Framing, Judging, Steering: An Assessable Competency Model for Teach-ing Students to Reason With Generative AI

Generative AI makes answers easy and understanding hard, and uncritical use invites cognitive offloading. Schools still measure unaided performance, yet the real task is to produce good work with AI: framing an ill-defined task, judging the output, and steering the model toward a better result. This ability is rarely assessed in its own right; where measured, it collapses into one "prompting" score that cannot diagnose why AI use succeeds or fails. We propose CoRe-3 (Co-Reasoning), a competency model factoring productive AI use into three assessable skills we abbreviate FJS: Framing (specifying an ill-defined task before invoking AI), Judging (evaluating output for errors and unstated assumptions), and Steering (iteratively redirecting the model). Its distinguishing claim is the separation of pre-generation Framing from post-generation Steering, with Judging as the gate between. We ground the skills in theory, state five testable propositions, and instantiate them in CoReasoningLab, an open platform that presents flawed AI output and scores them independently. Over simulated learners (generated and graded by different models), the skills dissociate: each tracks its own manipulated competence while staying flat in the others, and grades become correlated when one competence is shared across all three (convergent and discriminant validity), across grader backends from two providers. Human-rater agreement and outcomes are next; we release the instrument, data, and protocol.

CoEval: Ranking Language Models for Custom Tasks Without Labeled Data or Trustworthy Benchmarks

Selecting a pretrained language model, or evaluating a fine-tuned one, for a specific application is a high-value decision, yet the public benchmarks used to make it are poorly suited: a generic benchmark need not reflect a particular sub-domain or sub-task, and its scores are suspect when its items have leaked into pretraining and are recalled rather than solved. We present CoEval, an open framework that supplies a trustworthy, task-specific signal through ensemble self-evaluation: from a task or domain description, a pool of models rotates through all three roles, teacher, student, and judge, to generate a fresh, contamination-free benchmark, answer it, and score one another, with no human labels or raters. Because every model also answers as a student, the responses are the data that weight each question by its discriminative power and each judge by its consensus with the panel. Where ground truth exists, CoEval recovers the true ranking and tracks objective correctness at \r{ho}=0.86, and the weighting recovers the gold ranking of thirteen models at Spearman 0.95. Reliability comes from panel composition, not size: this label-free weighting zeroes out broken judges and down-weights saturated questions, so neither distorts the ranking. Generated items show zero verbatim overlap with five public benchmarks, the panel cancels verbosity bias and precludes same-family self-preference, and rankings are domain-specific: three different models top four de-novo domains, so a generic leaderboard misdirects most practitioners. The same pipeline reruns on each model release, giving any team a contamination-free leaderboard for its application.

DGLD: Domain-Gated Latent Diffusion for the Discovery of Novel Energetic Materials

Energetic-materials performance gains translate directly into reduced propellant mass, smaller warheads, and more efficient civilian gas-generators, yet no new HMX-class compound has been disclosed in fifteen years. Designing one is a sparse-label problem: of ~66 k labelled CHNO molecules only ~3 k carry experimental or DFT-quality measurements, and naive generative models trained on the full mixture either memorise the high-performance tail or extrapolate without calibration. We introduce Domain-Gated Latent Diffusion (DGLD): a label-quality gate at training time, multi-task score-model guidance at sample time, and a four-stage chemistry-validation funnel ending in first-principles DFT audit. The result is 12 DFT-confirmed novel leads. The headline compound, 3,4,5-trinitro-1,2-isoxazole (L1), reaches \r{ho}_"cal" =2.09 g/cm3 and D_"K-J,cal" =8.25 km/s and is structurally dissimilar from all 65 980 training molecules (nearest-neighbour Tanimoto 0.27). A co-headline lead, E1 (4-nitro-1,2,3,5-oxatriazole), exceeds L1 on calibrated detonation velocity (D_"K-J,cal" =9.00 km/s) from a chemotype family disjoint from L1's. DGLD is the only method to land in the productive quadrant (simultaneously novel and on-target) at DFT level. SMILES-LSTM memorises 18.3% of its outputs exactly; SELFIES-GA's best novel candidate loses 3.5 km/s under DFT audit; REINVENT 4 generates novel high-N heterocycles but peaks at D=9.02 km/s. Code, checkpoints, and 918 mined hard negatives are released on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19821953); the next compound to enter the HMX-class band can be discovered, validated, and recommended for synthesis at the cost of a few GPU-days.

