Adaptive Learning

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Period ending 2026-09-07

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A weekly snapshot of new work published in Adaptive Learning.

33 papers

Latest in Adaptive Learning

Sep 2, 2026cs.AI

Structure and Implementation of New Practical English Textbooks Driven by Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is changing the form of applied English materials from fixed paper sequences to adaptive learning systems that can diagnose learners, recommend tasks, and provide formative feedback. This paper studies the structure and application of a new practical English textbook driven by artificial intelligence. A five-layer architecture is proposed: knowledge mapping, learner profiling, task generation, feedback orchestration, and teacher-side governance. A prototype was tested on 186 non-English-major undergraduates for eight weeks of teaching. Compared with a static digital textbook, the proposed system increased the unit completion accuracy from 72.4% to 84.9%, raised the average score for speaking tasks by 10.8 points, and reduced the teacher's correction time by 31.6%. Therefore, an AI-driven textbook can maintain the stability of the curriculum while providing personalised learning paths, rich practice materials and traceable classroom data.
Ya Wang, Lei Zhang, Xueguang Yang +1
Aug 30, 2026cs.RO

Self-Aware Active Learning Enables Continual Improvement in Autonomous Driving

Learning-based autonomous driving (AD) systems can perform reliably in familiar conditions, yet rare distribution shifts and long-tail events remain a major source of abrupt failure. A central limitation is that most agents learn primarily from passive experience and lack mechanisms to estimate when their competence is insufficient, seek timely assistance, and convert safety-critical encounters into targeted improvement. Here we present self-aware guided exploration (SAGE), an active learning framework for post-training adaptation in AD. SAGE learns a predictive world model that generates two online intrinsic signals: fear, which estimates short-horizon predictive risk and model uncertainty, and curiosity, which measures novelty through prediction error. Curiosity adaptively calibrates the intervention threshold for fear, allowing the agent to regulate risk in a context-dependent manner. When predicted fear exceeds this adaptive threshold, the agent transfers control to an expert or fallback policy and uses the resulting takeover trajectories for focused imitation learning. In parallel, fear is integrated into policy optimization and evaluation as a safety-oriented constraint to reduce performance regressions during adaptation. We evaluate SAGE in simulated route-transfer tasks, Waymo-based logged driving scenarios, CARLA occlusion hazards, and real-world mobile robot navigation tests. Across these settings, SAGE improves robustness in novel and safety-critical scenarios, reduces safety violations, and maintains task performance comparable to strong baseline policies. These results suggest that agents can improve after initial training by estimating the limits of their competence, requesting guidance when needed, and learning selectively from rare high-value events.
Dong Hu, Chao Huang, Carman K. M. Lee +1
Aug 8, 2026cs.LG

Information Routing across Batch Boundaries: Memory--Batch Tradeoffs in Lipschitz Bandits

Adaptive learning needs both a state that preserves what observations imply and opportunities to act on that state. We study this width--depth tradeoff in stochastic Lipschitz bandits. After each pull, the learner retains at most WW bits of live reward-dependent state and organizes its pulls into at most BB committed batches. For W≳dlog⁡(eT)W\gtrsim_d\log(eT), we characterize minimax expected pseudo-regret up to logarithmic factors; the lower bounds hold for every WW. Besides the classical sequential and unrestricted-memory batch costs, the frontier contains the new penalty Td+2d+3(1+(B−1)W)−1d(d+3),T^{\frac{d+2}{d+3}} \bigl(1+(B-1)W\bigr)^{-\frac1{d(d+3)}}, proving that state width and update depth are not interchangeable. The interaction is an information-routing constraint: at regional scale ss, low regret forces the committed action transcript to encode Θd(s−d)Θ_d(s^{-d}) regional decisions, while the collected boundary states carry at most (B−1)W(B-1)W bits of entropy. Matching policies stream and erase verification statistics while retaining a mask of a safe active set, either in memory or fragment by fragment. The theorem recovers the full-dimensional worst-case batch-only frontier and logarithmic-memory achievability in the fully sequential specialization; static batch boundaries match predictable adaptive ones.
Zicheng Lyu, Zengfeng Huang
Aug 1, 2026cs.CL

Distill Where You Fail: Recovering Learning Signals of Negative RL-Groups from Adaptive Teacher Guidance

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs). While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, it suffers from sparse reward signals and loses gradients entirely when all responses within a group receive identical rewards. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers a natural remedy by providing dense, token-level supervision from a teacher model. However, naively combining GRPO with OPD leads to degraded performance, due to three underlying causes: not all samples benefit from distillation; fitting too quickly to the teacher undermines the exploratory capacity of RL; and OPD's advantages are asymmetric, suppressing most tokens. To address these challenges, we propose RSTG (Recovering Learning Signals via Adaptive Teacher Guidance), which applies distillation selectively and precisely where it matters most. At the sample level, OPD is restricted to negative zero-variance prompts with each sample weighted by the teacher's confidence score. At the token level, distillation targets only tokens with high student entropy or large teacher-student divergence. We further augment training with SFT on correct trajectories generated by the teacher model, injecting positive gradient signals where RL yields none. Experiments demonstrate that RSTG substantially outperforms naive GRPO+OPD by +4.02% on math and +3.05% on code.
Zhuowen Han, Jinwei Xiao, Zhengxi Lu +9
Jul 29, 2026cs.RO

