Assessment literacy (AL) is essential for personalized education, yet difficult to cultivate in pre-service teachers. Conventional teacher preparation programs focus on theoretical knowledge, while digital assessment tools commonly provide opaque scores or parameters. These limitations hinder reflection and transfer, leaving AL underdeveloped. We propose XIA, an eXplainable Intelligent Assessment platform that extends statistics-informed support with visualized cognitive diagnostic reasoning, including contrastive and counterfactual explanations. In a pre-post controlled study with 21 pre-service teachers, we combined quantitative tasks and questionnaires with qualitative interviews. The findings offer preliminary evidence that XIA supported reflection, self-regulation, and assessment awareness, and helped reduce assessment errors. Interviews further showed a shift from score-based judgments toward evidence-based reasoning. This work contributes insights into the design of intelligent assessment tools, showing how explanatory scaffolding can bridge assessment theory and classroom practice and support the cultivation of AL in teacher education.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied in education, showing significant potential in personalized instruction, student feedback, and intelligent tutoring. Generating hints for Math Word Problems (MWPs) has become a critical application, particularly in helping students understand problem-solving steps and logic. However, existing models struggle to provide pedagogically sound guidance that fosters learning without offering direct answers. To address this issue, we introduce TMATH, a dataset specifically designed to evaluate LLMs’ ability to generate high-quality hints for MWPs. TMATH contains diverse mathematical problems paired with carefully crafted, human-generated hints. To assess its impact, we fine-tuned a series of 7B-scale language models using TMATH. Our results, based on quantitative evaluations and expert assessments, show that while LLMs still face challenges in complex reasoning, the TMATH dataset significantly enhances their ability to generate more accurate and contextually appropriate educational hints.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have a wide range of applications in classroom analysis. However, due to the unique structure of classroom dialogue, existing ASR systems often struggle to accurately recognize and organize spoken utterances, creating significant challenges for downstream tasks in educational dialogue analysis. To address this issue, we propose EPIC, a post-processing framework for classroom ASR error correction. We begin by extracting error patterns to gain a deeper understanding of the distribution of ASR errors. Next, we utilize large language models (LLMs) to reconstruct contextual information based on these error patterns, offering a viable solution for error correction with limited labeled data. Finally, after fine-tuning an error correction model, we implement a candidate selection process to identify the most appropriate hypothesis for each context. Extensive experiments with our proposed method demonstrate substantial improvements in word error rate (WER) and overall robustness in ASR error correction, enabling more reliable analysis of educational dialogues and offering deeper insights for educational research.

Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to identify and segment the most striking elements within an image. Salient object detection methods can be differentiated into several types according to the input data, such as RGB-D (Depth) and RGB-T (Thermal). Previous research primarily focused on saliency detection for single data types. However, forcing an RGB-D SOD model to process RGB-T data will degrade its performance significantly. In addition, current methods still face challenges in detecting fine edge details of salient objects and achieving end-to-end training. To address these issues, we introduce diffSOD, which leverages stable diffusion and cross-modal feature rectification and fusion module for saliency detection by transforming salient object detection into a denoising process from a noisy mask to an object mask. It offers a unified solution for salient object detection that seamlessly spans both RGB-D SOD and RGB-T SOD. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed diffSOD, demonstrating its ability to efficiently detect salient objects across both RGB-D and RGB-T data, while achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

Relevance search is to find top-ranked entities in a knowledge graph (KG) that are relevant to a query entity. Relevance is ambiguous, particularly over a schema-rich KG like DBpedia which supports a wide range of different semantics of relevance based on numerous types of relations and attributes. As users may lack the expertise to formalize the desired semantics, supervised methods have emerged to learn the hidden user-defined relevance from user-provided examples. Along this line, in this paper we propose a novel generative model over KGs for relevance search, named GREASE. The model applies to meta-path based relevance where a meta-path characterizes a particular type of semantics of relating the query entity to answer entities. It is also extended to support properties that constrain answer entities. Extensive experiments on two large-scale KGs demonstrate that GREASE has advanced the state of the art in effectiveness, expressiveness, and efficiency.

Zixian Huang, Yulin Shen, Xiao Li, Yu’ang Wei, Gong Cheng, Lin Zhou, Xinyu Dai, Yuzhong Qu. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.