The Empty Quadrant: AI Teammates for Embodied Field Learning

For four decades, AIED research has rested on what we term the Sedentary Assumption: the unexamined design commitment to a stationary learner seated before a screen. Mobile learning and museum guides have moved learners into physical space, and context-aware systems have delivered location-triggered content -- yet these efforts predominantly cast AI in the role of information-de-livery tool rather than epistemic partner. We map this gap through a 2 x 2 matrix (AI Role x Learning Environment) and identify an undertheorized intersection: the configuration in which AI serves as an epistemic teammate during unstruc-tured, place-bound field inquiry and learning is assessed through trajectory rather than product. To fill it, we propose Field Atlas, a framework grounded in embod-ied, embedded, enactive, and extended (4E) cognition, active inference, and dual coding theory that shifts AIED's guiding metaphor from instruction to sensemak-ing. The architecture pairs volitional photography with immediate voice reflec-tion, constrains AI to Socratic provocation rather than answer delivery, and ap-plies Epistemic Trajectory Modeling (ETM) to represent field learning as a con-tinuous trajectory through conjoined physical-epistemic space. We demonstrate the framework through a museum scenario and argue that the resulting trajecto-ries -- bound to a specific body, place, and time -- constitute process-based evi-dence structurally resistant to AI fabrication, offering a new assessment paradigm and reorienting AIED toward embodied, dialogic human-AI sensemaking in the wild.

Continuous Modal Logical Neural Networks: Modal Reasoning via Stochastic Accessibility

We propose Fluid Logic, a paradigm in which modal logical reasoning, temporal, epistemic, doxastic, deontic, is lifted from discrete Kripke structures to continuous manifolds via Neural Stochastic Differential Equations (Neural SDEs). Each type of modal operator is backed by a dedicated Neural SDE, and nested formulas compose these SDEs in a single differentiable graph. A key instantiation is Logic-Informed Neural Networks (LINNs): analogous to Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), LINNs embed modal logical formulas such as ($\Box$ bounded) and ($\Diamond$ visits\_lobe) directly into the training loss, guiding neural networks to produce solutions that are structurally consistent with prescribed logical properties, without requiring knowledge of the governing equations. The resulting framework, Continuous Modal Logical Neural Networks (CMLNNs), yields several key properties: (i) stochastic diffusion prevents quantifier collapse ($\Box$ and $\Diamond$ differ), unlike deterministic ODEs; (ii) modal operators are entropic risk measures, sound with respect to risk-based semantics with explicit Monte Carlo concentration guarantees; (iii)SDE-induced accessibility provides structural correspondence with classical modal axioms; (iv) parameterizing accessibility through dynamics reduces memory from quadratic in world count to linear in parameters. Three case studies demonstrate that Fluid Logic and LINNs can guide neural networks to produce consistent solutions across diverse domains: epistemic/doxastic logic (multi-robot hallucination detection), temporal logic (recovering the Lorenz attractor geometry from logical constraints alone), and deontic logic (learning safe confinement dynamics from a logical specification).

STEM Faculty Perspectives on Generative AI in Higher Education

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools are increasingly present in higher education, yet their adoption has been largely student-driven, requiring instructors to respond to technologies already embedded in classroom practices. While some faculty have embraced GenAI for pedagogical purposes such as content generation, assessment support, and curriculum design, others approach these tools with caution, citing concerns about student learning, assessment validity, and academic integrity. Understanding faculty perspectives is therefore essential for informing effective pedagogical strategies and institutional policies. In this paper, we present findings from a focus group study with 29 STEM faculty members at a large public university in the United States. We examine how faculty integrate GenAI into their courses, the benefits and challenges they perceive for student learning, and the institutional support they identify as necessary for effective and responsible adoption. Our findings highlight key patterns in how STEM faculty engage with GenAI, reflecting both active adoption and cautious use. Faculty described a range of pedagogical applications alongside concerns about student learning, assessment, and academic integrity. Overall, the results suggest that effective integration of GenAI in higher education requires rethinking assessment, pedagogy, and institutional governance in addition to technical adoption.

Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B Technical Report

We present Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B, a compact open-weight multimodal reasoning model, and share the motivations, design choices, experiments, and learnings that informed its development. Our goal is to contribute practical insight to the research community on building smaller, efficient multimodal reasoning models and to share the result of these learnings as an open-weight model that is good at common vision and language tasks and excels at scientific and mathematical reasoning and understanding user interfaces. Our contributions include demonstrating that careful architecture choices and rigorous data curation enable smaller, open-weight multimodal models to achieve competitive performance with significantly less training and inference-time compute and tokens. The most substantial improvements come from systematic filtering, error correction, and synthetic augmentation -- reinforcing that data quality remains the primary lever for model performance. Systematic ablations show that high-resolution, dynamic-resolution encoders yield consistent improvements, as accurate perception is a prerequisite for high-quality reasoning. Finally, a hybrid mix of reasoning and non-reasoning data with explicit mode tokens allows a single model to deliver fast direct answers for simpler tasks and chain-of-thought reasoning for complex problems.

From Spark to Fire: Modeling and Mitigating Error Cascades in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration

Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) are increasingly applied to complex collaborative scenarios. However, their collaborative mechanisms may cause minor inaccuracies to gradually solidify into system-level false consensus through iteration. Such risks are difficult to trace since errors can propagate and amplify through message dependencies. Existing protections often rely on single-agent validation or require modifications to the collaboration architecture, which can weaken effective information flow and may not align with natural collaboration processes in real tasks. To address this, we propose a propagation dynamics model tailored for LLM-MAS that abstracts collaboration as a directed dependency graph and provides an early-stage risk criterion to characterize amplification risk. Through experiments on six mainstream frameworks, we identify three vulnerability classes: cascade amplification, topological sensitivity, and consensus inertia. We further instantiate an attack where injecting just a single atomic error seed leads to widespread failure. In response, we introduce a genealogy-graph-based governance layer, implemented as a message-layer plugin, that suppresses both endogenous and exogenous error amplification without altering the collaboration architecture. Experiments show that this approach raises the defense success rate from a baseline of 0.32 to over 0.89 and significantly mitigates the cascading spread of minor errors.

Towards Generalized Multimodal Homography Estimation

Supervised and unsupervised homography estimation methods depend on image pairs tailored to specific modalities to achieve high accuracy. However, their performance deteriorates substantially when applied to unseen modalities. To address this issue, we propose a training data synthesis method that generates unaligned image pairs with ground-truth offsets from a single input image. Our approach renders the image pairs with diverse textures and colors while preserving their structural information. These synthetic data empower the trained model to achieve greater robustness and improved generalization across various domains. Additionally, we design a network to fully leverage cross-scale information and decouple color information from feature representations, thus improving estimation accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our training data synthesis method improves generalization performance. The results also confirm the effectiveness of the proposed network.

Lang2Str: Two-Stage Crystal Structure Generation with LLMs and Continuous Flow Models

Generative models hold great promise for accelerating material discovery but are often limited by their inflexible single-stage generative process in designing valid and diverse materials. To address this, we propose a two-stage generative framework, Lang2Str, that combines the strengths of large language models (LLMs) and flow-based models for flexible and precise material generation. Our method frames the generative process as a conditional generative task, where an LLM provides high-level conditions by generating descriptions of material unit cells' geometric layouts and properties. These descriptions, informed by the LLM's extensive background knowledge, ensure reasonable structure designs. A conditioned flow model then decodes these textual conditions into precise continuous coordinates and unit cell parameters. This staged approach combines the structured reasoning of LLMs and the distribution modeling capabilities of flow models. Experimental results show that our method achieves competitive performance on \textit{ab initio} material generation and crystal structure prediction tasks, with generated structures exhibiting closer alignment to ground truth in both geometry and energy levels, surpassing state-of-the-art models. The flexibility and modularity of our framework further enable fine-grained control over the generation process, potentially leading to more efficient and customizable material design.