Reliable Extraction of Clinical Follow-Up Instructions: A Hybrid Neural-Symbolic Pipeline

Objective. Outpatient notes carry follow-up instructions pairing actions with future times ("MRI brain in two weeks"). Extracting (action, date) pairs supports scheduling and audit, but generative extractors miss the date because linking and arithmetic are implicit in decoding. We test a hybrid neural-symbolic pipeline against direct generation. Methods. We define TestSpecification and TimeSpecification entities and a ScheduledFor relation. BioBERT feeds BIO tagging and a biaffine linker; entities are canonicalized via a 28-action ontology and times normalized to day offsets deterministically. We evaluate on a 2,000-note synthetic outpatient corpus with action-disjoint splits (18 train, 6 OOV-test) against zero-shot GPT-4o-mini and LoRA-fine-tuned LLaMA-3 8B with note-level bootstrap 95% CIs. Results. On 259-note seen and OOV splits the hybrid pipeline achieves Test-Time Pair F1 of 0.997 and 0.986 with 0.00-day MAE. Baselines reach high action F1 (LLaMA-3 0.992; GPT-4o-mini 0.963 seen) but Pair F1 stays at 0.51-0.57 (LLaMA-3) and 0.53 (GPT-4o-mini), CIs non-overlapping with the hybrid. Conclusion. Separating learned entity extraction from deterministic date arithmetic outperforms generation on this benchmark, generalizes to held-out actions, and exposes failure modes. Transfer to real EHR notes is the next validation; a first-pass realism check is in Limitations.

A Controlled Synthetic Benchmark for Educational Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Educational aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) can support course improvement, but public aspect-labeled student feedback remains scarce because educational reviews are private, institution-specific, and expensive to annotate. This study introduces a controlled synthetic benchmark for educational ABSA built from 10,000 synthetic course reviews with explicit train-validation-test splits and a 20-aspect pedagogical schema spanning instructional quality, assessment and course management, learning demand, learning environment, and engagement. The corpus is generated with sampled target labels, sampled nuance attributes, and a realism-tuned prompt refined through a three-cycle judge-editor procedure. On the resulting benchmark, local baselines with TF-IDF, two-step transformers, and joint encoders show that the task is nontrivial; the strongest untuned model, BERT, reaches a held-out detection micro-F1 of 0.2760, while a modest lower-rate BERT schedule improves this to 0.2930. Full-test GPT-based inference with gpt-5.2 reaches 0.2519 micro-F1 in zero-shot mode and 0.2501 with retrieval-based few-shot prompting, placing batch inference above the classical baseline and close to the compact joint encoders. A conservative external evaluation on 2,829 mapped student-feedback reviews from Herath et al. yields a micro-F1 of 0.4593 for BERT on a 9-aspect overlap, indicating partial synthetic-to-real transfer. Realism and faithfulness analyses are reported as generator diagnostics that clarify how the benchmark was stabilized and where label noise remains. The study therefore contributes a synthetic educational ABSA corpus, a documented generation procedure, and a reproducible benchmark setting for a domain in which public labeled data remain difficult to obtain.

Toward a Benchmark for Controllable Simulation of Imperfect Students with Large Language Models

Teacher education requires deliberate practice with learners who exhibit identifiable strengths, weaknesses, and partial mastery. Large language models could support such practice by simulating students with known skill components, enabling teachers to rehearse explanations, diagnoses, and instructional responses. For this purpose, however, the central requirement is neither to maximize benchmark accuracy nor to suppress isolated facts, but to control model behavior so that it reflects a specified skill profile. This paper investigates whether prompted language models can be steered to retain some skills while suppressing others. We introduce a benchmark-oriented framework in which an explicit skill vector represents a simulated student, prompt-based control specifies retained and missing competencies, and behavior is evaluated using profile-alignment metrics, retained-versus-forgotten comparisons, and cross-skill calibration analyses. The results show that selective partial mastery can be induced and measured in a structured mathematics setting, although the degree of controllability remains model-dependent. These findings position controllable learner simulation as a distinct research problem at the intersection of teacher education, educational simulation, and language-model control.

Acting on the Unseen: Communication-Free Collaborative Filtering for Decentralized Multi-Robot Task Allocation

Multi-robot task allocation usually assumes some combination of communication, known task models, or a coordinator. We study the opposite extreme, a regime common in practice but overlooked in theory, which we name Zero-Knowledge MRTA (ZK-MRTA): a robot team with no prior knowledge (no task models, not even the latent rank), no communication (no messages, no parameter sharing, no coordinator), and only a partial and privately-noisy view of a public stream of teammates' outcomes. A hidden low-rank structure governs which robot suits which task, and there are far more tasks than rounds, so most (robot, task) pairs are never attempted. Yet each robot can act well on tasks it never attempted, and onboard new tasks, by running online low-rank collaborative filtering over the broadcast (SwarmCF). The advantage over any structure-free learner is categorical, not a constant factor: a structure-free learner is provably at the prior-mean error floor on unseen pairs. We prove a matching per-robot sample complexity (Θ(d) versus Θ(n), in the rank d and the task count n), an anytime (cumulative-reward) separation under task scarcity, and a deterministic condition under which decentralized recovery from the masked broadcast is exact (validated empirically). Experiments quantify the value of the broadcast, a positive scaling law (per-robot unseen-pair skill rises with team size), and the strongest masking-robustness and anytime profile among low-rank methods, recovering most (about 80% on earned skill) of a centralized full-communication ceiling, and holding under capacity-1 contention and in a robotics-grounded sensing instance.

