Ziyu Yao

Murong Yue, Wenhan Lyu, Jennifer Suh et al.

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is essential in mathematics education, fostering deeper learning through the exchange of ideas. Yet, classrooms often lack the resources, time, and peer dynamics needed to sustain productive CPS. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue to enhance CPS in mathematical education. We designed and developed MathVC, a multi-persona LLM simulated virtual classroom platform to facilitate CPS in mathematics. MathVC combines a meta planning controller that monitors CPS stages-sense-making, team organization, planning, execution, validation, and predicts the next speaker, with a persona simulation stack that encodes mathematical thinking via a task schema and error-injected persona schemas seeded from teacher-specified misconceptions. We evaluated MathVC with 14 U.S. middle schoolers. Students reported constructive interaction and reaching shared solutions, describing gains in engagement, motivation, and confidence through diverse perspectives, immediate scaffolding, and human-like fallibility. Our findings also provide insights into simulating peers via LLM-based technologies for collaboration to support learning.

Qineng Wang, Chen Qian, Xiaochang Li et al.

Network traffic refers to the amount of data being sent and received over the internet or any system that connects computers. Analyzing and understanding network traffic is vital for improving network security and management. However, the analysis of network traffic is challenging due to the diverse nature of data packets, which often feature heterogeneous headers and encrypted payloads lacking semantics. To capture the latent semantics of traffic, a few studies have adopted pre-training techniques based on the Transformer encoder or decoder to learn the representations from massive traffic data. However, these methods typically excel in traffic understanding (classification) or traffic generation tasks. To address this issue, we develop Lens, a foundation model for network traffic that leverages the T5 architecture to learn the pre-trained representations from large-scale unlabeled data. Harnessing the strength of the encoder-decoder framework, which captures the global information while preserving the generative ability, our model can better learn the representations from raw data. To further enhance pre-training effectiveness, we design a novel loss that combines three distinct tasks: Masked Span Prediction (MSP), Packet Order Prediction (POP), and Homologous Traffic Prediction (HTP). Evaluation results across various benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed Lens outperforms the baselines in most downstream tasks related to both traffic understanding and generation. Notably, it also requires much less labeled data for fine-tuning compared to current methods.