Self-Adaptive Learning and Model Predictive Control for Tracking Unknown Dynamics with No Regret

We propose a self-adaptive online learning for control method for tracking unknown target dynamics. The target dynamics can exhibit switching behavior, particularly, a mixture of structured, random, and/or adversarial motion. Such challenging target tracking scenarios arise in applications of dynamic mapping, traffic control, and pursuit evasion, where robots need to track, pursue, or avoid collision with moving landmarks, objects, humans, etc., whose dynamics are unknown. Our method simultaneously learns multiple predictors from scratch, via self-supervised, one-shot, and computationally efficient learning, and adaptively selects the best one to match the observed target behavior. The method enjoys finite-time near-optimality guarantees in expectation, characterized as a function of the learning error of the target dynamics and the frequency that the target dynamics switch. In the absence of both error and switching, the method asymptotically matches the optimal non-causal control policy that knows a priori the target dynamics, i.e., the method enjoys no regret in expectation. In the presence of learning errors and switching, the method degrades gracefully, \eg when there are errors and no switching, the average regret is proportional to the average learning error and switching times. To prove these guarantees, a novel technical approach is required compared to the existing works that employ RFF-based online learning. We validate our method in Crazyflie simulations and hardware experiments, across target trajectories that vary from structured to random to adversarial, in comparison to non-stochastic, kernel-based, and neural-network-based methods for online learning.
Atharva Navsalkar, Hongyu Zhou, Vasileios Tzoumas
Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

HGeo-TopoMap: Boosting Topological Mapping with Hierarchical Geometric Priors

Topological maps are key outputs of autonomous driving perception systems, delivering essential road information for path planning. They identify instances such as centerlines and traffic signs, along with their connectivity relationships. Due to the lack of explicit markings for centerlines in real-world environments, the detection of centerline instances remains a significant challenge. To tackle this problem, we propose HGeo-TopoMap, which leverages an explicit prior map and implicit spatial relations to hierarchically boost topological mapping. First, a geometric adaptive learning module is designed for the road structure map obtained via inverse perspective mapping. This module discretely encodes semantic and spatial features from the map, followed by a prior-mask attention mechanism that selectively focuses on informative regions. Then, a geometric consistency learning module is devised, which leverages the geometric properties and spatial relationships of centerlines. Built on the geometry-aware decoder, it enforces spatial consistency by aligning features of centerline instances with identical geometric orientations. The proposed method is evaluated on the OpenLane-V2 dataset across the centerline, lane segment, and robustness benchmarks. Beyond substantial improvements in topological mapping accuracy, the proposed method offers the benefit of enhanced robustness, consistently outperforming baselines under both standard and challenging conditions. The source code and model weights will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lynn-yu/HGeo-TopoMap.
Siyu Li, Kunyu Peng, Di Wen +3
Jun 27, 2026cs.NE

Unified Complex-valued Neural Network: A Magnitude-Phase Computational Model for Event-Driven Neuromorphic Learning

Artificial neural networks (ANN) provide accurate continuous-valued representation, whereas spiking neural networks (SNN) offer event-driven temporal processing, yet both paradigms face limitations when value encoding and timing dynamics must be learned within a single computational structure. This paper introduces a network based on Unified Complex-valued Neuron (UCN), a new neural computational model that integrates continuous activation and phase-driven event generation through an asymmetric complex-valued state. In the UCN, magnitude encodes signal strength while phase governs intrinsic temporal evolution and valued spike emission. A foundational training framework combining backpropagation (BP) and backpropagation through time (BPTT) is first developed to optimize magnitude and phase pathways in a unified way. To reduce computational complexity, an event-driven adaptive phase learning (EAPL) rule is then introduced as a more efficient alternative. The proposed model is evaluated through object tracking and Lorenz attractor learning. Results demonstrate that UCN-based Network (UCNN) provides accurate, stable, and interpretable spatiotemporal learning while preserving sparse event-driven computation for neuromorphic and edge-AI applications.
Reza Ahmadvand, Sarah Safura Sharif, Yaser Mike Banad
Jun 25, 2026cs.LG

On the Necessity of a Liquid Substrate for Mesh Intelligence

A mesh of sovereign agents has no center: no shared clock, no shared model, and no coordinator to gather data or retrain. Its competence rests on each agent folding the projections its peers emit into a single internal state, online, from observations that arrive at irregular, unscheduled times, on a substrate whose weights it cannot retrain. Any one of these constraints is tractable on its own; folding optimally under all three at once is not. We ask what such a substrate must be, and prove two necessary conditions from one model of a self-evolving latent observed at irregular, exogenous times. Because the latent changes, its optimal estimator is time-varying: an adaptive timescale is necessary, and every fixed-gain filter is strictly suboptimal. And because arrivals are clock-free, the optimal estimate depends on the elapsed gap between them, which no gap-blind network recovers at any width or depth. This second condition is capacity-independent: scale cannot substitute for the missing dependence. The two conditions intersect in the continuous-time liquid class. An LSTM satisfies the first, a fixed continuous-time filter the second, and a multi-timescale liquid network both. Synthetic experiments confirm each: the network attains the timescale, and the separation is computed exactly. The characterization is necessary, not sufficient, and binds fixed-weight substrates: a network free to retrain reaches the class by other means. Proved per agent, the necessity binds every agent of a mesh, a structural condition on mesh intelligence.
Hongwei Xu
Jun 22, 2026cs.LG

