15 papers
A Missing Piece for Trustworthy AI Reviewers: From Benchmarking Rhetorical Robustness to SciCore Review
Chenguang Wang, Ming Li, Chengrui Fan +4
AI reviewers can assign different judgments to manuscripts that report the same science in different wording, potentially rewarding rhetorical optimization over scientific improvem…
The Emerging AI Paper-Review Arms Race: Adversarial Co-Evolution in Scholarly Publishing
Chenguang Wang, Ming Li, Adebayo Braimah +6
Generative and agentic AI are reshaping both the production and evaluation of scientific research. These developments are often studied separately, as questions of how AI can produ…
Thinking Hard, Not Smart: Reasoning Models Fail to Ration Test-Time Compute Across Questions
Chenrui Fan, Yize Cheng, Ming Li +3
Reasoning language models increasingly use test-time compute to improve performance, but existing evaluations typically study this compute one question at a time. Yet when multiple…
How Can Rhetoric Reward-Hack AI Reviewers? Dissecting Rhetorical Sensitivity in AI-Based Peer Review
Ming Li, Chenguang Wang, Xirui Li +5
As large language models increasingly participate in scientific evaluation, we investigate a potential form of reward hacking: how rhetorical choices shape AI-review judgments when…
Representing Visual Evidence for Item Difficulty Prediction: Visual Textualization and Image-Native Modeling
Han Chen, Ming Li, Hong Jiao +1
Predicting item difficulty from content can provide an initial estimate for newly developed questions before sufficient student responses are available. Existing approaches typical…
Can LLMs Really Understand Item Difficulty Levels? Implications for Automated Item Generation Using LLMs
Xinyi Wang, Hong Jiao, Ming Li +4
The estimation of item difficulty plays a key role in both formative assessment and large-scale high-stakes summative assessments. This study explores how large language models (LL…
Sharp Pre-Schwarzian Norm Bounds for Ma-Minda Starlike Classes
Ming Li, Mei Luo
In this paper, we develop a unified framework to evaluate the pre-Schwarzian norm for the Ma-Minda starlike class. We present a direct, general computational approach. As an applic…
Self-Evolving Visual Questioner
Yijun Liang, Hengguang Zhou, Ming Li +3
Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains un…
When is Your LLM Steerable?
Chenrui Fan, Yize Cheng, Ming Li +2
Activation steering offers a lightweight approach to control language models' behavior at inference time, but whether it succeeds or fails heavily depends on the prompt, concept, m…
Cognitive Episodes in LLM Reasoning Traces Enable Interpretable Human Item Difficulty Prediction
Chenguang Wang, Ming Li, Xinyue Zeng +4
Predicting human item difficulty is central to educational assessment, where reliable estimates support fairness and effective test construction. Existing methods often depend on c…
LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment
Han Chen, Ming Li, Chenguang Wang +4
Existing work on LLM-based educational assessment has focused largely on item difficulty, but difficulty alone does not indicate whether an item meaningfully distinguishes higher-…
History-Conditioned Spatio-Temporal Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Navigation
Qitong Wang, Yijun Liang, Ming Li +2
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables robots to follow natural-language instructions in visually grounded environments, serving as a key capability for embodied robotic systems.…
V-REX: Benchmarking Exploratory Visual Reasoning via Chain-of-Questions
Chenrui Fan, Yijun Liang, Shweta Bhardwaj +3
While many vision-language models (VLMs) are developed to answer well-defined, straightforward questions with highly specified targets, as in most benchmarks, they often struggle i…
Automated Alignment of Math Items to Content Standards in Large-Scale Assessments Using Language Models
Qingshu Xu, Hong Jiao, Tianyi Zhou +4
Accurate alignment of items to content standards is critical for valid score interpretation in large-scale assessments. This study evaluates three automated paradigms for aligning…
Text-Based Approaches to Item Alignment to Content Standards in Large-Scale Reading & Writing Tests
Yanbin Fu, Hong Jiao, Tianyi Zhou +5
Aligning test items to content standards is a critical step in test development to collect validity evidence based on content. Item alignment has typically been conducted by human…