Hierarchical Inference and Closure Learning via Adaptive Surrogates for ODEs and PDEs

Inverse problems are the task of calibrating models to match data. They play a pivotal role in diverse engineering applications by allowing practitioners to align models with reality. In many applications, engineers and scientists do not have a complete picture of i) the detailed properties of a system (such as material properties, geometry, initial conditions, etc.); ii) the complete laws describing all dynamics at play (such as friction laws, complicated damping phenomena, and general nonlinear interactions). In this paper, we develop a principled methodology for leveraging data from collections of distinct yet related physical systems to jointly estimate the individual model parameters of each system, and learn the shared unknown dynamics in the form of an ML-based closure model. To robustly infer the unknown parameters for each system, we employ a hierarchical Bayesian framework, which allows for the joint inference of multiple systems and their population-level statistics. To learn the closures, we use a maximum marginal likelihood estimate of a neural network embeded within the ODE/PDE formulation of the problem. To realize this framework we utilize the ensemble Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) for stable and efficient sampling. To mitigate the computational bottleneck of repetitive forward evaluations in solving inverse problems, we introduce a bilevel optimization strategy to simultaneously train a surrogate forward model alongside the inference. Within this framework, we evaluate and compare distinct surrogate architectures, specifically Fourier Neural Operators (FNO) and parametric Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINNs).

Cyclostationarity Analysis as a Complement to Self-Supervised Representations for Speech Deepfake Detection

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) is essential for maintaining trust in voice-driven technologies and digital media. Although recent SDD systems increasingly rely on self-supervised learning (SSL) representations that capture rich contextual information, complementary signal-driven acoustic features remain important for modeling fine-grained structural properties of speech. Most existing acoustic front ends are based on time-frequency representations, which do not fully exploit higher-order spectral dependencies inherent in speech signals. We introduce a cyclostationarity-inspired acoustic feature extraction framework for SDD based on spectral correlation density (SCD). The proposed features model periodic statistical structures in speech by capturing spectral correlations between frequency components. In particular, we propose temporally structured SCD features that characterize the evolution of spectral and cyclic-frequency components over time. The effectiveness and complementarity of the proposed features are evaluated using multiple countermeasure architectures, including convolutional neural networks, SSL-based embedding systems, and hybrid fusion models. Experiments on ASVspoof 2019 LA, ASVspoof 2021 DF, and ASVspoof 5 demonstrate that SCD-based features provide complementary discriminative information to SSL embeddings and conventional acoustic representations. In particular, fusion of SSL and SCD embeddings reduces the equal error rate on ASVspoof 2019 LA from $8.28\%$ to $0.98\%$, and yields consistent improvements on the challenging ASVspoof 5 dataset. The results highlight cyclostationary signal analysis as a theoretically grounded and effective front end for speech deepfake detection.

Rethinking Role-Playing Evaluation: Anonymous Benchmarking and a Systematic Study of Personality Effects

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in developing Role-Playing Agents (RPAs). However, current research primarily evaluates RPAs using famous fictional characters, allowing models to rely on memory associated with character names. This dependency creates a bias that limits the generalization of RPAs to unseen personas. To address this issue, we propose an anonymous evaluation method. Experiments across multiple benchmarks reveal that anonymization significantly degrades role-playing performance, confirming that name exposure carries implicit information. Furthermore, we investigate personality augmentation to enhance role fidelity under anonymous setting. We systematically compare the efficacy of personality traits derived from human annotations versus those self-generated by the model. Our results demonstrate that incorporating personality information consistently improves RPA performance. Crucially, self-generated personalities achieve performance comparable to human-annotated ones. This work establishes a fairer evaluation protocol and validates a scalable, personality-enhanced framework for constructing robust RPAs.