Counterfactual learning of new adaptive instructional policies using logged data

Optimizing instructional policies in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) typically requires costly online experimentation or student simulators that may fail to capture real-world dynamics. This paper introduces an offline contextual bandit framework that learns new adaptive policies directly from logged interaction data. By mapping student-item interactions onto a continuous latent proficiency-difficulty scale using a Rasch model, we cast the tutoring process as a continuous stochastic bandit problem. We propose a novel reward function designed to optimize ''flow'' by balancing task challenge with student success. Our approach includes a round-specific behavior policy estimation that serves as both a propensity model for off-policy evaluation and a diagnostic tool for ITS adaptivity. We demonstrate the efficacy of this framework across four large-scale real-world datasets, achieving consistent policy improvements over the logged behavior policy. The results show that effective instructional policies can be learned and visualized within seconds of computation, providing a scalable path for improving adaptive learning systems without further data collection.
Samuel Girard, Sein Minn, Amel Bouzeghoub +1
Jun 17, 2026cond-mat.mtrl-sci

AdsMind: A Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent System for Self-Correcting Discovery of Adsorption Configurations on Heterogeneous Catalyst Surfaces

Identifying the lowest-energy surface-adsorbate configuration is critical for modeling heterogeneous catalysis, yet exhaustive exploration with ab initio calculations is computationally prohibitive. Machine-learning force fields (MLFFs) accelerate structural relaxation but leave the search over the vast configurational space a major bottleneck, and open-loop large language model (LLM) agents lack a physics-grounded feedback mechanism to correct erroneous initial guesses. We propose AdsMind (Adsorption configuration discovery with Machine intelligence and relaxation feedback), a closed-loop multi-agent framework that enables autonomous error correction through MLFF relaxation feedback. Across four LLM backends, AdsMind achieves consistently high search reliability, with success rates of 100% and 98.8% on the benchmarks AA20 and OCD-GMAE62. Relative to its single-pass (1-Shot) ablation it reduces cross-backend energy dispersion, and it uses only 4.11 and 4.67 MLFF relaxations per case, respectively -- an approximately 14-fold reduction over heuristic enumeration baselines. Density functional theory (DFT) validation using VASP/PBE on six representative AA20 systems shows that the reported open-loop Adsorb-Agent outputs exhibit qualitative adsorption-energy sign errors for molecular adsorbates, whereas AdsMind preserves the correct sign in all tested cases with closer quantitative agreement. AdsMind thus delivers reliability, self-reflection, and interpretability simultaneously, supporting more DFT-informed autonomous chemistry workflows.
Zongmin Zhang, Yuyang Lou, Bowen Zhang +6
Jun 1, 2026cs.RO

Hybrid Adaptive Kalman Filtering for Data-Efficient Joint Tracking and Classification

Kalman filtering performance is highly sensitive to model mismatch and noise covariance tuning. Learning-based approaches address these limitations but typically rely on supervised training with large datasets and do not produce consistent uncertainty estimates. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised Hybrid Adaptive Kalman Filter that learns structured corrections to system dynamics and process noise covariance from measurements alone while preserving the probabilistic structure of the filter. This allows the innovation likelihood to be computed and subsequently used for model classification via generalized Bayesian inference. Experimental results on real-world and simulated datasets demonstrate improved estimation accuracy and statistical consistency as well as robust classification performance across both low-data and large-data scenarios.
Jiho Lee, Nisar R. Ahmed, Rebecca Russell
May 28, 2026cs.LG

A Theoretical and Experimental Study of a Novel Adaptive Learning Algorithm

A crucial component of machine learning algorithms is minimizing loss functions with less computational cost and less oscillations. While adaptive learning rate-based optimizers have been widely used for real-world tasks, they do not guarantee convergence, which is why AMSGrad was later introduced to investigate the non-convergence behaviour of Adam. In this paper, popular adaptive optimization methods like Adam and AMSGrad are critically reviewed with an emphasis on their fundamental design concepts. To address limitations of the above mentioned optimizers, a new optimizer variant, C-Adam, is proposed based on the line of sight approach. A theoretical proof for convergence is also provided and the optimizer is validated through a number of real-life based numerical experiments.
Sakshi Kumari, Shyam Kumar M, Sushmitha P
May 22, 2026cs.CY

Estimating Learners' Skill Acquisition Without Temporal Information

Recent research in educational data mining, especially knowledge tracing, has focused on predicting learners' future knowledge states to support adaptive instruction. However, in many real-world educational settings, learning data are often available only as single-time-point assessments without temporal information, making existing time-series-based approaches difficult to apply. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for predicting future skill acquisition using only snapshot data. Specifically, we address the problem of predicting the next skill to be acquired from skill mastery patterns estimated by cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs). In the absence of temporal information, we exploit inclusion relations among learners' skill sets to induce a pseudo-temporal ordering, interpreting expanding skill sets as a proxy for learning progression. To efficiently approximate unobserved acquisition paths, we introduce a neural model that captures latent skill acquisition dynamics through expected skill increments. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms baseline approaches, with particularly strong advantages as the skill space becomes larger. These results indicate that meaningful skill acquisition patterns can be inferred from snapshot data alone, providing a practical framework for adaptive learning support in data-constrained educational environments.
Ryosuke Nagai, Kyohei Atarashi, Koh Takeuchi +2
May 21, 2026cs.CV

