Patients have long sought health information online, and increasingly, they are turning to generative AI to answer their health-related queries. Given the high stakes of the medical domain, techniques like retrieval-augmented generation and citation grounding have been widely promoted as methods to reduce hallucinations and improve the accuracy of AI-generated responses and have been widely adopted into search engines. This paper argues that even when these methods produce literally accurate content drawn from source documents sans hallucinations, they can still be highly misleading. Patients may derive significantly different interpretations from AI-generated outputs than they would from reading the original source material, let alone consulting a knowledgeable clinician. Through a large-scale query analysis on topics including disputed diagnoses and procedure safety, we support our argument with quantitative and qualitative evidence of the suboptimal answers resulting from current systems. In particular, we highlight how these models tend to decontextualize facts, omit critical relevant sources, and reinforce patient misconceptions or biases. We propose a series of recommendations -- such as the incorporation of communication pragmatics and enhanced comprehension of source documents -- that could help mitigate these issues and extend beyond the medical domain.
Oversmoothing has been recognized as a main obstacle to building deep Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), limiting the performance. This position paper argues that the influence of oversmoothing has been overstated and advocates for a further exploration of deep GNN architectures. Given the three core operations of GNNs, aggregation, linear transformation, and non-linear activation, we show that prior studies have mistakenly confused oversmoothing with the vanishing gradient, caused by transformation and activation rather than aggregation. Our finding challenges prior beliefs about oversmoothing being unique to GNNs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that classical solutions such as skip connections and normalization enable the successful stacking of deep GNN layers without performance degradation. Our results clarify misconceptions about oversmoothing and shed new light on the potential of deep GNNs.
Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) has gained traction in an attempt to improve the interpretability and robustness of machine learning predictions. Specifically (medical) biosignals such as electroencephalography (EEG), electrocardiography (ECG), electrooculography (EOG), and electromyography (EMG) could benefit from good UQ, since these suffer from a poor signal-to-noise ratio, and good human interpretability is pivotal for medical applications. In this paper, we review the state of the art of applying Uncertainty Quantification to Machine Learning tasks in the biosignal domain. We present various methods, shortcomings, uncertainty measures and theoretical frameworks that currently exist in this application domain. We address misconceptions in the field, provide recommendations for future work, and discuss gaps in the literature in relation to diagnostic implementations as well as control for prostheses or brain-computer interfaces. Overall it can be concluded that promising UQ methods are available, but that research is needed on how people and systems may interact with an uncertainty-model in a (clinical) environment
Younger generations are growing up in a world increasingly shaped by intelligent technologies, making early AI literacy crucial for developing the skills to critically understand and navigate them. However, education in this field often emphasizes tool-based learning, prioritizing usage over understanding the underlying concepts. This lack of knowledge leaves non-experts, especially children, prone to misconceptions, unrealistic expectations, and difficulties in recognizing biases and stereotypes. In this paper, we propose a structured and replicable teaching approach that fosters foundational AI literacy in primary students, by building upon core mathematical elements closely connected to and of interest in primary curricula, to strengthen conceptualization, data representation, classification reasoning, and evaluation of AI. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted an empirical study with thirty-one fifth-grade students across two classes, evaluating their progress through a post-test and a satisfaction survey. Our results indicate improvements in terminology understanding and usage, features description, logical reasoning, and evaluative skills, with students showing a deeper comprehension of decision-making processes and their limitations. Moreover, the approach proved engaging, with students particularly enjoying activities that linked AI concepts to real-world reasoning. Materials: https://github.com/tail-unica/ai-literacy-primary-ed.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have fueled the vision of automated scientific discovery, often called AI Co-Scientists. To date, prior work casts these systems as generative co-authors responsible for crafting hypotheses, synthesizing code, or drafting manuscripts. In this work, we explore a complementary application: using LLMs as verifiers to automate the \textbf{academic verification of scientific manuscripts}. To that end, we introduce SPOT, a dataset of 83 published papers paired with 91 errors significant enough to prompt errata or retraction, cross-validated with actual authors and human annotators. Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs on SPOT, we find that none surpasses 21.1\% recall or 6.1\% precision (o3 achieves the best scores, with all others near zero). Furthermore, confidence estimates are uniformly low, and across eight independent runs, models rarely rediscover the same errors, undermining their reliability. Finally, qualitative analysis with domain experts reveals that even the strongest models make mistakes resembling student-level misconceptions derived from misunderstandings. These findings highlight the substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements for dependable AI-assisted academic verification.
