Niv Efron

Irina Jurenka, Markus Kunesch, Kevin R. McKee et al.

A major challenge facing the world is the provision of equitable and universal access to quality education. Recent advances in generative AI (gen AI) have created excitement about the potential of new technologies to offer a personal tutor for every learner and a teaching assistant for every teacher. The full extent of this dream, however, has not yet materialised. We argue that this is primarily due to the difficulties with verbalising pedagogical intuitions into gen AI prompts and the lack of good evaluation practices, reinforced by the challenges in defining excellent pedagogy. Here we present our work collaborating with learners and educators to translate high level principles from learning science into a pragmatic set of seven diverse educational benchmarks, spanning quantitative, qualitative, automatic and human evaluations; and to develop a new set of fine-tuning datasets to improve the pedagogical capabilities of Gemini, introducing LearnLM-Tutor. Our evaluations show that LearnLM-Tutor is consistently preferred over a prompt tuned Gemini by educators and learners on a number of pedagogical dimensions. We hope that this work can serve as a first step towards developing a comprehensive educational evaluation framework, and that this can enable rapid progress within the AI and EdTech communities towards maximising the positive impact of gen AI in education.

Mohit Agarwal, Mimi Sun, Chaitanya Kamath et al.

Supporting the health and well-being of dynamic populations around the world requires governmental agencies, organizations and researchers to understand and reason over complex relationships between human behavior and local contexts in order to identify high-risk groups and strategically allocate limited resources. Traditional approaches to these classes of problems often entail developing manually curated, task-specific features and models to represent human behavior and the natural and built environment, which can be challenging to adapt to new, or even, related tasks. To address this, we introduce a Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM) that aims to capture the relationships between diverse data modalities and is applicable to a broad range of geospatial tasks. We first construct a geo-indexed dataset for postal codes and counties across the United States, capturing rich aggregated information on human behavior from maps, busyness, and aggregated search trends, and environmental factors such as weather and air quality. We then model this data and the complex relationships between locations using a graph neural network, producing embeddings that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks using relatively simple models. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by benchmarking it on 27 downstream tasks spanning three distinct domains: health indicators, socioeconomic factors, and environmental measurements. The approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 27 geospatial interpolation tasks, and on 25 out of the 27 extrapolation and super-resolution tasks. We combined the PDFM with a state-of-the-art forecasting foundation model, TimesFM, to predict unemployment and poverty, achieving performance that surpasses fully supervised forecasting. The full set of embeddings and sample code are publicly available for researchers.

LearnLM Team, Abhinit Modi, Aditya Srikanth Veerubhotla et al. · amazon-science, cmu

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform education, but the research community lacks a robust, general benchmark to evaluate AI models for learning. To assess state-of-the-art support for educational use cases, we ran an "arena for learning" where educators and pedagogy experts conduct blind, head-to-head, multi-turn comparisons of leading AI models. In particular, $N = 189$ educators drew from their experience to role-play realistic learning use cases, interacting with two models sequentially, after which $N = 206$ experts judged which model better supported the user's learning goals. The arena evaluated a slate of state-of-the-art models: Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and OpenAI o3. Excluding ties, experts preferred Gemini 2.5 Pro in 73.2% of these match-ups -- ranking it first overall in the arena. Gemini 2.5 Pro also demonstrated markedly higher performance across key principles of good pedagogy. Altogether, these results position Gemini 2.5 Pro as a leading model for learning.

Mimi Sun, Chaitanya Kamath, Mohit Agarwal et al.

Aggregated relative search frequencies offer a unique composite signal reflecting people's habits, concerns, interests, intents, and general information needs, which are not found in other readily available datasets. Temporal search trends have been successfully used in time series modeling across a variety of domains such as infectious diseases, unemployment rates, and retail sales. However, most existing applications require curating specialized datasets of individual keywords, queries, or query clusters, and the search data need to be temporally aligned with the outcome variable of interest. We propose a novel approach for generating an aggregated and anonymized representation of search interest as foundation features at the community level for geospatial modeling. We benchmark these features using spatial datasets across multiple domains. In zip codes with a population greater than 3000 that cover over 95% of the contiguous US population, our models for predicting missing values in a 20% set of holdout counties achieve an average $R^2$ score of 0.74 across 21 health variables, and 0.80 across 6 demographic and environmental variables. Our results demonstrate that these search features can be used for spatial predictions without strict temporal alignment, and that the resulting models outperform spatial interpolation and state of the art methods using satellite imagery features.

Aaron Bell, Amit Aides, Amr Helmy et al.

Geospatial data offers immense potential for understanding our planet. However, the sheer volume and diversity of this data along with its varied resolutions, timescales, and sparsity pose significant challenges for thorough analysis and interpretation. This paper introduces Earth AI, a family of geospatial AI models and agentic reasoning that enables significant advances in our ability to unlock novel and profound insights into our planet. This approach is built upon foundation models across three key domains--Planet-scale Imagery, Population, and Environment--and an intelligent Gemini-powered reasoning engine. We present rigorous benchmarks showcasing the power and novel capabilities of our foundation models and validate that when used together, they provide complementary value for geospatial inference and their synergies unlock superior predictive capabilities. To handle complex, multi-step queries, we developed a Gemini-powered agent that jointly reasons over our multiple foundation models along with large geospatial data sources and tools. On a new benchmark of real-world crisis scenarios, our agent demonstrates the ability to deliver critical and timely insights, effectively bridging the gap between raw geospatial data and actionable understanding.