arXiv:2602.18451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contemporary science education reforms such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) demand assessments to understand students' ability to use science knowledge to solve problems and design solutions. To elicit such higher-order ability, educators need performance-based assessments, which are challenging to develop. One solution that has been broadly adopted is Evidence-Centered Design (ECD), which emphasizes interconnected models of the learner, evidence, and tasks. Although ECD provides a framework to safeguard assessment validity, its implementation requires diverse expertise (e.g., content and assessment), which is both costly and labor-intensive. To address this challenge, this study proposed integrating the ECD framework into Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) to generate NGSS-aligned assessment items automatically. This integrated MAS system ensembles multiple large language models with varying expertise, enabling the automation of complex, multi-stage item generation workflows traditionally performed by human experts. We examined the quality of AI-generated NGSS-aligned items and compared them with human-developed items across multiple dimensions of assessment design. Results showed that AI-generated items have overall comparable quality to human-developed items in terms of alignment with NGSS three-dimensional standards and cognitive demands. Divergent patterns also emerged: AI-generated items demonstrated a distinct strength in inclusivity, while also exhibiting limitations in clarity, conciseness, and multimodal design. AI- and human-developed items both showed weaknesses in evidence collectability and student interest alignment. These findings suggest that integrating ECD into MAS can support scalable and standards-aligned assessment design, while human expertise remains essential.

arXiv:2602.18476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Protein-ligand scoring is a central component of structure-based drug design, underpinning molecular docking, virtual screening, and pose optimization. Conventional physics-based energy functions are often computationally expensive, limiting their utility in large-scale screening. In contrast, deep learning-based scoring models offer improved computational efficiency but frequently suffer from limited cross-target generalization and poor interpretability, which restrict their practical applicability. Here we present BioLM-Score, a simple yet generalizable protein-ligand scoring model that couples geometric modeling with representation learning. Specifically, it employs modality-specific and structure-aware encoders for proteins and ligands, each augmented with biomolecular language models to enrich structural and chemical representations. Subsequently, these representations are integrated through a mixture density network to predict multimodal interatomic distance distributions, from which statistically grounded likelihood-based scores are derived. Evaluations on the CASF-2016 benchmark demonstrate that BioLM-Score achieves significant improvements across docking, scoring, ranking, and screening tasks. Moreover, the proposed scoring function serves as an effective optimization objective for guiding docking protocols and conformational search. In summary, BioLM-Score provides a principled and practical alternative to existing scoring functions, combining efficiency, generalization, and interpretability for structure-based drug discovery.

arXiv:2602.20078v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is fundamentally limited by cross-agent noise: when agents share a common reward, the actions of all $N$ agents jointly determine each agent's learning signal, so cross-agent noise grows with $N$. In the policy gradient setting, per-agent gradient estimate variance scales as $\Theta(N)$, yielding sample complexity $\mathcal{O}(N/\epsilon)$. We observe that many domains -- cloud computing, transportation, power systems -- have differentiable analytical models that prescribe efficient system states. In this work, we propose Descent-Guided Policy Gradient (DG-PG), a framework that constructs noise-free per-agent guidance gradients from these analytical models, decoupling each agent's gradient from the actions of all others. We prove that DG-PG reduces gradient variance from $\Theta(N)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$, preserves the equilibria of the cooperative game, and achieves agent-independent sample complexity $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon)$. On a heterogeneous cloud scheduling task with up to 200 agents, DG-PG converges within 10 episodes at every tested scale -- from $N=5$ to $N=200$ -- directly confirming the predicted scale-invariant complexity, while MAPPO and IPPO fail to converge under identical architectures.