IRC-Bench: Recognizing Entities from Contextual Cues in First-Person Reminiscences

When people recount personal memories, they often refer to people, places, and events indirectly, relying on contextual cues rather than explicit names. Such implicit references are central to reminiscence narratives: first-person accounts of lived experience used in therapeutic, archival, and social settings. They pose a difficult computational problem because the intended entity must be inferred from dispersed narrative evidence rather than from a local mention. We introduce IRC-Bench, the Implicit Reminiscence Context Benchmark, for evaluating implicit entity recognition in reminiscence transcripts. The benchmark targets non-locality: entity-identifying cues are distributed across multiple, non-contiguous clauses, unlike named entity recognition, entity linking, or coreference resolution. IRC-Bench comprises 25,136 samples constructed from 12,337 Wiki-data-linked entities across 1,994 transcripts spanning 11 thematic domains. Each sample pairs an Entity-Grounded Narrative, in which the target entity is explicitly mentioned, with an Entity-Elided Narrative, in which direct mentions are removed. We evaluate 19 configurations across LLM generation, dense retrieval, RAG, and fine-tuning. QLoRA-adapted Llama 3.1 8B performs best in the open-world setting (38.94% exact match; 51.59% Jaccard), while fine-tuned DPR leads closed-world retrieval (35.38% Hit@1; 71.49% Hit@10). We release IRC-Bench with data, code, and evaluation tools.

Mapping License Plate Recoverability Under Extreme Viewing Angles for Oppor-tunistic Urban Sensing

Urban environments contain many imaging sensors built for specific purposes, including ATM, body-worn, CCTV, and dashboard cameras. Under the opportunistic sensing paradigm, these sensors can be repurposed for secondary inference tasks such as license plate recognition. Yet objects of interest in such imagery are often noisy, low-resolution, and captured from extreme viewpoints. Recent advances in AI-based restoration can recover use-ful information even from severely degraded images. A central challenge is determining which distortion parame-ters allow reliable recovery and which lead to inference failure. This paper introduces recoverability maps, a task-agnostic method for quantifying this boundary. The method combines a dense synthetic sweep of degrada-tion parameters with two summary measures: boundary area-under-curve, which estimates the recoverable frac-tion of the parameter space, and a reliability score, which captures the frequency and severity of failures within that region. We demonstrate the method on license plate recognition from highly angled views under realistic camera artifacts. Several restoration architectures are trained and evaluated, including U-Net, Restormer, Pix2Pix, and SR3 diffusion. The best model recovers about 93% of the parameter space. Similar results across models sug-gest that sensing geometry, rather than architecture, sets the limit of recovery.

LLM-guided headline rewriting for clickability enhancement without clickbait

Enhancing reader engagement while preserving informational fidelity is a central challenge in controllable text generation for news media. Optimizing news headlines for reader engagement is often conflated with clickbait, resulting in exaggerated or misleading phrasing that undermines editorial trust. We frame clickbait not as a separate stylistic category, but as an extreme outcome of disproportionate amplification of otherwise legitimate engagement cues. Based on this view, we formulate headline rewriting as a controllable generation problem, where specific engagement-oriented linguistic attributes are selectively strengthened under explicit constraints on semantic faithfulness and proportional emphasis. We present a guided headline rewriting framework built on a large language model (LLM) that uses the Future Discriminators for Generation (FUDGE) paradigm for inference-time control. The LLM is steered by two auxiliary guide models: (1) a clickbait scoring model that provides negative guidance to suppress excessive stylistic amplification, and (2) an engagement-attribute model that provides positive guidance aligned with target clickability objectives. Both guides are trained on neutral headlines drawn from a curated real-world news corpus. At the same time, clickbait variants are generated synthetically by rewriting these original headlines using an LLM under controlled activation of predefined engagement tactics. By adjusting guidance weights at inference time, the system generates headlines along a continuum from neutral paraphrases to more engaging yet editorially acceptable formulations. The proposed framework provides a principled approach for studying the trade-off between attractiveness, semantic preservation, and clickbait avoidance, and supports responsible LLM-based headline optimization in journalistic settings.