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FACET: Teacher-Centred LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems-Towards Personalized Educational WorksheetsHier den Haupttitel eintragen
No full textThe increasing heterogeneity of student populations poses significant challenges for teachers, particularly in mathematics education, where cognitive, motivational, and emotional differences strongly influence learning outcomes. While AI-driven personalization tools have emerged, most remain performance-focused, offering limited support for teachers and neglecting broader pedagogical needs. This paper presents the FACET framework, a teacher-facing, large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent system designed to generate individualized classroom materials that integrate both cognitive and motivational dimensions of learner profiles. The framework comprises three specialized agents: (1) learner agents that simulate diverse profiles incorporating topic proficiency and intrinsic motivation, (2) a teacher agent that adapts instructional content according to didactical principles, and (3) an evaluator agent that provides automated quality assurance. We tested the system using authentic grade 8 mathematics curriculum content and evaluated its feasibility through a) automated agent-based assessment of output quality and b) exploratory feedback from K-12 in-service teachers. Results from ten internal evaluations highlighted high stability and alignment between generated materials and learner profiles, and teacher feedback particularly highlighted structure and suitability of tasks. The findings demonstrate the potential of multi-agent LLM architectures to provide scalable, context-aware personalization in heterogeneous classroom settings, and outline directions for extending the framework to richer learner profiles and real-world classroom trials
Physics-informed Bayesian optimization of expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions
No full textAbstract
Bayesian optimization with Gaussian process surrogates is a popular approach for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate functions in terms of time, energy, or computational resources. Typically, a Gaussian process models a scalar objective derived from observed data. However, in many real-world applications, the objective is a combination of multiple outputs from physical experiments or simulations. Converting these multidimensional observations into a single scalar can lead to information loss, slowing convergence and yielding suboptimal results. To address this, we propose to use multi-output Gaussian processes to learn the full vector of observations directly, before mapping them to the scalar objective via an inexpensive analytical function. This physics-informed approach retains more information from the underlying physical processes, improving surrogate model accuracy. As a result, the approach accelerates optimization and produces better final designs compared to standard implementations
Demand Uncertainty in Energy Systems: Scenario Catalogs vs. Integrated Robust Optimization
No full textDesigning efficient energy systems is indispensable for shaping a more sustainable society. This involves making infrastructure investment decisions that must be valid for a long-term time horizon. While energy system optimization models constitute a powerful technique to support planning decisions, they need to cope with inherent uncertainty. For example, predicting future demand on a scale of decades is not only an intricate challenge in itself, but small fluctuations in such a forecast might also largely impact the layout of a complex energy system.
In this paper, we compare two methodologies of capturing demand uncertainty for linear-programming based energy system optimization models. On one hand, we generate and analyze catalogs of varying demand scenarios, where each individual scenario is considered independently, so that the optimization produces scenario-specific investment pathways. On the other hand, we make use of robust linear programming to meet the demand of all scenarios at once. Since including a multitude of scenarios increases the size and complexity of the optimization model, we will show how to use warm-starting approaches to accelerate the computation process, by exploiting the similar structure of the linear program across different demand inputs. This allows to integrate a meaningful number of demand scenarios with fully-fledged energy system models.
We demonstrate the practical use of our methods in a case study of the Berlin-Brandenburg area in Germany, a region that contains both a metropolitan area and its rural surroundings. As a backbone, we use the open-source framework oemof to create a sector-coupled optimization model for planning an energy system with up to 100% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This model features a fine-grained temporal resolution of one hour for the full year 2050. We consider uncertainty in demand for electricity, hydrogen, natural gas, central, and decentral heat.
Based on our computations, we analyze the trade-offs in terms of quality and computation time for scenario catalogs and the robust optimization approach. We further demonstrate that our procedure provides a valuable strategy for decision makers to gain insight on the robustness and sensitivity of solutions regarding demand variability
Exact Objective Space Contraction for the Preprocessing of Multi-objective Integer Programs
No full textSolving integer optimization problems with large or widely ranged objective coefficients can lead to numerical instability and increased runtimes. When the problem also involves multiple objectives, the impact of the objective coefficients on runtimes and numerical issues multiplies. We address this issue by transforming the coefficients of linear objective functions into smaller integer coefficients. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been defined before. Next to a straightforward scaling heuristic, we introduce a novel exact transformation approach for the preprocessing of multi-objective binary problems. In this exact approach, the large or widely ranged integer objective coefficients are transformed into the minimal integer objective coefficients that preserve the dominance relation of the points in the objective space. The transformation problem is solved with an integer programming formulation with an exponential number of constraints. We present a cutting-plane algorithm that can efficiently handle the problem size. In a first computational study, we analyze how often and in which settings the transformation actually leads to smaller coefficients. In a second study, we evaluate how the exact transformation and a typical scaling heuristic, when used as preprocessing, affect the runtime and numerical stability of the Defining Point Algorithm
Revealing the Atomistic Mechanism of Rare Events in Molecular Dynamics
No full textInterpretable reaction coordinates are essential for understanding rare conformational transitions in molecular dynamics. The Atomistic Mechanism Of Rare Events in Molecular Dynamics (AMORE-MD) framework enhances interpretability of deep-learned reaction coordinates by connecting them to atomistic mechanisms, without requiring any a priori knowledge of collective variables, pathways, or endpoints. Here, AMORE-MD employs the ISOKANN algorithm to learn a neural membership function χ representing the dominant slow process, from which transition pathways are reconstructed as minimum-energy paths aligned with the gradient of χ, and atomic contributions are quantified through gradient-based sensitivity analysis. Iterative enhanced sampling further enriches transition regions and improves coverage of rare events enabling recovery of known mechanisms and chemically interpretable structural rearrangements at atomic resolution for the Müller-Brown potential, alanine dipeptide, and the elastin-derived hexapeptide VGVAPG
Stability of nonhomogeneous split equality and split feasibility problems with possibly nonconvex constraint sets
No full textBy applying some techniques of set-valued and variational analysis, we study solution stability of nonhomogeneous split equality problems and nonhomogeneous split feasibility problems, where the constraint sets need not be convex. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the Lipschitz-likeness of the solution maps of the problems are given and illustrated by concrete examples. The obtained results complement those given in [Huong VT, Xu HK, Yen ND. Stability analysis of split equality and split feasibility problems. arXiv:2410.16856.], where classical split equality problems and split feasibility problems have been considered
Computing All Shortest Passenger Routes with a Tropical Dijkstra Algorithm
No full textGiven a public transportation network, which and how many passenger routes can potentially be shortest paths, when all possible timetables are taken into account?
This question leads to shortest path problems on graphs with interval costs on their arcs and is closely linked to multi-objective optimization.
We introduce a Dijkstra algorithm based on polynomials over the tropical semiring that computes complete or minimal sets of efficient paths.
We demonstrate that this approach is computationally feasible by employing it on the public transport network of the city of Wuppertal and instances of the benchmarking set TimPassLib, and we evaluate the resulting sets of passenger routes