FashionLens: Toward Versatile Fashion Image Retrieval via Task-Adaptive Learning

Fashion image retrieval is a cornerstone of modern e-commerce systems. A unified framework that supports diverse query formats and search intentions is highly desired in practice. However, existing approaches focus on narrow retrieval tasks and do not fully capture such diversity. Therefore, in this work, we aim to develop a unified framework capable of handling diverse realistic fashion retrieval scenarios, achieving truly versatile fashion image retrieval. To establish a data foundation, we first introduce U-FIRE, a comprehensive benchmark that consolidates fragmented fashion datasets into a unified collection, supplemented by two manually curated datasets for testing generalization. Building upon this, we propose FashionLens, a unified framework based on Multimodal Large Language Models. To handle divergent matching objectives, we design a Proposal-Guided Spherical Query Calibrator that dynamically shifts query representations into task-aligned metric spaces via adaptive spherical linear interpolation. Additionally, to mitigate the optimization imbalance caused by varying task complexities and data scales, we develop a Gradient-Guided Adaptive Sampling strategy that automatically re-weights tasks based on realtime learning difficulty and the data scale prior. Experiments on U-FIRE show that FashionLens achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse retrieval scenarios and generalizes robustly to unseen tasks. The data and code are publicly released at https://github.com/haokunwen/FashionLens.
Haokun Wen, Xuemeng Song, Xinghao Xie +3
May 21, 2026cs.AI

Meta-Learning for Rapid Adaptation in Reference Tracking of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems

In this paper, we address the problem of reference tracking for uncertain nonlinear systems. Since collecting data from the target system (i.e., the system of interest) is often challenging, our objective is to design optimal controllers using limited target system data. Meta-learning provides a promising paradigm by leveraging offline data from source systems (systems sharing structural similarities with the target system) to accelerate training and enhance control performance. Motivated by this idea, we propose a meta-learning-based control framework that tailors the implicit model-agnostic meta-learning (iMAML) algorithm to the control setting. The framework operates in two phases: an (offline) meta-training phase, where an aggregated representation is learned from source data to capture the shared system dynamics among similar systems, and an (online) meta-adaptation phase, where this representation is fine-tuned on the target system using only a few data samples and limited adaptation steps. We formulate this framework as a bi-level optimization problem and provide an efficient solution with reduced storage complexity and few approximations. The proposed framework is general, allowing various learning algorithms to be integrated. To demonstrate this flexibility, we propose two specific learning algorithms that can be incorporated into our framework based on a neural state-space model and a deep Q-network, respectively. The primary distinction between these approaches is whether explicit system identification is required. Numerical simulations and hardware experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods enhance control performance and consistently outperform baseline approaches.
Jiaqi Yan, Ankush Chakrabarty, Niklas Schmid +2
May 18, 2026stat.ME

Estimating Item Difficulty with Large Language Models as Experts

Accurate estimates of item difficulty are essential for valid assessment and effective adaptive learning. However, for newly created tasks, response data are typically unavailable. Pretesting and expert judgement can be costly and slow, while machine learning methods often require large labelled training datasets. Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) may help. However, there is limited evidence on the elicitation procedures and prompt configurations used to emulate experts for difficulty estimation. This study addresses this gap by evaluating three off-the-shelf LLMs as difficulty raters for newly created items without access to response data. Using an item bank from an online learning system, the study examined 6 domains of primary-school mathematics, with empirical difficulty estimates treated as empirical reference. The study used a full factorial design crossing three factors: judgement format (absolute vs pairwise), decision type (hard decisions vs token-probability-based estimates), and prompting strategy (zero-shot vs few-shot). LLM-derived difficulty estimates were compared with empirical difficulties using Spearman rank correlations. Across domains, LLM-based estimates exhibited moderate to strong positive correlations with empirical item difficulties. For simpler arithmetic tasks, some configurations approached the upper end of the accuracy range reported for human experts in previous research. Pairwise comparison consistently outperformed absolute judgement in the absence of additional refinements. However, when token-level probabilities were incorporated and examples of items with known empirical difficulty were provided, the absolute judgement configuration likewise demonstrated moderate-to-high alignment. The study positions LLMs as a promising tool for initial item calibration and offers insights into effective workflow configuration.
Diana Kolesnikova, Kirill Fedyanin, Abe D. Hofman +2
May 17, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Predefined Learning Objects: A Thinking-Learning Interaction Model for Up-to-Date Autonomous Robot Learning

