Related papers: Learning to Program != "One-Size-Fits-All": Explor…

Programming education is becoming important as demands on computer literacy and coding skills are growing. Despite the increasing popularity of interactive online learning systems, many programming courses in schools have not changed their…

Understanding code represents a core ability needed for automating software development tasks. While foundation models like LLMs show impressive results across many software engineering challenges, the extent of their true semantic…

Non-native English speakers (NNES) face multiple barriers to learning programming. These barriers can be obvious, such as the fact that programming language syntax and instruction are often in English, or more subtle, such as being afraid…

Manifold learning techniques have become increasingly valuable as data continues to grow in size. By discovering a lower-dimensional representation (embedding) of the structure of a dataset, manifold learning algorithms can substantially…

In many machine learning tasks, learning a good representation of the data can be the key to building a well-performant solution. This is because most learning algorithms operate with the features in order to find models for the data. For…

Coding is a fundamental skill required in the engineering discipline, and much work exists exploring better ways of teaching coding in the higher education context. In particular, Code Snippets (CSs) are approved to be an effective way of…

Supporting learners during Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) is a necessity. Existing studies have compared scaffolds with maximal and minimal instructional support by studying their effects on learning and behaviour. However, our…

We present a comprehensive framework for structured sparse coding and modeling extending the recent ideas of using learnable fast regressors to approximate exact sparse codes. For this purpose, we develop a novel block-coordinate proximal…

Logic program transformation by the unfold/fold method ad- vocates the writing of correct logic programs via the application of some rules to a naive program. This work focuses on how to overcome subgoal- introduction difficulties in…

Recent studies have shown that code language models at scale demonstrate significant performance gains on downstream tasks, i.e., code generation. However, most of the existing works on code representation learning train models at a hundred…

Motion planning and control problems are embedded and essential in almost all robotics applications. These problems are often formulated as stochastic optimal control problems and solved using dynamic programming algorithms. Unfortunately,…

Modern machine learning models are opaque, and as a result there is a burgeoning academic subfield on methods that explain these models' behavior. However, what is the precise goal of providing such explanations, and how can we demonstrate…

Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it. Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes program understanding…

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a capable and intuitive structure for the fundamental sequential decision-making problem. Despite impressive breakthroughs, it can still be difficult to employ RL in practice in many simple applications.…

Proof Blocks is a software tool that allows students to practice writing mathematical proofs by dragging and dropping lines instead of writing proofs from scratch. Proof Blocks offers the capability of assigning partial credit and providing…

Program obfuscation is a widely employed approach for software intellectual property protection. However, general obfuscation methods (e.g., lexical obfuscation, control obfuscation) implemented in mainstream obfuscation tools are heuristic…

Sparse coding has been popularly used as an effective data representation method in various applications, such as computer vision, medical imaging and bioinformatics, etc. However, the conventional sparse coding algorithms and its manifold…

Several recent advances in AI systems solve problems by providing a "scaffolding" program that structures multiple calls to language models (LMs) to generate better outputs. A scaffolding program is written in a programming language such as…

Teachers face several challenges when presenting the fundamental concepts of programming in the classroom. Several tools are introduced to give a visual dimension to support the learning process. These tools rely on code blocks, easily…

Background: Programming skills are advantageous to navigate today's society, so it is important to teach them to students. However, failure rates for programming courses are high, and especially students who fall behind early in…