In Computer Science (CS) education, understanding factors contributing to students' programming difficulties is crucial for effective learning support. By identifying specific issues students face, educators can provide targeted assistance to help them overcome obstacles and improve learning outcomes. While identifying sources of struggle, such as misconceptions, in real-time can be challenging in current educational practices, analyzing logical errors in students' code can offer valuable insights. This paper presents a scalable framework for automatically detecting logical errors in students' programming solutions. Our framework is based on an explainable Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) embedding model, the Subtree-based Attention Neural Network (SANN), that identifies the structural components of programs containing logical errors. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate its effectiveness, and the results suggest that our framework can accurately capture students' logical errors and, more importantly, provide us with deeper insights into their learning processes, offering a valuable tool for enhancing programming education.
Generating high-quality MCQs, especially those targeting diverse cognitive levels and incorporating common misconceptions into distractor design, is time-consuming and expertise-intensive, making manual creation impractical at scale. Current automated approaches typically generate questions at lower cognitive levels and fail to incorporate domain-specific misconceptions. This paper presents a hierarchical concept map-based framework that provides structured knowledge to guide LLMs in generating MCQs with distractors. We chose high-school physics as our test domain and began by developing a hierarchical concept map covering major Physics topics and their interconnections with an efficient database design. Next, through an automated pipeline, topic-relevant sections of these concept maps are retrieved to serve as a structured context for the LLM to generate questions and distractors that specifically target common misconceptions. Lastly, an automated validation is completed to ensure that the generated MCQs meet the requirements provided. We evaluate our framework against two baseline approaches: a base LLM and a RAG-based generation. We conducted expert evaluations and student assessments of the generated MCQs. Expert evaluation shows that our method significantly outperforms the baseline approaches, achieving a success rate of 75.20% in meeting all quality criteria compared to approximately 37% for both baseline methods. Student assessment data reveal that our concept map-driven approach achieved a significantly lower guess success rate of 28.05% compared to 37.10% for the baselines, indicating a more effective assessment of conceptual understanding. The results demonstrate that our concept map-based approach enables robust assessment across cognitive levels and instant identification of conceptual gaps, facilitating faster feedback loops and targeted interventions at scale.
This study investigates whether individuals can learn to accurately discriminate between human-written and AI-produced texts when provided with immediate feedback, and if they can use this feedback to recalibrate their self-perceived competence. We also explore the specific criteria individuals rely upon when making these decisions, focusing on textual style and perceived readability. We used GPT-4o to generate several hundred texts across various genres and text types comparable to Koditex, a multi-register corpus of human-written texts. We then presented randomized text pairs to 254 Czech native speakers who identified which text was human-written and which was AI-generated. Participants were randomly assigned to two conditions: one receiving immediate feedback after each trial, the other receiving no feedback until experiment completion. We recorded accuracy in identification, confidence levels, response times, and judgments about text readability along with demographic data and participants' engagement with AI technologies prior to the experiment. Participants receiving immediate feedback showed significant improvement in accuracy and confidence calibration. Participants initially held incorrect assumptions about AI-generated text features, including expectations about stylistic rigidity and readability. Notably, without feedback, participants made the most errors precisely when feeling most confident -- an issue largely resolved among the feedback group. The ability to differentiate between human and AI-generated texts can be effectively learned through targeted training with explicit feedback, which helps correct misconceptions about AI stylistic features and readability, as well as potential other variables that were not explored, while facilitating more accurate self-assessment. This finding might be particularly important in educational contexts.