Autonomous robots operating in open and changing environments cannot always rely on predefined inputs, outputs, and action routines. Although existing learning methods enable robots to improve their performance through environmental interaction, the objects of learning are often fixed in advance, such as input features, recognition outputs, network structures, task goals, or action sequences. This limits their ability to adapt when new features, new categories, or more efficient task routines appear during long-term operation. To address this problem, this paper proposes a thinking-learning interaction model for autonomous robots. The core idea is that thinking guides learning by identifying potential changes, selecting useful evidence, organizing training materials, and planning verification actions, while learning promotes thinking by updating task knowledge, feature-selection experience, action strategies, and future reasoning processes. Based on this bidirectional mechanism, the robot can gradually move beyond predefined learning settings and adapt its recognition relations and action relations through continuous interaction with the environment. Specifically, the proposed model supports adaptive input feature discovery, output category expansion, learning model update, and action routine reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed model improves the final recognition accuracy from 0.419 to 0.845 in feature adaptation, achieves higher new-category formation accuracy and model-update success rate, and reduces the average action length from 13.0 to 4.0 in action routine reconstruction. In learning-enhanced thinking, the useful evidence selection rate increases from 0.272 to 0.965, indicating that learning results can effectively improve future evidence selection and reasoning.
Hong Su
May 16, 2026cs.AI

Artificial Adaptive Intelligence: The Missing Stage Between Narrow and General Intelligence

Between the narrow systems we deploy and the general intelligence we speculate about lies an entire regime of machine behavior that has never received its own name. This monograph argues that this regime is not empty: it is where meta-learning, neural architecture search, AutoML, continual learning, evolutionary computation, and physics-informed modeling have quietly converged on a common principle, namely the steady removal of the human from the loop of parameter specification. We name this regime Artificial Adaptive Intelligence (AAI) and define it operationally: a system exhibits AAI to the extent that it requires no human-specified tunable hyperparameters while maintaining competitive performance across a diverse distribution of tasks. To make the definition quantitative, we introduce an adaptivity index that measures progress along an axis orthogonal to scale, combining the fraction of hyperparameters absorbed by the system with the performance ratio against a task-specialized baseline. We develop the principle of parametric minimality and ground it in the minimum description length framework, showing that the appropriate hyperparameter count is data-determined rather than designer-determined. We then organize the field around three pathways to minimality: data- and task-aware configuration, structural and evolutionary morphing, and in-training self-adaptation. We analyze their stability, convergence, and governance implications, and illustrate them through case studies spanning aerospace design, financial regime detection, turbulence modeling, ecological dynamics, and vision-language systems. The thesis is that the path from ANI to AGI passes through AAI, and that naming this stage changes what we measure, what we build, and what we call a success.
Boris Kriuk
May 15, 2026cs.CL

Can Vision Language Models Be Adaptive in Mathematics Education? A Learner Model-based Rubric Study

Adaptive learning refers to educational technologies that track learners' learning progress and adapt the instructional process based on individual learners' learning performance. It is increasingly recognized as critical for developing an effective learning support tool. Vision language models (VLMs) have seen adoption in mathematics education, and students have been using them as learning aids for personalized instruction. However, it is unknown whether VLMs have the ability to adapt to different learner profiles when providing mathematical instructions. Current VLMs lack a systematic evaluation framework for this adaptivity to different learner profiles in mathematics tutoring tasks. To address this gap, we draw on the learner model from the adaptive learning framework (Shute and Towle, 2018) and propose a learner model-based rubric. Our rubric formalizes adaptivity assessment into three aspects: cognitive aspects, motivational aspects, and complexity. We also evaluate two additional dimensions of VLM responses: correctness (of answers and solutions) and quality (of the response itself). Our experimental results show measurable differences in adaptivity across models and also reveal that current VLMs struggle to consistently produce learner model-based instructional responses, especially when receiving limited learner information.
Jie Gao, Yongan Yu, Junzhu Su +3
May 12, 2026cs.LG

Online Continual Learning with Dynamic Label Hierarchies

Online Continual Learning (OCL) aims to learn from endless non\text{-}stationary data streams, yet most existing methods assume a flat label space and overlook the hierarchical organization of real\text{-}world concepts that evolves both horizontally (sibling classes) and vertically (coarse or fine categories). To better reflect this context, we introduce a new problem setting, DHOCL (Online Continual Learning from Dynamic Hierarchies), where taxonomies evolve across granularities and each sample provides supervision at a single hierarchical level. In this setting, we find two fundamental issues: (i) partial supervision under mixed granularities provides only point-wise signals over an evolving path-wise hierarchy, which constrains plasticity and undermines cross-level semantic consistency, and (ii) the dynamically evolving hierarchies induce granularity-dependent interference, destabilizing popular replay and regularization mechanisms and thereby exacerbating catastrophic forgetting. To tackle these issues, we propose HALO (Hierarchical Adaptive Learning with Organized Prototypes), which adaptively combines complementary classification heads, regularized by organized learnable hierarchical prototypes, enabling rapid adaptation, hierarchical consistency, and structured knowledge consolidation as the taxonomy evolves. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that HALO consistently outperforms existing methods across hierarchical accuracy, mistake severity, and continual performance.
Xinrui Wang, Shao-Yuan Li, Bartłomiej Twardowski +2
May 11, 2026cs.LG

Consolidation-Expansion Operator Mechanics:A Unified Framework for Adaptive Learning

