arXiv AI
Oct 9

Universal Textual Teaching for LLMs

The paper introduces Universal Textual Teaching (UTT), a parameter‑update‑free framework that distills knowledge gaps between a Teacher and Student large language model into a reusable natural‑language artifact called a Primer. UTT identifies representative gap cases, then iteratively refines the Primer through a cycle of student attempts, prompter‑generated teaching instructions, teacher demonstrations, and synthesizer consolidation. Experiments on math (Omni‑MATH‑2) and code generation (KernelBench) show significant accuracy gains, outperforming prompt engineering and parameter‑based knowledge distillation, and the Primer generalizes across different Teacher‑Student pairs.

By Zhanyi Lu, Huan Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Grammar Concept Annotation at Scale: Deployed Fine-Tuned Small Language Models Outperform Prompted Frontier Models

The paper reports that fine‑tuned small language models (SLMs) can outperform large frontier models in annotating grammar concepts from learner–tutor transcripts. By training a 0.8B Qwen3.5 model on teacher‑generated data and embedding the annotation rules into adapter weights, the authors deploy an efficient end‑to‑end grammar mastery tracker that matches or exceeds the performance of 4B reference models and GPT‑5.4/5.6 on two human‑curated benchmarks. The lightweight model also cuts serving costs by about 16× and boosts learner engagement and key business metrics in an online experiment.

By Marjan Celikik, Ana Peleteiro Ramallo, Javier Morales
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

From prompting to evidence-based translation: A RAG+prompt system for Japanese-Chinese translation and its pedagogical potential

The paper presents a retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) system combined with prompt engineering for Japanese‑to‑Chinese translation, focusing on sentences with noun‑modifying clause constructions (NMCCs). It integrates linguistic analysis, embedding‑based retrieval, and prompt construction before generating translations with GPT‑4o, without altering the base model. Experiments on a 66‑sentence test set show that increasing the knowledge‑base size from 0 to 2,000 examples raises macro‑averaged BLEU scores from 24.28 to 29.96, indicating improved translation quality for NMCC‑rich sentences.

By Wenshi Gu