United States

With the boom of digital educational materials and scalable e-learning systems, the potential for realising AI-assisted personalised learning has skyrocketed. In this landscape, the automatic generation of educational questions will play a key role, enabling scalable self-assessment when a global population is manoeuvring their personalised learning journeys. We develop EduQG, a novel educational question generation model built by adapting a large language model. Our initial experiments demonstrate that EduQG can produce superior educational questions by pre-training on scientific text.

AAAI 2023

Pre-training with Scientific Text Improves Educational Question Generation

educational question generation

domains of application

humans and ai

intelligent tutoring systems

ai in education

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

lightning talk

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

Applications such as employees sharing office spaces over
a workweek can be modeled as problems where agents are
matched to resources over multiple rounds. Agents’ require-
ments limit the set of compatible resources and the rounds in
which they want to be matched. Viewing such an application
as a multi-round matching problem on a bipartite compati-
bility graph between agents and resources, we show that a
solution can be found efficiently if one exists. To cope with
situations where a solution does not exist, we consider two
extensions. In the first extension, a benefit function is defined
for each agent and the objective is to find a solution to maxi-
mize the total benefit. For a general class of benefit functions
satisfying certain properties (including diminishing returns),
we show that this multi-round matching problem is efficiently
solvable. This class includes utilitarian and Rawlsian wel-
fare functions. For another benefit function, we show that the
maximization problem is NP-hard. In the second extension,
the objective is to generate advice to each agent (i.e., a subset
of requirements to be relaxed) subject to a budget constraint
so that the agent can be matched. We show that this budget-
constrained advice generation problem is NP-hard. For this
problem, we develop an integer linear programming formu-
lation as well as a heuristic based on local search. We exper-
imentally evaluate our algorithms on synthetic networks and
apply them to two real-world situations: shared office spaces
and matching courses to classrooms.

Resource Sharing Through Multi-Round Matchings

Although weakly-supervised techniques can reduce the labeling effort, it is unclear whether a saliency model trained with weakly-supervised data (e.g., point annotation) can achieve the equivalent performance of its fully-supervised version. This paper attempts to answer this unexplored question by proving a hypothesis: there is a point-labeled dataset where saliency models trained on it can achieve equivalent performance when trained on the densely annotated dataset. To prove this conjecture, we proposed a novel yet effective adversarial trajectory-ensemble active learning (ATAL). Our contributions are three-fold:  1) Our proposed adversarial attack triggering uncertainty can conquer the overconfidence of existing active learning methods and accurately locate these uncertain pixels. {2)} Our proposed trajectory-ensemble uncertainty estimation method maintains the advantages of the ensemble networks while significantly reducing the computational cost. {3)} Our proposed relationship-aware diversity sampling algorithm can conquer oversampling while boosting performance.
Experimental results show that our ATAL can find such a point-labeled dataset, where a saliency model trained on it obtained $97\%$ -- $99\%$ performance of its fully-supervised version with only ten annotated points per image.

Pixel is All You Need: Adversarial Trajectory-Ensemble Active Learning for Salient Object Detection

Neural network pruning is a technique of network compression by removing weights of lower importance from an optimized neural network. Often, pruned networks are compared in terms of accuracy, which is realized in terms of rewards for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) networks. However, networks that estimate control actions for safety-critical tasks, must also adhere to safety requirements along with obtaining rewards. We propose a methodology to iteratively refine the weights of a pruned neural network such that we get a sparse high-performance network without significant side effects on safety.