Every adaptive learning system must alternate between two operations: consolidating what it already knows and expanding into new evidence. We propose \emph{Consolidation-Expansion Operator Mechanics} (OpMech), a framework that makes this structure precise. The central object is the \emph{order-gap} \Ogap(θ;e)\Ogap(θ; e), the degree to which a consolidation operator~QQ and an expansion operator~PeP_e fail to commute at a given knowledge state. Because the order-gap is computable from the system's own trajectory, it serves as a real-time control signal: large values indicate that the system is still sensitive to the ordering of consolidation and expansion; once the order-gap falls and stays small, further processing is unlikely to change the outcome. Three results give the signal precise meaning: the order-gap decays along convergent trajectories; a persistently large order-gap implies the system is far from its settled state; and an order-gap-based stopping rule terminates with provable guarantees in both noiseless and bounded-noise settings. The framework applies across five domains: bandits, reinforcement learning, stochastic optimization, continual learning, and recursive language models. We give conditions under which the order-gap reliably tracks convergence in three representative cases. We develop the recursive language model application in detail, showing how OpMech replaces heuristic stopping rules and fixed recursion budgets with principled, evidence-driven alternatives.
Debashis Guha
May 10, 2026cs.LG

Adaptive Data Harvesting for Efficient Neural Network Learning with Universal Constraints

Training neural networks to satisfy universal constraints over continuous domains poses unique challenges. Common examples include Lyapunov Neural Networks (Lyapunov NNs) and Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), where analytical solutions are generally either unavailable or overly restrictive. Sample-based methods are therefore commonly used to enforce these constraints, and the choice of samples has a substantial impact on convergence speed, stability, and solution quality. Most existing methods rely on fixed heuristics or handcrafted rules, and are suboptimal in practice. In this paper, we aim to improve upon them by learning, from data and experience, how to dynamically and iteratively adjust the samples in response to the model's evolving learning performance. Trained by reinforcement learning, the learned policy improves empirical constraint satisfaction on test problems while significantly improving efficiency. We validate the approach on both Lyapunov NNs and PINNs, and demonstrate its broader applicability to domains where adaptive input selection is essential for effective training.
Siteng Kang, Xinhua Zhang
May 7, 2026cs.LG

Same Signal, Opposite Meaning: Direction-Informed Adaptive Learning for LLM Agents

Adaptive test-time compute for LLM agents aims to invoke extra computation only when it improves performance. Existing methods typically use confidence-, uncertainty-, or difficulty-based gates, assuming a fixed direction from the gating signal through compute need to the value of computation. This makes gating a utility-calibration problem: gating signals should align with whether extra computation improves the final outcome over the base policy. We show that this alignment is unstable: the same signal predicts rollout benefit in one setting and rollout harm in another, with reversals across environments and backbones even when the task is fixed. Wrong-direction gates can therefore worsen performance by precisely selecting harmful states. This reversal reflects a deeper distinction between compute need and compute suitability: a high uncertainty signal may indicate decision-difficult states where rollouts help compare alternatives, or intervention-unsuitable states where the current context does not support useful rollout-based improvement. Under this two-source model, fixed-direction gates are unreliable across heterogeneous settings. To address this, we propose DIAL (Direction-Informed Adaptive Learning), a sparse gate trained from signal-agnostic counterfactual exploration to learn the utility direction of state features per (environment, backbone). Across six environments and three backbones, DIAL yields a stronger overall success-cost trade-off than fixed-direction baselines.
Ziming Li, Jiatan Huang, Xiaoguang Guo +2
May 6, 2026cs.LG

Adaptive Learning Strategies for AoA-Based Outdoor Localization: A Comprehensive Framework

Localization in 5G and 6G networks is essential for important use cases such as intelligent transportation, smart factories, and smart cities. Although deep learning has enabled improving localization accuracy, depending on the deployment scenario and the effort required for dataset collection campaigns on a given infrastructure, the training process for localization models can vary significantly. Furthermore, with respect to feature selection, recent works have demonstrated the robustness of angle-of-arrival (AoA) based localization. In view of these two points, we propose an adaptive framework for AoA-based localization that consists of two alternative learning strategies, each suited either for large or small training datasets. The proposed framework is evaluated on a real, massive multiple input multiple output (mMIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) outdoor channel state information (CSI) dataset. First, we investigate offline learning when large training datasets are available; we propose a hierarchical framework that first distinguishes between line of sight (LoS) and non line of sight (NLoS) regions and then moves to more fine grained localization in the respective region. This approach provides high-performance localization through accumulated batch retraining and an integrated hyperparameter optimization mechanism. Second, when only a small training dataset is available, an online learning framework is proposed, using incremental tree-based and ensemble-based models for handling streaming data and continuously updating mode, as well as an online few-shot learning model for rapidly initializing new classes from a limited labeled support set. These results showcase that highly accurate robust localization can be achieved incrementally during network operation by exploiting online learning, alleviating the need for large dataset collection campaigns.
Bac Trinh-Nguyen, Sara Berri, Sin G. Teo +2
May 6, 2026cs.LG

Adaptivity Under Realizability Constraints: Comparing In-Context and Agentic Learning

