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Adrian-Marius Dumitran

Publications and source records attributed to Adrian-Marius Dumitran.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

Automated Textbook Auditing with Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Ensuring the quality of educational materials requires more than standard proofreading: textbooks must be audited for factual accuracy, domain-specific technical correctness, and linguistic quality simultaneously -- a task that general-purpose grammar checkers cannot address. We present \textbf{AI Textbook Auditor}, a modular multi-agent pipeline for automated quality assurance of educational materials across subject domains. The system accepts a textbook PDF and produces a structured, human-reviewable report via two analysis tracks: a \textbf{Factual and Technical Track} in which an ensemble of specialized LLM agents detects factual inaccuracies, code errors, incorrect definitions, and conceptual inconsistencies, augmented with web search for humanities domains; and a \textbf{Grammar Track} operating PDF-natively to preserve diacritical encoding. A \textbf{Judge Agent} filters false positives using domain-specific rules before presenting findings to a human reviewer. The pipeline supports two ingestion modes -- vision-native page rendering and PyMuPDF text extraction -- and is domain-adaptable via custom prompts encoding subject-specific error taxonomies. We demonstrate the system on two Romanian upper-secondary textbooks: a CS textbook (56 technical findings across seven categories, with an expert-validated precision of 62.5\%) and a history and social sciences textbook (72 findings spanning factual errors, ideological bias, and grammar). The system is designed as a triage tool that reduces the manual effort of locating candidate issues, with human expert validation required before any editorial action.

cs.CL

The Paternalistic Filter: Epistemic Injustice and Differential Refusal in LLM-Mediated History Education for Marginalized Romanian Students

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as conversational tutors, they risk institutionalizing systemic inequalities. This study presents a systematic API audit of four LLMs acting as history tutors, evaluating 1,800 responses regarding the 1989 Romanian Revolution across five student personas varying by ethnicity and socio-economic tier. We uncover four interconnected patterns of \emph{epistemic paternalism}: (1)~\textbf{Differential Refusal}, where safety-aligned models block 76.7\% of educational requests from low-tier students; (2)~\textbf{Epistemic Gatekeeping}, evidenced by a 3$\times$ reduction in access to geopolitical complexity (e.g., the contested ``coup theory'') for marginalized learners; (3)~\textbf{Agency Theft}, a lexical shift where models like LLaMA produce a 5$\times$ higher victimization-to-politics vocabulary ratio for Roma students compared to elite peers; and (4)~\textbf{Elite Hermeneutics}, where AI tutors disproportionately withhold epistemic confidence and justification scores from low-resource demographic profiles. We argue that current safety alignment acts as a paternalistic filter, transforming conversational AI into agents of narrative segregation -- a manifestation of \emph{hermeneutical injustice} in Fricker's~\cite{fricker2007} sense that demands urgent pedagogical auditing.

cs.CY

Programming Language Policy as an AI Literacy Equity Problem: A 15-Nation Comparative Analysis

The promise of AI literacy ``for all'' confronts a structural challenge embedded in how nations organise secondary computer science education. In most systems, a general-track subject -- Digital Literacy, ICT, TIC, or SNT -- bears the weight of universal AI literacy, while a specialist Informatics course serves STEM pathways separately. Yet the content and depth of the general track are shaped by governance decisions made largely with reference to the specialist one. This paper presents a comparative analysis of curricula and examination frameworks across fifteen countries, identifying two structural challenges. First, in several systems a significant portion of students completes secondary education without any formal programming exposure. Second, among those who do receive CS education, a \emph{Syntax Ceiling} emerges: Python-based instruction reaches most students, while the algorithmic depth associated with C++ remains concentrated in elite STEM tracks. Drawing on reform cases spanning centralised mandates (France, China, Japan), assessment-driven systems (Poland, Romania, South Korea), and recent universal reforms (Switzerland, Kazakhstan), we show that governance structures and high-stakes examinations are the primary drivers of both challenges -- and that specialist and general-track language choices are rarely independent, linked through shared teacher pipelines that curriculum policy seldom acknowledges. Achieving genuine AI literacy for all requires confronting not just curriculum content, but the access architectures and resource constraints that determine who receives it -- and at what depth.

cs.CY

A Two-Validator Web Interface for Structured Geometry Figure Annotation

Annotating geometric figures from scanned documents has long been addressed by adapting generic annotation tools, tools not originally designed for such tasks, to use cases where they are suboptimal. An interactive web interface is described that is purpose-built for validating automatically generated geometry figure descriptions, allowing annotators to review and correct conditional declaration language (CDL) descriptions while simultaneously adjusting figure crops and editing source problem text. Submissions pass through two independent annotators in sequence, with each round fully logged. The interface is currently deployed and has been used by 12 annotators to validate 483 problem entries.

