Anh Dang

Chau Nguyen, Phuong Nguyen, Thanh Tran et al.

The Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE) is held annually to encourage advancements in the automatic processing of legal texts. Processing legal documents is challenging due to the intricate structure and meaning of legal language. In this paper, we outline our strategies for tackling Task 2, Task 3, and Task 4 in the COLIEE 2023 competition. Our approach involved utilizing appropriate state-of-the-art deep learning methods, designing methods based on domain characteristics observation, and applying meticulous engineering practices and methodologies to the competition. As a result, our performance in these tasks has been outstanding, with first places in Task 2 and Task 3, and promising results in Task 4. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Nguyen2015/CAPTAIN-COLIEE2023/tree/coliee2023.

Hui Wang, Anh Dang, Zihao Wu et al.

The advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) provide opportunities to enrich educational experiences, but also raise concerns about academic integrity. Many educators have expressed anxiety and hesitation in integrating GenAI in their teaching practices, and are in needs of recommendations and guidance from their institutions that can support them to incorporate GenAI in their classrooms effectively. In order to respond to higher educators' needs, this study aims to explore how universities and educators respond and adapt to the development of GenAI in their academic contexts by analyzing academic policies and guidelines established by top-ranked U.S. universities regarding the use of GenAI, especially ChatGPT. Data sources include academic policies, statements, guidelines, and relevant resources provided by the top 100 universities in the U.S. Results show that the majority of these universities adopt an open but cautious approach towards GenAI. Primary concerns lie in ethical usage, accuracy, and data privacy. Most universities actively respond and provide diverse types of resources, such as syllabus templates, workshops, shared articles, and one-on-one consultations focusing on a range of topics: general technical introduction, ethical concerns, pedagogical applications, preventive strategies, data privacy, limitations, and detective tools. The findings provide four practical pedagogical implications for educators in teaching practices: accept its presence, align its use with learning objectives, evolve curriculum to prevent misuse, and adopt multifaceted evaluation strategies rather than relying on AI detectors. Two recommendations are suggested for educators in policy making: establish discipline-specific policies and guidelines, and manage sensitive information carefully.

Daniil Ignatev, Nan Li, Hugh Mee Wong et al.

This system paper presents the DeMeVa team's approaches to the third edition of the Learning with Disagreements shared task (LeWiDi 2025; Leonardelli et al., 2025). We explore two directions: in-context learning (ICL) with large language models, where we compare example sampling strategies; and label distribution learning (LDL) methods with RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019b), where we evaluate several fine-tuning methods. Our contributions are twofold: (1) we show that ICL can effectively predict annotator-specific annotations (perspectivist annotations), and that aggregating these predictions into soft labels yields competitive performance; and (2) we argue that LDL methods are promising for soft label predictions and merit further exploration by the perspectivist community.

Anh Dang, Reza Babanezhad, Sharan Vaswani

Stochastic heavy ball momentum (SHB) is commonly used to train machine learning models, and often provides empirical improvements over stochastic gradient descent. By primarily focusing on strongly-convex quadratics, we aim to better understand the theoretical advantage of SHB and subsequently improve the method. For strongly-convex quadratics, Kidambi et al. (2018) show that SHB (with a mini-batch of size $1$) cannot attain accelerated convergence, and hence has no theoretical benefit over SGD. They conjecture that the practical gain of SHB is a by-product of using larger mini-batches. We first substantiate this claim by showing that SHB can attain an accelerated rate when the mini-batch size is larger than a threshold $b^*$ that depends on the condition number $κ$. Specifically, we prove that with the same step-size and momentum parameters as in the deterministic setting, SHB with a sufficiently large mini-batch size results in an $O\left(\exp(-\frac{T}{\sqrtκ}) + σ\right)$ convergence when measuring the distance to the optimal solution in the $\ell_2$ norm, where $T$ is the number of iterations and $σ^2$ is the variance in the stochastic gradients. We prove a lower-bound which demonstrates that a $κ$ dependence in $b^*$ is necessary. To ensure convergence to the minimizer, we design a noise-adaptive multi-stage algorithm that results in an $O\left(\exp\left(-\frac{T}{\sqrtκ}\right) + \fracσ{\sqrt{T}}\right)$ rate when measuring the distance to the optimal solution in the $\ell_2$ norm. We also consider the general smooth, strongly-convex setting and propose the first noise-adaptive SHB variant that converges to the minimizer at an $O(\exp(-\frac{T}κ) + \frac{σ^2}{T})$ rate when measuring the distance to the optimal solution in the squared $\ell_2$ norm. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.