We compare in-context learning with fixed queries and agentic learning with adaptive queries for uniform approximation of task families. We consider two settings: an unrestricted regime, where querying and approximation are arbitrary functions, and a realizable regime, where we require these operations to be implemented by ReLU neural networks. In both settings, adaptivity never hinders approximation performance. However, this advantage can change when one passes from the unrestricted regime to the realizable regime. We identify four distinct approximation scenarios, each witnessed by an explicit task family: (a) no advantage of adaptivity; (b) an advantage in the unrestricted regime that persists under ReLU realizability; (c) an advantage that arises only under realizability; and (d) an advantage that disappears under realizability. This demonstrates that representational constraints interact profoundly with the effect of adaptivity.
Anastasis Kratsios, A. Martina Neuman, Philipp Petersen
Apr 29, 2026cs.AI

Compositional Meta-Learning for Mitigating Task Heterogeneity in Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) approximate solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws into the loss function. In parameterized PDE families, variations in coefficients or boundary/initial conditions define distinct tasks. This makes training individual PINNs for each task computationally prohibitive, while cross-task transfer can be sensitive to task heterogeneity. While meta-learning can reduce retraining cost, existing methods often rely on a single global initialization and may suffer from negative transfer, particularly under feature-scarce coordinate inputs and limited training-task availability. We propose the Learning-Affinity Adaptive Modular Physics-Informed Neural Network (LAM-PINN), a compositional framework that leverages task-specific learning dynamics. LAM-PINN combines PDE parameters with learning-affinity metrics from brief transfer sessions to construct a task representation and cluster tasks even with coordinate-only inputs. It decomposes the model into cluster-specialized subnetworks and a shared meta network, and learns routing weights to selectively reuse modules instead of relying on a single global initialization. Across three PDE benchmarks, LAM-PINN achieves an average 19.7-fold reduction in mean squared error (MSE) on unseen tasks using only 10% of the training iterations required by conventional PINNs. These results indicate its effectiveness for generalization to unseen configurations within bounded design spaces of parameterized PDE families in resource-constrained engineering settings.
Beomchul Park, Minsu Koh, Heejo Kong +1
Apr 21, 2026cs.CL

SAMoRA: Semantic-Aware Mixture of LoRA Experts for Task-Adaptive Learning

The combination of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has shown significant potential for enhancing the multi-task learning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, existing methods face two primary challenges: (1)Imprecise Routing in the current MoE-LoRA method fails to explicitly match input semantics with expert capabilities, leading to weak expert specialization. (2)Uniform weight fusion strategies struggle to provide adaptive update strengths, overlooking the varying complexity of different tasks. To address these limitations, we propose SAMoRA (Semantic-Aware Mixture of LoRA Experts), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework tailored for task-adaptive learning. Specifically, A Semantic-Aware Router is proposed to explicitly align textual semantics with the most suitable experts for precise routing. A Task-Adaptive Scaling mechanism is designed to regulate expert contributions based on specific task requirements dynamically. In addition, a novel regularization objective is proposed to jointly promote expert specialization and effective scaling. Extensive experiments on multiple multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that SAMoRA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and holds excellent task generalization capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/boyan-code/SAMoRA
Boyan Shi, Wei Chen, Shuyuan Zhao +4
Apr 16, 2026cs.IR

Uncertainty-aware Generative Learning Path Recommendation with Cognition-Adaptive Diffusion

Learning Path Recommendation (LPR) is critical for personalized education, yet current methods often fail to account for historical interaction uncertainty (e.g., lucky guesses or accidental slips) and lack adaptability to diverse learning goals. We propose U-GLAD (Uncertainty-aware Generative Learning Path Recommendation with Cognition-Adaptive Diffusion). To address representation bias, the framework models cognitive states as probability distributions, capturing the learner's underlying true state via a Gaussian LSTM. To ensure highly personalized recommendation, a goal-oriented concept encoder utilizes multi-head attention and objective-specific transformations to dynamically align concept semantics with individual learning goals, generating uniquely tailored embeddings. Unlike traditional discriminative ranking approaches, our model employs a generative diffusion model to predict the latent representation of the next optimal concept. Extensive evaluations on three public datasets demonstrate that U-GLAD significantly outperforms representative baselines. Further analyses confirm its superior capability in perceiving interaction uncertainty and providing stable, goal-driven recommendation paths.
Xiangrui Xiong, Hang Liang, Baiyang Chen +2
Feb 14, 2026cs.CY

Arapai: An Offline-First LLM Architecture for Adaptive Learning in Low-Connectivity Environments

Artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) are transforming educational technology by enabling conversational tutoring, personalised explanations, and inquiry-driven learning. However, most AI-based learning systems rely on continuous internet connectivity and cloud-based computation, limiting their use in bandwidth-constrained environments. This paper presents Arapai, an offline-first large language model architecture designed for AI-assisted learning in low-connectivity settings. The system performs all inference locally using quantized language models and incorporates hardware-aware model selection to enable deployment on low-specification, CPU-only devices. By removing dependence on cloud infrastructure, the system provides curriculum-aligned explanations and structured academic support through natural-language interaction. To support learners at different educational stages, the system includes adaptive response levels that generate explanations at varying levels of complexity: Simple English, Lower Secondary, Upper Secondary, and Technical. The system was evaluated with 120 students and 9 instructors from secondary and tertiary institutions under limited-connectivity conditions. Results indicate stable operation on legacy hardware, acceptable response times of 1-3 seconds for typical queries, and positive user perceptions of its effectiveness in supporting self-directed learning.
Joseph Walusimbi, Ann Move Oguti, Joshua Benjamin Ssentongo +1
Dec 11, 2025physics.ed-ph