cs.HC

Block-Based Pathfinding: A Minecraft System for Visualizing Graph Algorithms

Graph theory is a cornerstone of Computer Science education, yet entry-level students often struggle to map abstract node-edge relationships to practical applications. This paper presents the design and architecture of a Minecraft-based educational tool specifically built to visualize graph traversal and shortest-path algorithms. We propose a three-layer system: (1) a Grid Traversal module where terrain types (e.g., soul sand, ice) represent edge weights, allowing for the gamified study of shortest path algorithms; (2) a "Sky Graph" module for interactive 3D manipulation of both directed and undirected graphs; and (3) lessons and quizzes available through books. The system grounds its design in Constructionist learning theory, transitioning students from passive observers to active protagonists who physically manipulate algorithmic behavior. We additionally present a planned empirical evaluation using NASA-TLX and in-game telemetry to validate the system's pedagogical efficacy.

cs.HC

MuTSE: A Human-in-the-Loop Multi-use Text Simplification Evaluator

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent in text simplification, systematically evaluating their outputs across diverse prompting strategies and architectures remains a critical methodological challenge in both NLP research and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). Developing robust prompts is often hindered by the absence of structured, visual frameworks for comparative text analysis. While researchers typically rely on static computational scripts, educators are constrained to standard conversational interfaces -- neither paradigm supports systematic multi-dimensional evaluation of prompt-model permutations. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{MuTSE}\footnote{The project code and the demo have been made available for peer review at the following anonymized URL. https://osf.io/njs43/overview?view_only=4b4655789f484110a942ebb7788cdf2a, an interactive human-in-the-loop web application designed to streamline the evaluation of LLM-generated text simplifications across arbitrary CEFR proficiency targets. The system supports concurrent execution of $P \times M$ prompt-model permutations, generating a comprehensive comparison matrix in real-time. By integrating a novel tiered semantic alignment engine augmented with a linearity bias heuristic ($λ$), MuTSE visually maps source sentences to their simplified counterparts, reducing the cognitive load associated with qualitative analysis and enabling reproducible, structured annotation for downstream NLP dataset construction.

cs.CL

BacPrep: Lessons from Deploying an LLM-Based Bacalaureat Assessment Platform

Accessing quality preparation and feedback for the Romanian Bacalaureat exam is challenging, particularly for students in remote or underserved areas. This paper presents BacPrep, an experimental online platform exploring Large Language Model (LLM) potential for automated assessment, aiming to offer a free, accessible resource. Using official exam questions from the last 5 years, BacPrep employs the latest available Gemini Flash model (currently Gemini 2.5 Flash, via the \texttt{gemini-flash-latest} endpoint) to prioritize user experience quality during the data collection phase, with model versioning to be locked for subsequent rigorous evaluation. The platform has collected over 100 student solutions across Computer Science and Romanian Language exams, enabling preliminary assessment of LLM grading quality. This revealed several significant challenges: grading inconsistency across multiple runs, arithmetic errors when aggregating fractional scores, performance degradation under large prompt contexts, failure to apply subject-specific rubric weightings, and internal inconsistencies between generated scores and qualitative feedback. These findings motivate a redesigned architecture featuring subject-level prompt decomposition, specialized per-subject graders, and a median-selection strategy across multiple runs. Expert validation against human-graded solutions remains the critical next step.

cs.SE

An Agentic Evaluation Architecture for Historical Bias Detection in Educational Textbooks

History textbooks often contain implicit biases, nationalist framing, and selective omissions that are difficult to audit at scale. We propose an agentic evaluation architecture comprising a multimodal screening agent, a heterogeneous jury of five evaluative agents, and a meta-agent for verdict synthesis and human escalation. A central contribution is a Source Attribution Protocol that distinguishes textbook narrative from quoted historical sources, preventing the misattribution that causes systematic false positives in single-model evaluators. In an empirical study on Romanian upper-secondary history textbooks, 83.3\% of 270 screened excerpts were classified as pedagogically acceptable (mean severity 2.9/7), versus 5.4/7 under a zero-shot baseline, demonstrating that agentic deliberation mitigates over-penalization. In a blind human evaluation (18 evaluators, 54 comparisons), the Independent Deliberation configuration was preferred in 64.8\% of cases over both a heuristic variant and the zero-shot baseline. At approximately \$2 per textbook, these results position agentic evaluation architectures as economically viable decision-support tools for educational governance.

cs.AI

RoMathExam: A Longitudinal Dataset of Romanian Math Exams (1895-2025) with a Seven-Decade Core (1957-2025)