Safety Aware Neural Pruning for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Feature selection (FS) is a crucial procedure in machine learning pipelines for its significant benefits in removing data redundancy and mitigating model overfitting. Since concept drift is a widespread phenomenon in streaming data and could severely affect model performance, effective FS on concept drifting data streams is imminent. However, existing state-of-the-art FS algorithms fail to adjust their selection strategy adaptively when the effective feature subset changes, making them unsuitable for drifting streams. In this paper, we propose a dynamic FS method that selects effective features on concept drifting data streams via deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, we present two novel designs: (i) a skip-mode reinforcement learning environment that shrinks action space size for high-dimensional FS tasks; (ii) a curiosity mechanism that generates intrinsic rewards to address the long-horizon exploration problem. The experiment results show that our proposed method outperforms other FS methods and can dynamically adapt to concept drifts.

Anti-drifting Feature Selection via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Keyphrase identification and classification is a Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval task that involves extracting relevant groups of words from a given text related to the main topic. In this work, we focus on extracting keyphrases from scientific documents. We introduce TA-DA, a Topic-Aware Domain Adaptation framework for keyphrase extraction that integrates Multi-Task Learning with Adversarial Training and Domain Adaptation. Our approach improves performance over baseline models by up to 5% in the exact match of the F1-score.

TA-DA: Topic-Aware Domain Adaptation for Scientific Keyphrase Identification and Classification (Student Abstract)

Previous research on the comprehensive negotiation strategy using deep reinforcement learning (RL) has scalability issues of not performing effectively in the large-sized domains.
We improve negotiation strategy via deep RL by considering an issue-based represented deep policy network to deal with multi-issue negotiation.
The architecture of the proposed learning agent considers the characteristics of multi-issue negotiation domains and policy-based learning.
We demonstrate that proposed method achieve equivalent or higher utility than existing negotiation agents in the large-sized domains.

Scalable Negotiating Agent Strategy via Multi-Issue Policy Network (Student Abstract)

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has been increasingly used in safety-critical applications but has no safety guarantees, especially during training. In this paper, we propose dynamic shielding, a novel decentralized MARL framework to ensure safety in both the training and deployment phases. Our framework leverages Shield, a reactive system running in parallel with the reinforcement learning algorithm, to monitor and correct agents’ behavior. In our algorithm, shields dynamically split and merge according to the environment state in order to maintain decentralization and avoid conservative behaviors while enjoying formal safety guarantees. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MARL with dynamic shielding in the mobile navigation scenario.

Tackling Safe and Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Dynamic Shielding (Student Abstract)

Learning to recover clear images from images having a combination of degrading factors is a challenging task. That being said, autonomous surveillance in low visibility conditions caused by high pollution/smoke, poor air quality index, low light, atmospheric scattering and haze during a blizzard, etc, becomes even more important to prevent accidents. It is thus crucial to form a solution that can not only result in a high-quality image but also which is efficient enough to be deployed for everyday use. However, the lack of proper datasets available to tackle this task limits the performance of the previous methods proposed. To this end, we generate the LowVis-AFO dataset, containing 3647 paired dark-hazy and clear images. We also introduce a new lightweight deep learning model called Low-Visibility Restoration Network (LVRNet). It outperforms previous image restoration methods with low latency, achieving a PSNR value of 25.744 and an SSIM of 0.905, hence making our approach scalable and ready for practical use.

LVRNet: Lightweight Image Restoration for Aerial Images under Low Visibility(Student Abstract)

The efficacy of topological data analysis (TDA) has been demonstrated in many different machine learning pipelines, particularly those in which structural characteristics of data are highly relevant. However, TDA's usability in large scale machine learning applications is hindered by the significant computational cost of generating persistence diagrams. In this work, a method that allows this computationally expensive process to be approximated by deep neural networks is proposed. Moreover, the method's practicality in estimating 0-dimensional persistence diagrams across a diverse range of images is shown.

Persistent Homology through Image Segmentation (Student Abstract)

This work investigates the evolution of the latent space when deep learning models are trained incrementally in non-stationary environments. We propose a methodology for visualizing the latent representations. We then show that classes that are not even targeted by the concept drift can be negatively affected, suggesting that some classes may regularize the latent space.

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Resource Sharing Through Multi-Round Matchings

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