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Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is swiftly cementing its role as an indispensable tool for students transitioning from K-12 to higher education and professional spheres. Yet, harnessing its full potential requires more than mere familiarity. Students must be equipped with the skills to engage with AI both productively and ethically. Left unchecked, AI usage can pose risks, especially if students lack proper guidance or understanding of their actions. Moreover, effective interaction with AI necessitates skills in prompt engineering to yield desired outcomes. Sidekick Academy is a digital online platform where students can safely experiment with and learn about AI. This article delves into the genesis of Sidekick Academy, offering a glimpse into its lessons on how to use AI and complex debate on ethical use. It also sheds light on the academy&#39;s &quot;sandbox&quot; - a secure space for students to explore AI without jeopardizing their safety or privacy.

AAAI 2024

AI, Ethics, and Education: The Pioneering Path of Sidekick Academy

generative ai

app: education

ethics

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is swiftly cementing its role as an indispensable tool for students transitioning from K-12 to higher education and professional spheres. Yet, harnessing its full potential requires more than mere familiarity. Students must be equipped with the skills to engage with AI both productively and ethically. Left unchecked, AI usage can pose risks, especially if students lack proper guidance or understanding of their actions. Moreover, effective interaction with AI necessitates skills in prompt engineering to yield desired outcomes. Sidekick Academy is a digital online platform where students can safely experiment with and learn about AI. This article delves into the genesis of Sidekick Academy, offering a glimpse into its lessons on how to use AI and complex debate on ethical use. It also sheds light on the academy's "sandbox" - a secure space for students to explore AI without jeopardizing their safety or privacy.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

The rapid progress of Transformers in artificial intelligence has come at the cost of increased resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions due to growing model sizes. Prior work suggests using pretrained small models to improve training efficiency, but this approach may not be suitable for new model structures. On the other hand, training from scratch can be slow, and progressively stacking layers often fails to achieve significant acceleration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called Apollo, which prepares lessons for expanding operations by learning high-layer functionality during training of low layers. Our approach involves low-value-prioritized sampling (LVPS) to train different depths and weight sharing to facilitate efficient expansion. We also introduce an interpolation method for stable model depth extension. Experiments demonstrate that Apollo achieves state-of-the-art acceleration ratios, even rivaling methods using pretrained models, making it a universal and efficient solution for training deep models while reducing time, financial, and environmental costs.

Preparing Lessons for Progressive Training on Language Models

Game theory, as an analytical tool, is frequently utilized to analyze human behavior in social science research. With the high alignment between the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and humans, a promising research direction is to employ LLMs as substitutes for humans in game experiments, enabling social science research. However, despite numerous empirical researches on the combination of LLMs and game theory, the capability boundaries of LLMs in game theory remain unclear. In this research, we endeavor to systematically analyze LLMs in the context of game theory. Specifically, rationality, as the fundamental principle of game theory, serves as the metric for evaluating players' behavior --- building a clear desire, refining belief about uncertainty, and taking optimal actions. Accordingly, we select three classical games (dictator game, Rock-Paper-Scissors, and ring-network game) to analyze to what extent LLMs can achieve rationality in these three aspects. The experimental results indicate that even the current state-of-the-art LLM (GPT-4) exhibits substantial disparities compared to humans in game theory. For instance, LLMs struggle to build desires based on uncommon preferences, fail to refine belief from many simple patterns, and may overlook or modify refined belief when taking actions. Therefore, we consider that introducing LLMs into game experiments in the field of social science should be approached with greater caution.

Can Large Language Models Serve as Rational Players in Game Theory? A Systematic Analysis | VIDEO

This paper proposes SAT-based techniques to calculate a specific normal form of a given finite mathematical structure (model). The normal form is obtained by permuting the domain elements so that the representation of the structure is lexicographically smallest possible. Such a normal form is of interest to mathematicians as it enables easy cataloging of algebraic structures. In particular, two structures are isomorphic precisely when their normal forms are the same. This form is also natural to inspect as mathematicians have been using it routinely for many decades.