Personalized recommendation is widely used in the web applications, and graph contrastive learning (GCL) has gradually become a dominant approach in recommender systems, primarily due to its ability to extract self-supervised signals from raw interaction data, effectively alleviating the problem of data sparsity. A classic GCL-based method typically uses data augmentation during graph convolution to generates more contrastive views, and performs contrast on these new views to obtain rich self-supervised signals. Despite this paradigm is effective, the reasons behind the performance gains remain a mystery. In this paper, we first reveal via theoretical derivation that the gradient descent process of the CL objective is formally equivalent to graph convolution, which implies that CL objective inherently supports neighborhood aggregation on interaction graphs. We further substantiate this capability through experimental validation and identify common misconceptions in the selection of positive samples in previous methods, which limit the potential of CL objective. Based on this discovery, we propose the Light Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (LightCCF) method, which introduces a novel neighborhood aggregation objective to bring users closer to all interacted items while pushing them away from other positive pairs, thus achieving high-quality neighborhood aggregation with very low time complexity. On three highly sparse public datasets, the proposed method effectively aggregate neighborhood information while preventing graph over-smoothing, demonstrating significant improvements over existing GCL-based counterparts in both training efficiency and recommendation accuracy. Our implementations are publicly accessible.
Recent advancements in the coding, reasoning, and tool-using abilities of LLMs have spurred interest in library learning (i.e., online learning through the creation, storage, and retrieval of reusable and composable functions, knowledge, checklists, or lemmas). Such systems often promise improved task performance through the automatic creation of broadly applicable tools, as well as superior computational performance through the caching of reasoning (i.e., the storage of generated tools). However, we find strong reason to be skeptical. We perform a deep dive into one such system, LEGO-Prover, which purports to learn reusable lemmas for mathematical reasoning. We find no evidence of the direct reuse of learned lemmas, and find evidence against the soft reuse of learned lemmas (i.e., reuse by modifying relevant examples). Crucially, we find that LEGO-Prover does not in fact improve over the simple baseline of prompting the model - the improvements in task accuracy vanish once computational cost is accounted for. Our findings suggest that serious misconceptions exist as to the effectiveness of these techniques, that a serious re-examination of the state of LLM-based library learning is required, and that we require much stronger standards for evaluation including behavioural analysis and ensuring that an equal computational budget is used for baselines.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have been prevalent in particle physics for over three decades, shaping many aspects of High Energy Physics (HEP) analyses. As AI's influence grows, it is essential for physicists $\unicode{x2013}$ as both researchers and informed citizens $\unicode{x2013}$ to critically examine its foundations, misconceptions, and impact. This paper explores AI definitions, examines how ML differs from traditional programming, and provides a brief review of AI/ML applications in HEP, highlighting promising trends such as Simulation-Based Inference, uncertainty-aware machine learning, and Fast ML for anomaly detection. Beyond physics, it also addresses the broader societal harms of AI systems, underscoring the need for responsible engagement. Finally, it stresses the importance of adapting research practices to an evolving AI landscape, ensuring that physicists not only benefit from the latest tools but also remain at the forefront of innovation.
Generative AI has the potential to transform personalization and accessibility of education. However, it raises serious concerns about accuracy and helping students become independent critical thinkers. In this study, we designed a helpful AI "Peer" to help students correct fundamental physics misconceptions related to Newtonian mechanic concepts. In contrast to approaches that seek near-perfect accuracy to create an authoritative AI tutor or teacher, we directly inform students that this AI can answer up to 40% of questions incorrectly. In a randomized controlled trial with 165 students, those who engaged in targeted dialogue with the AI Peer achieved post-test scores that were, on average, 10.5 percentage points higher - with over 20 percentage points higher normalized gain - than a control group that discussed physics history. Qualitative feedback indicated that 91% of the treatment group's AI interactions were rated as helpful. Furthermore, by comparing student performance on pre- and post-test questions about the same concept, along with experts' annotations of the AI interactions, we find initial evidence suggesting the improvement in performance does not depend on the correctness of the AI. With further research, the AI Peer paradigm described here could open new possibilities for how we learn, adapt to, and grow with AI.
