Creativity is a critical learning outcome in K–12 computer science, yet assessing it at scale remains challenging. Human-scored approaches, such as the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), are resource-intensive and prone to rater variability. Leveraging advances in large language models (LLMs), this study investigates whether GPT-4o can reliably assess creativity in student-generated code. We collected 383 flow-based music programs from 194 upper-elementary students (ages 10–12) between 2022 and 2024. Each artifact was rated by five human experts across four dimensions: originality, complexity, efficiency, and emotional expressiveness. We evaluated three prompting strategies: zero-shot, few-shot with theory-driven exemplars (ECD), and few-shot with human-selected examples. Among them, the ECD-based few-shot prompting yielded the best performance, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE = 0.582) and highest agreement within ±1.0 of human scores (82.4%). Zero-shot prompting, while slightly less accurate, achieved the highest correlation with human scores (Spearman's p = 0.53), suggesting its potential for lightweight deployment.

A two-user interference channel is a canonical model for multiple one-to-one communications, where two transmitters wish to communicate with their receivers via a shared medium, examples of which include pairs of base stations and handsets near the cell boundary that suffer from interference. Practical codes and the fundamental limit of communications are unknown for interference channels as mathematical analysis becomes intractable. Hence, simple heuristic coding schemes are used in practice to mitigate interference, e.g., time division, treating interference as noise, and successive interference cancellation. These schemes are nearly optimal for extreme cases: when interference is strong or weak. However, there is no optimality guarantee for channels with moderate interference. Here we combine deep learning and network information theory to overcome the limitation on the tractability of analysis and construct finite-blocklength coding schemes for channels with various interference levels. We show that carefully designed and trained neural codes using network information theoretic insight can achieve several orders of reliability improvement for channels with moderate interference. Furthermore, we present the interpretation of the learned codes based on the codeword distance and the Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) analysis.

In modern communication systems with feedback, there are increasingly more scenarios where the transmitter has much less power than the receiver (e.g., medical implant devices), which we refer to as noise-asymmetric channels. For such channels, the feedback link is of higher quality than the forward link. However, feedback schemes for cellular communications, such as hybrid ARQ, do not fully utilize the high-quality feedback link. To this end, we introduce Compressed Error Hybrid ARQ, a generalization of hybrid ARQ tailored for noise-asymmetric channels; the receiver sends its estimated message to the transmitter, and the transmitter harmoniously switches between hybrid ARQ and compressed error retransmission. We show that our proposed method significantly improves reliability, latency, and spectral efficiency compared to the conventional hybrid ARQ in various practical scenarios where the transmitter is resource-constrained.

A critical aspect of reliable communication involves the design of codes that allow transmissions to be robustly and computationally efficiently decoded under noisy conditions. Advances in the design of reliable codes have been driven by coding theory and have been sporadic. Recently, it is shown that channel codes that are comparable to modern codes can be learned solely via deep learning. In particular, Turbo Autoencoder (TurboAE), introduced by Jiang et al., is shown to achieve the reliability of Turbo codes for Additive White Gaussian Noise channels.In this paper, we focus on applying the idea of TurboAE to various practical channels, such as fading channels and chirp noise channels. We introduce TurboAE-TI, a novel neural architecture that combines TurboAE with a trainable interleaver design. We develop a carefully-designed training procedure and a novel interleaver penalty function that are crucial in learning the interleaver and TurboAE jointly. We demonstrate that TurboAE-TI outperforms TurboAE and LTE Turbo codes for several channels of interest. We also provide interpretation analysis to better understand TurboAE-TI.

Designing channel codes is one of the core research areas for modern communication systems. Canonical channel codes asymptotically achieve near-capacity performance under large block length regime for additive white gaussian noise channels. However, this achieved success does not generalize to many channels. Channels with output feedback, proposed by Shannon, is one of such channels where practical codes have been unknown for several decades.Recently it has been demonstrated that deep learning based code outperforms the state-of-the-art codes for channels with output feedback. While the success is promising and inspiring, there are a few major challenges that need to be addressed. Firstly, the channel assumes a feedback with a unit step delay, which is not very practical. Second is the lack of generalization to larger block lengths. In this work, we propose Feedback Auto Turbo Encoder (FTAE) which harmoniously combines interleaver and iterative decoding with CNN architectures and demonstrate the blocklength gain and improved performance in the block feedback setting.

Designing channel codes under low latency constraints is one of the most demanding requirements in 5G standards. However, sharp characterizations of the performances of traditional codes are only available in the large block lengths limit. Code designs are guided by those asymptotic analyses and require large block lengths and long latency to achieve the desired error rate. Furthermore, when the codes designed for one channel (e.g. Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel) are used for another (e.g. non-AWGN channels), heuristics are necessary to achieve any non trivial performance - thereby severely lacking in robustness as well as adaptivity. Obtained by jointly designing recurrent neural network (RNN) based encoder and decoder, we propose an end-to-end learned neural code which outperforms canonical convolutional code under block settings. With this gained experience of designing a novel neural block code, we propose a new class of codes under low latency constraint - Low-latency Efficient Adaptive Robust Neural (LEARN) codes, which outperform the state-of-the-art low latency codes as well as exhibit robustness and adaptivity properties. LEARN codes show the potential of designing new versatile and universal codes for future communications via tools of modern deep learning coupled with communication engineering insights.

Designing codes that combat the noise in a communication medium has remained a significant area of research in information theory as well as wireless communications. Asymptotically optimal channel codes have been developed by mathematicians for communicating under canonical models after over 60 years of research. On the other hand, in many non-canonical channel settings, optimal codes do not exist and the codes designed for canonical models are adapted via heuristics to these channels and are thus not guaranteed to be optimal. In this work, we make significant progress on this problem by designing a fully end-to-end jointly trained neural encoder and decoder, namely, Turbo Autoencoder (TurboAE), with the following contributions: (a) under moderate block lengths, TurboAE approaches state-of-the-art performance under canonical channels; (b) moreover, TurboAE outperforms the state-of-the-art codes under non-canonical settings in terms of reliability. TurboAE shows that the development of channel coding design can be automated via deep learning, with near-optimal performance.

The design of codes for communicating reliably over a statistically well defined channel is an important endeavor involving deep mathematical research and wide- ranging practical applications. In this work, we present the first family of codes obtained via deep learning, which significantly beats state-of-the-art codes designed over several decades of research. The communication channel under consideration is the Gaussian noise channel with feedback, whose study was initiated by Shannon; feedback is known theoretically to improve reliability of communication, but no practical codes that do so have ever been successfully constructed. We break this logjam by integrating information theoretic insights harmoniously with recurrent-neural-network based encoders and decoders to create novel codes that outperform known codes by 3 orders of magnitude in reliability. We also demonstrate several desirable properties in the codes: (a) generalization to larger block lengths; (b) composability with known codes; (c) adaptation to practical constraints. This result also presents broader ramifications to coding theory: even when the channel has a clear mathematical model, deep learning methodologies, when combined with channel specific information-theoretic insights, can potentially beat state-of-the-art codes, constructed over decades of mathematical research.