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Students bring different levels of interest to learning experiences, which impacts how they engage with learning materials. This study aims to understand the relationship between student's interest levels and their scientific observation behaviors within a Minecraft-based learning system. Motivated by the growing interest in integrating human-AI collaboration within educational research, we combine the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the expertise of human researchers to capture the emerging themes within students’ observations. Using epistemic network analysis, we then visualized and compared the observational patterns of students with high and low situational interest. Our findings indicate that students with higher situational interest tend to make observations across a broader range of topics, with a particular emphasis on scientific content. These results highlight the potential for developing timely interventions to support students with low situational interest. 

Graphs are ubiquitous in various domains, such as social networks and biological systems. Despite the great successes of graph neural networks (GNNs) in modeling and analyzing complex graph data, the inductive bias of locality assumption, which involves exchanging information only within neighboring connected nodes, restricts GNNs in capturing long-range dependencies and global patterns in graphs. Inspired by the classic Brachistochrone problem, we seek how to devise a new inductive bias for cutting-edge graph application and present a general framework through the lens of variational analysis. The backbone of our framework is a two-way mapping between the discrete GNN model and continuous diffusion functional, which allows us to design application-specific objective function in the continuous domain and engineer discrete deep model with mathematical guarantees. First, we address over-smoothing in current GNNs. Specifically, our inference reveals that the existing layer-by-layer models of graph embedding learning are equivalent to a ℓ 2 -norm integral functional of graph gradients, which is the underlying cause of the over-smoothing problem. Similar to edge-preserving filters in image denoising, we introduce the total variation (TV) to promote alignment of the graph diffusion pattern with the global information present in community topologies. On top of this, we devise a new selective mechanism for inductive bias that can be easily integrated into existing GNNs and effectively address the trade-off between model depth and over-smoothing. Second, we devise a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) to predict the spreading flows in the graph through a neural transport equation. To avoid the potential issue of vanishing flows, we tailor the objective function to minimize the transportation within each community while maximizing the inter-community flows. Our new GNN models achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on graph learning benchmarks such as Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed. 

The prediction of human shifts of attention is a widely-studied question in both behavioral and computer vision, especially in the context of a free viewing task. However, search behavior, where the fixation scanpaths are highly dependent on the viewer's goals, has received far less attention, even though visual search constitutes much of a person's everyday behavior. One reason for this is the absence of real-world image datasets on which search models can be trained. In this paper we present a carefully created dataset for two target categories, microwaves and clocks, curated from the COCO2014 dataset. A total of 2183 images were presented to multiple participants, who were tasked to search for one of the two categories. This yields a total of 16184 validated fixations used for training, making our microwave-clock dataset currently one of the largest datasets of eye fixations in categorical search. We also present a 40-image testing dataset, where images depict both a microwave and a clock target. Distinct fixation patterns emerged depending on whether participants searched for a microwave (n=30) or a clock (n=30) in the same images, meaning that models need to predict different search scanpaths from the same pixel inputs. We report the results of several state-of-the-art deep network models that were trained and evaluated on these datasets. Collectively, these datasets and our protocol for evaluation provide what we hope will be a useful test-bed for the development of new methods for predicting category-specific visual search behavior.