Background Advances in machine learning (ML) models have increased the capability of researchers to detect vaccine hesitancy in social media using Natural Language Processing (NLP). A considerable volume of research has identified the persistence of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in discourse shared on various social media platforms. Methods Our objective in this study was to conduct a systematic review of research employing sentiment analysis or stance detection to study discourse towards COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination spread on Twitter (officially known as X since 2023). Following registration in the PROSPERO international registry of systematic reviews, we searched papers published from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2023 that used supervised machine learning to assess COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy through stance detection or sentiment analysis on Twitter. We categorized the studies according to a taxonomy of five dimensions: tweet sample selection approach, self-reported study type, classification typology, annotation codebook definitions, and interpretation of results. We analyzed if studies using stance detection report different hesitancy trends than those using sentiment analysis by examining how COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is measured, and whether efforts were made to avoid measurement bias. Results Our review found that measurement bias is widely prevalent in studies employing supervised machine learning to analyze sentiment and stance toward COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination. The reporting errors are sufficiently serious that they hinder the generalisability and interpretation of these studies to understanding whether individual opinions communicate reluctance to vaccinate against SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion Improving the reporting of NLP methods is crucial to addressing knowledge gaps in vaccine hesitancy discourse.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in diverse scenarios, the extent to which they could tacitly spread misinformation emerges as a critical safety concern. Current research primarily evaluates LLMs on explicit false statements, overlooking how misinformation often manifests subtly as unchallenged premises in real-world interactions. We curated EchoMist, the first comprehensive benchmark for implicit misinformation, where false assumptions are embedded in the query to LLMs. EchoMist targets circulated, harmful, and ever-evolving implicit misinformation from diverse sources, including realistic human-AI conversations and social media interactions. Through extensive empirical studies on 15 state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that current models perform alarmingly poorly on this task, often failing to detect false premises and generating counterfactual explanations. We also investigate two mitigation methods, i.e., Self-Alert and RAG, to enhance LLMs' capability to counter implicit misinformation. Our findings indicate that EchoMist remains a persistent challenge and underscore the critical need to safeguard against the risk of implicit misinformation.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are leading a new technological revolution as one of the most promising research streams toward artificial general intelligence. The scaling of these models, accomplished by increasing the number of parameters and the magnitude of the training datasets, has been linked to various so-called emergent abilities that were previously unobserved. These emergent abilities, ranging from advanced reasoning and in-context learning to coding and problem-solving, have sparked an intense scientific debate: Are they truly emergent, or do they simply depend on external factors, such as training dynamics, the type of problems, or the chosen metric? What underlying mechanism causes them? Despite their transformative potential, emergent abilities remain poorly understood, leading to misconceptions about their definition, nature, predictability, and implications. In this work, we shed light on emergent abilities by conducting a comprehensive review of the phenomenon, addressing both its scientific underpinnings and real-world consequences. We first critically analyze existing definitions, exposing inconsistencies in conceptualizing emergent abilities. We then explore the conditions under which these abilities appear, evaluating the role of scaling laws, task complexity, pre-training loss, quantization, and prompting strategies. Our review extends beyond traditional LLMs and includes Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), which leverage reinforcement learning and inference-time search to amplify reasoning and self-reflection. However, emergence is not inherently positive. As AI systems gain autonomous reasoning capabilities, they also develop harmful behaviors, including deception, manipulation, and reward hacking. We highlight growing concerns about safety and governance, emphasizing the need for better evaluation frameworks and regulatory oversight.
Understanding the structure of neural network loss surfaces, particularly the emergence of low-loss tunnels, is critical for advancing neural network theory and practice. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to directly embed loss tunnels into the loss landscape of neural networks. Exploring the properties of these loss tunnels offers new insights into their length and structure and sheds light on some common misconceptions. We then apply our approach to Bayesian neural networks, where we improve subspace inference by identifying pitfalls and proposing a more natural prior that better guides the sampling procedure.
