human tutors who teach middle school mathematics online. Employing prompt engineering through a Retrieval-Augmented Generation approach with GPT-4o, we developed a system capable of creating structured tutor training lessons. Our study generated lessons in English for three key topics: Encouraging Students' Independence, Encouraging Help-Seeking Behavior, and Turning on Cameras, using a task decomposition prompting strategy that breaks lesson generation into sub-tasks. The generated lessons were evaluated by two human evaluators, who provided both quantitative and qualitative evaluations using a comprehensive rubric informed by lesson design research. Results demonstrate that the task decomposition strategy led to higher-rated lessons compared to single-step generation. Human evaluators identified several strengths in the LLM-generated lessons, including well-structured content and time-saving potential, while also noting limitations such as generic feedback and a lack of clarity in some instructional sections. These findings underscore the potential of hybrid human-AI approaches for generating effective lessons in tutor training.

The increasing adoption of econometric and machine-learning approaches by empirical researchers has led to a widespread use of one data collection method: web scraping. Web scraping refers to the use of automated computer programs to access websites and download their content. The key argument of this paper is that na\"ive web scraping procedures can lead to sampling bias in the collected data. This article describes three sources of sampling bias in web-scraped data. More specifically, sampling bias emerges from web content being volatile (i.e., being subject to change), personalized (i.e., presented in response to request characteristics), and unindexed (i.e., abundance of a population register). In a series of examples, I illustrate the prevalence and magnitude of sampling bias. To support researchers and reviewers, this paper provides recommendations on anticipating, detecting, and overcoming sampling bias in web-scraped data.

Artificial intelligence offers an unprecedented opportunity to augment human capabilities, yet progress at the frontier has focused primarily on advancing model capabilities. We introduce StudentBench, a suite of AI teaching evaluations and a public platform that enables large-scale data collection with over 175,000 student-AI messages to study whether large language models (LLMs) produce learning gains equivalent to human tutoring. Using StudentBench, we measured learning gains on Quantitative and Verbal GRE questions across 2,383 human participants receiving AI tutoring, human tutoring, or no tutoring. We establish that AI tutoring is statistically equivalent to expert human tutoring for GRE learning gains (p = .015), and in five of the seven GRE domains, the best performing AI tutor surpassed the human tutor, on average. In a second study, expert human tutors compared LLM-generated lesson plans and practice problems through 2,028 pairwise rubric evaluations. Together, the two studies clearly separate AI tutors across: (1) lesson planning, (2) practice-problem creation, (3) conversational pedagogy, (4) cost, and (5) engagement. Surprisingly, one AI tutor achieved learning gains equivalent to human tutoring (p = .044) at 918 times lower cost (USD 0.0052 for AI versus USD 4.81 for human, per percentage point gained). For Quantitative GRE sessions, faster AI replies correlated with more student messages, more messages with more correct practice, and more correct practice with larger learning gains (all p < .002). The StudentBench platform is freely available at https://studentbench.org.