We develop a novel approach where a SAT solver is used in a black-box fashion to compute the smallest representative. The approach constructs the representative gradually and searches the space of possible isomorphisms, requiring a small number of variables. However, the approach may lead to a large number of SAT calls and therefore we devise propagation techniques to reduce this number. The paper focuses on finite structures with a single binary operation (encompassing groups, semigroups, etc.). However, the approach is generalizable to arbitrary finite structures. We provide an implementation of the proposed algorithm and evaluate it on a variety of algebraic structures.

SAT-Based Techniques for Lexicographically Smallest Finite Models | VIDEO

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have found widespread application in modeling graph data across diverse domains. While GNNs excel in scenarios where the testing data shares the distribution of their training counterparts (in distribution, ID), they often exhibit incorrect predictions when confronted with samples from an unfamiliar distribution (out-of-distribution, OOD). To identify and reject OOD samples with GNNs, recent studies have explored graph OOD detection, often focusing on training a specific model or modifying the data on top of a well-trained GNN. Despite their effectiveness, these methods come with heavy training resources and costs, as they need to optimize the GNN-based models on training data. Moreover, their reliance on modifying the original GNNs and accessing training data further restricts their universality. To this end, this paper introduces a method to detect \textbf{G}raph \textbf{O}ut-\textbf{o}f-\textbf{D}istribution \textbf{A}t \textbf{T}est-time (namely GOODAT), a \textit{data-centric}, \textit{unsupervised}, and \textit{plug-and-play} solution that operates independently of training data and modifications of GNN architecture. With a lightweight graph masker, GOODAT can learn informative subgraphs from test samples, enabling the capture of distinct graph patterns between OOD and ID samples. To optimize the graph masker, we meticulously design three unsupervised objective functions based on the graph information bottleneck principle, motivating the masker to capture compact yet informative subgraphs for OOD detection. Comprehensive evaluations confirm that our GOODAT method outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks across a variety of real-world datasets.

GOODAT: Towards Test-Time Graph Out-of-Distribution Detection | VIDEO

In Environment Design, one interested party seeks to affect another agent's decisions by applying changes to the environment. Most research on planning environment (re)design assumes the interested party's objective is to facilitate the recognition of goals and plans, and search over the space of environment modifications to find the minimal set of changes that simplify those tasks and optimise a particular metric. This search space is usually intractable, so existing approaches devise metric-dependent pruning techniques for performing search more efficiently. This results in approaches that are not able to generalise across different objectives and/or metrics. In this paper, we argue that the interested party could have objectives and metrics that are not necessarily related to recognising agents' goals or plans. Thus, to generalise the task of Planning Environment Redesign, we develop a general environment redesign approach that is metric-agnostic and leverages recent research on top-quality planning to efficiently redesign planning environments according to any interested party's objective and metric. Experiments over a set of environment redesign benchmarks show that our general approach outperforms existing approaches when using well-known metrics, such as facilitating the recognition of goals, as well as its effectiveness when solving environment redesign tasks that optimise a novel set of different metrics.

Generalising Planning Environment Redesign

For many combinatorial optimization problems, the translation to SAT introduces a substantial-size blow-up, constraining the feasible instance size. To address this limitation, algorithmic frameworks like SLIM have emerged, leveraging multiple local SAT calls to enhance global heuristic solutions. The performance of such algorithmic frameworks heavily relies on critical parameters, including the size of selected local instances and the time allocated per SAT call.

This paper presents a comprehensive study of configuration techniques for the TW-SLIM approach, which tackles the problem of computing small-width tree decompositions for large graphs using the SLIM paradigm. We explore various approaches for configuring TW-SLIM, including offline learning on training data and real-time configurations. These methods can notably improve over the default TW-SLIM configuration when suitably adapted to the specific multi-SAT calls setting with dynamically changing problem instances.

Building upon these insights, we propose the iterative cascading policy—a novel hybrid technique uniquely combining offline and real-time methods. The iterative cascading policy employs a pool of 30 configurations obtained through clustering-based offline methods, deploying them in dynamic cascades across multiple rounds. In each round, the 30 configurations are tested according to the cascading ordering, and the best tree decomposition is retained for further improvement, with the option to adjust the following ordering of cascades. This iterative approach significantly enhances the performance of TW-SLIM beyond baseline results, even within varying global timeouts. This highlights the effectiveness of the proposed iterative cascading policy in enhancing the efficiency and efficacy of complex algorithmic frameworks like TW-SLIM.