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) enhance highway safety by improving environmental perception and reducing human errors. However, misconceptions, trust issues, and knowledge gaps hinder widespread adoption. This study examines driver perceptions, knowledge sources, and usage patterns of ADAS in passenger vehicles. A nationwide survey collected data from a diverse sample of U.S. drivers. Machine learning models predicted ADAS adoption, with SHAP (SHapley Additive Explanations) identifying key influencing factors. Findings indicate that higher trust levels correlate with increased ADAS usage, while concerns about reliability remain a barrier. Specific features, such as Forward Collision Warning and Driver Monitoring Systems, significantly influence adoption likelihood. Demographic factors (age, gender) and driving habits (experience, frequency) also shape ADAS acceptance. Findings emphasize the influence of socioeconomic, demographic, and behavioral factors on ADAS adoption, offering guidance for automakers, policymakers, and safety advocates to improve awareness, trust, and usability.
As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly prevalent in education, a fundamental challenge emerges: how can we verify if an AI truly understands how students think and reason? Traditional evaluation methods like measuring learning gains require lengthy studies confounded by numerous variables. We present a novel evaluation framework based on a two-phase Turing-like test. In Phase 1, students provide open-ended responses to questions, revealing natural misconceptions. In Phase 2, both AI and human experts, conditioned on each student's specific mistakes, generate distractors for new related questions. By analyzing whether students select AI-generated distractors at rates similar to human expert-generated ones, we can validate if the AI models student cognition. We prove this evaluation must be conditioned on individual responses - unconditioned approaches merely target common misconceptions. Through rigorous statistical sampling theory, we establish precise requirements for high-confidence validation. Our research positions conditioned distractor generation as a probe into an AI system's fundamental ability to model student thinking - a capability that enables adapting tutoring, feedback, and assessments to each student's specific needs.
Knowledge tracing (KT) in programming education presents unique challenges due to the complexity of coding tasks and the diverse methods students use to solve problems. Although students' questions often contain valuable signals about their understanding and misconceptions, traditional KT models often neglect to incorporate these questions as inputs to address these challenges. This paper introduces SQKT (Students' Question-based Knowledge Tracing), a knowledge tracing model that leverages students' questions and automatically extracted skill information to enhance the accuracy of predicting students' performance on subsequent problems in programming education. Our method creates semantically rich embeddings that capture not only the surface-level content of the questions but also the student's mastery level and conceptual understanding. Experimental results demonstrate SQKT's superior performance in predicting student completion across various Python programming courses of differing difficulty levels. In in-domain experiments, SQKT achieved a 33.1\% absolute improvement in AUC compared to baseline models. The model also exhibited robust generalization capabilities in cross-domain settings, effectively addressing data scarcity issues in advanced programming courses. SQKT can be used to tailor educational content to individual learning needs and design adaptive learning systems in computer science education.
From self-supervised, vision-only models to contrastive visual-language frameworks, computational pathology has rapidly evolved in recent years. Generative AI "co-pilots" now demonstrate the ability to mine subtle, sub-visual tissue cues across the cellular-to-pathology spectrum, generate comprehensive reports, and respond to complex user queries. The scale of data has surged dramatically, growing from tens to millions of multi-gigapixel tissue images, while the number of trainable parameters in these models has risen to several billion. The critical question remains: how will this new wave of generative and multi-purpose AI transform clinical diagnostics? In this article, we explore the true potential of these innovations and their integration into clinical practice. We review the rapid progress of foundation models in pathology, clarify their applications and significance. More precisely, we examine the very definition of foundational models, identifying what makes them foundational, general, or multipurpose, and assess their impact on computational pathology. Additionally, we address the unique challenges associated with their development and evaluation. These models have demonstrated exceptional predictive and generative capabilities, but establishing global benchmarks is crucial to enhancing evaluation standards and fostering their widespread clinical adoption. In computational pathology, the broader impact of frontier AI ultimately depends on widespread adoption and societal acceptance. While direct public exposure is not strictly necessary, it remains a powerful tool for dispelling misconceptions, building trust, and securing regulatory support.