AI in Education research increasingly relies on authentic, curriculum-grounded assessment data, yet large, well-structured exam corpora remain scarce for many languages and educational systems. We introduce RoMathExam, a longitudinal dataset of Romanian high-school mathematics exams spanning 1895-2025, with a robust standardized core for 1957-2025. The dataset contains 10,592 mathematics problems organized into 600+ complete exam sets across multiple tracks (M1-M4), covering both official national examination sessions and ministry-published training variants. Beyond high-fidelity digitization and a unified JSON schema with traceable provenance, RoMathExam is enriched with curriculum-aligned topic tags and dense text embeddings, enabling variant detection, deduplication, and similarity-based retrieval. To overcome the lack of historical psychometric data, we propose and validate a solution complexity metric as a scalable intrinsic proxy for difficulty. Our evaluation across three frontier reasoning models (GPT-5-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and Qwen3-235B-Thinking) reveals high cross-model synchronization (r > 0.72), confirming the metric's ability to isolate intrinsic mathematical depth from stochastic generation noise. We demonstrate the dataset's utility through a longitudinal analysis that quantifies a "regime shift" from volatile historical formats to a standardized, algebra-dominant modern curriculum. RoMathExam provides a foundation for reproducible research in difficulty modeling, curriculum analytics, and LLM evaluation in low-resource linguistic contexts.

cs.CY

RoBiologyDataChoiceQA: A Romanian Dataset for improving Biology understanding of Large Language Models

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, their performance in domain-specific applications and non-English languages remains less explored. This study introduces a novel Romanian-language dataset for multiple-choice biology questions, carefully curated to assess LLM comprehension and reasoning capabilities in scientific contexts. Containing approximately 14,000 questions, the dataset provides a comprehensive resource for evaluating and improving LLM performance in biology. We benchmark several popular LLMs, analyzing their accuracy, reasoning patterns, and ability to understand domain-specific terminology and linguistic nuances. Additionally, we perform comprehensive experiments to evaluate the impact of prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and other optimization techniques on model performance. Our findings highlight both the strengths and limitations of current LLMs in handling specialized knowledge tasks in low-resource languages, offering valuable insights for future research and development.

cs.CL

Parallel Algorithms for the One Sided Crossing Minimization Problem

The One Sided Crossing Minimization (OSCM) problem is an optimization problem in graph drawing that aims to minimize the number of edge crossings in bipartite graph layouts. It has practical applications in areas such as network visualization and VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) design, where reducing edge crossings improves the arrangement of circuit components and their interconnections. Despite the rise of multi-core systems, the parallelization of exact and fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms for OSCM remains largely unexplored. Parallel variants offer significant potential for scaling to larger graphs but require careful handling of synchronization and memory management. In this paper, we explore various previously studied exact and FPT algorithms for OSCM, implementing and analyzing them in both sequential and parallel forms. Our main contribution lies in empirically proving that these algorithms can achieve close to linear speedup under parallelization. In particular, our best result achieves a speedup of nearly 19 on a 16-core, 32-thread machine. We further investigate and discuss the reasons why linear speedup is not always attained.

cs.DC

GRILE: A Benchmark for Grammar Reasoning and Explanation in Romanian LLMs

LLMs (Large language models) have revolutionized NLP (Natural Language Processing), yet their pedagogical value for low-resource languages remains unclear. We present GRILE (Grammar Romanian Inference and Language Explanations) , the first open benchmark of 1,151 multiple-choice questions harvested from Romanian high-stakes exams (National Evaluation, Baccalaureate, university admissions). GRILE enables us to probe two complementary abilities of seven state-of-the-art multilingual and Romanian-specific LLMs: (i) selecting the correct answer, and (ii) producing linguistically accurate explanations. While Gemini 2.5 Pro reaches 83% accuracy, most open-weight models stay below 65%, and 48% of their explanations contain factual or pedagogical flaws according to expert review. A detailed error analysis pinpoints systematic weaknesses in morphology and in applying the latest DOOM3 orthographic norms. All data, code and a public web demo are released to catalyze future research. Our findings expose open challenges for trustworthy educational NLP in low-resource settings and establish GRILE as a new test-bed for controllable explanation generation and evaluation.

cs.CL

A Culturally-Rich Romanian NLP Dataset from "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Videos

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate varying performance across languages and cultural contexts. This study introduces a novel, culturally-rich, multilingual dataset derived from video recordings of the Romanian game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" (Vrei să fii Milionar?). We employed an innovative process combining optical character recognition (OCR), automated text extraction, and manual verification to collect question-answer pairs, enriching them with metadata including question domain (e.g., biology, history), cultural relevance (Romanian-specific vs. international), and difficulty. Benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs, including Romanian-adapted models, on this dataset revealed significant performance disparities: models consistently achieve higher accuracy (80-95%) on international questions compared to Romanian-specific cultural questions (50-75%). We further investigate these differences through experiments involving machine translation of Romanian questions into English and cross-lingual tests using a comparable dataset in French. Our findings underscore the impact of cultural context and data source on LLM performance and offer practical insights for building robust, culturally-aware multilingual NLP systems, especially in educational domains. The dataset is publicly available at Hugging Face.

cs.CL