SAT-Based Tree Decomposition with Iterative Cascading Policy Selection

A fundamental challenge of bipartite graph representation learning is how to extract informative node embeddings. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) is a promising paradigm to address this challenge. Most recent bipartite graph SSL methods are based on contrastive learning which learns embeddings by discriminating positive and negative node pairs. Contrastive learning usually requires a large number of negative node pairs, which could lead to computational burden and semantic errors. In this paper, we introduce a novel synergistic representation learning model (STERLING) to learn node embeddings without negative node pairs. STERLING preserves the unique local and global synergies in bipartite graphs. The local synergies are captured by maximizing the similarity of the inter-type and intra-type positive node pairs, and the global synergies are captured by maximizing the mutual information of co-clusters. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that STERLING could improve the connectivity between different node types in the embedding space. Extensive empirical evaluation on various benchmark datasets and tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of STERLING for extracting node embeddings.

Sterling: Synergistic Representation Learning on Bipartite Graphs

One approach to probabilistic inference involves counting the number of models of a given Boolean formula. Here, we are interested in inferences involving higher-order objects, i.e., functions. We study the following task: Given a Boolean specification between a set of inputs and outputs, count the number of functions of inputs such that the specification is met. Such functions are called Skolem functions.

We are motivated by the recent development of scalable approaches to Boolean function synthesis. This stands in relation to our problem analogously to the relationship between Boolean satisfiability and the model counting problem. Yet, counting Skolem functions poses considerable new challenges. From the complexity-theoretic standpoint, counting Skolem functions is not only #P-hard; it is quite unlikely to have an FPRAS (Fully Polynomial Randomized Approximation Scheme) as the problem of synthesizing a Skolem function remains challenging, even given access to an NP oracle.

The primary contribution of this work is the first algorithm, SkolemFC, that computes the number of Skolem functions. SkolemFC relies on technical connections between counting functions and propositional model counting: our algorithm makes a linear number of calls to an approximate model counter and computes an estimate of the number of Skolem functions with theoretical guarantees. Our prototype displays impressive scalability, handling benchmarks comparably to state-of-the-art Skolem function synthesis engines, even though counting all such functions ostensibly poses a greater challenge than synthesizing a single function.

An Approximate Skolem Function Counter

In an age where Large Language Models (LLMs) expedite the generation of text, the skills for critically evaluating and creating meaningful text using these models are often lacking. To help classroom teachers address this, we introduce Prompty, a specialized teaching tool co-designed to facilitate both critical and effective use of LLMs. Prompty serves multiple learning goals: it allows students to critically evaluate text generated by LLMs, aids in their writing practice, and provides a deeper understanding of how LLMs function—all within a student-friendly environment secured by essential guardrails. Prompty was co-designed in collaboration with high school teachers as part of CRAFT, an initiative by Stanford University to promote AI literacy. It was pilot-tested in a high school English class to serve as an AI writing assistant, focusing on the critical evaluation of machine-generated text. This trial yielded preliminary evidence that attests to the tool's effectiveness in fulfilling its educational goals. The findings from the pilot study indicate that easy-to-use tools like Prompty have great potential. These tools can be adapted to fit the goals of individual teachers. They can help in achieving subject-specific learning goals while serving as an effective way to teach AI concepts in high school.

From Consumers to Critical Users: Prompty, an AI Literacy Tool for High School Students

Many learning tasks in Artificial Intelligence (AI) require dealing with graph data, ranging from biology and chemistry to finance and education. As powerful learning tools for graphs,  graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various graph-related applications.  Despite the significant accomplishments of GNNs, recent studies have highlighted that their efficiency and effectiveness face significant challenges such as adversarial robustness and scalability, which are fundamentally linked to data. While major attention has been devoted to improving GNNs from the model perspective, the potential of directly enhancing data has often been overlooked.  It underscores a critical gap in GNN research---while model improvements are undoubtedly important, we also need to recognize and address the data-related factors contributing to the challenges. Hence, \textbf{my research is to investigate solutions for these challenges from the data perspective, employing strategies such as data characterization, reduction, augmentation, transformation, and detection.

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Preparing Lessons for Progressive Training on Language Models

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‘What Do Children Think About AI?’: Insights and Educational Implications from Primary School Students’ Perceptions of AI

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