Developing an LLM-Based Feedback System Grounded in Evidence-Centered Design to Support Physics Problem Solving

Generative AI offers new opportunities for individualized and adaptive learning, e.g., through large language model (LLM)-based feedback systems. While LLMs can produce factually correct feedback for relatively straightforward conceptual tasks, delivering high-quality feedback for tasks that require advanced domain expertise, such as physics problem solving, remains a substantial challenge. This study presents the design and implementation of an LLM-based feedback system for physics problem solving grounded in evidence-centered design and reports a first evaluation within the German Physics Olympiad. Participants rated the usefulness and correctness of the generated feedback for each implemented problem. The collected ratings indicate that the feedback was generally perceived as useful and highly correct. However, an in-depth analysis revealed that the feedback contained errors in 20% of cases; errors that often went unnoticed by the students. We discuss the risks associated with uncritical reliance on LLM-based feedback and outline potential directions for generating more adaptive and reliable LLM-based feedback in the future.
Holger Maus, Fabian Kieser, Stefan Petersen +2
Nov 4, 2025cs.CV

Automatic Extraction of Road Networks by using Teacher-Student Adaptive Structural Deep Belief Network and Its Application to Landslide Disaster

An adaptive structural learning method of Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) and Deep Belief Network (DBN) has been developed as one of prominent deep learning models. The neuron generation-annihilation algorithm in RBM and layer generation algorithm in DBN make an optimal network structure for given input during the learning. In this paper, our model is applied to an automatic recognition method of road network system, called RoadTracer. RoadTracer can generate a road map on the ground surface from aerial photograph data. A novel method of RoadTracer using the Teacher-Student based ensemble learning model of Adaptive DBN is proposed, since the road maps contain many complicated features so that a model with high representation power to detect should be required. The experimental results showed the detection accuracy of the proposed model was improved from 40.0% to 89.0% on average in the seven major cities among the test dataset. In addition, we challenged to apply our method to the detection of available roads when landslide by natural disaster is occurred, in order to rapidly obtain a way of transportation. For fast inference, a small size of the trained model was implemented on a small embedded edge device as lightweight deep learning. We reported the detection results for the satellite image before and after the rainfall disaster in Japan. This version of the article was improved the search algorithm at the border around image.
Shin Kamada, Takumi Ichimura
Jun 22, 2023cs.LG

Reinforcement Federated Learning Method Based on Adaptive OPTICS Clustering

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning technology, which realizes the balance between data privacy protection and data sharing computing. To protect data privacy, feder-ated learning learns shared models by locally executing distributed training on participating devices and aggregating local models into global models. There is a problem in federated learning, that is, the negative impact caused by the non-independent and identical distribu-tion of data across different user terminals. In order to alleviate this problem, this paper pro-poses a strengthened federation aggregation method based on adaptive OPTICS clustering. Specifically, this method perceives the clustering environment as a Markov decision process, and models the adjustment process of parameter search direction, so as to find the best clus-tering parameters to achieve the best federated aggregation method. The core contribution of this paper is to propose an adaptive OPTICS clustering algorithm for federated learning. The algorithm combines OPTICS clustering and adaptive learning technology, and can effective-ly deal with the problem of non-independent and identically distributed data across different user terminals. By perceiving the clustering environment as a Markov decision process, the goal is to find the best parameters of the OPTICS cluster without artificial assistance, so as to obtain the best federated aggregation method and achieve better performance. The reliability and practicability of this method have been verified on the experimental data, and its effec-tiveness and superiority have been proved.
Tianyu Zhao, Junping Du, Yingxia Shao +1
Date pendingcs.LG

ExpTest: Loss-Curve Hypothesis Testing for Autonomous Learning-Rate Selection in Deep Neural Networks

Hyperparameter tuning remains a significant challenge in the training of deep neural networks (DNNs), requiring manual search or time-intensive grid searches that increase resource costs and limit the accessibility of machine learning. The global initial learning rate is among the most consequential of these hyperparameters. Adaptive and scheduling-based methods manage the learning rate during training but still require manual selection of an initial global value; learning-rate-free alternatives remove this selection at the cost of performance or stability on non-convex problems. We present ExpTest, an autonomous learning-rate controller that treats the training loss curve as an online signal and performs sequential statistical tests on theoretically motivated windows to detect convergent behavior and trigger learning-rate reductions. The framework combines a covariance-based initial learning-rate estimate, curvature-motivated window sizing, and two-phase test-driven decay, drawing on the approximately exponential decay behavior predicted under linearized network dynamics. We provide a mathematical motivation for ExpTest and evaluate it on regression, classification, forecasting, and natural-language tasks across fully-connected, convolutional, transformer-based, and pretrained architectures. Across these tasks, ExpTest achieves competitive performance relative to hand-tuned SGD-based baselines and recent learning-rate-free methods, without manual initial learning-rate selection or predefined scheduling.
Zan Chaudhry, Naoko Mizuno