Huaiyuan Yao
2026
Instructional Agents: Reducing Teaching Faculty Workload through Multi-Agent Instructional Design
Huaiyuan Yao | Wanpeng Xu | Justin Turnau | Nadia Kellam | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Huaiyuan Yao | Wanpeng Xu | Justin Turnau | Nadia Kellam | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Preparing high-quality instructional materials remains a labor-intensive process that often requires extensive coordination among teaching faculty, instructional designers, and teaching assistants. In this work, we present Instructional Agents, a multi-agent large language model (LLM) framework designed to automate end-to-end course material generation, including syllabus creation, lecture scripts, LaTeX-based slides, and assessments. Unlike existing AI-assisted educational tools that focus on isolated tasks, Instructional Agents simulates role-based collaboration among educational agents to produce cohesive and pedagogically aligned content. The system operates in four modes: Autonomous, Catalog-Guided, Feedback-Guided, and Full Co-Pilot mode, enabling flexible control over the degree of human involvement. We evaluate Instructional Agents across five university-level computer science courses and show that it produces high-quality instructional materials while significantly reducing development time and human workload. By supporting institutions with limited instructional design capacity, Instructional Agents provides a scalable and cost-effective framework to democratize access to high-quality education, particularly in underserved or resource-constrained settings.
Every Response Counts: Quantifying Uncertainty of LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems through Tensor Decomposition
Tiejin Chen | Huaiyuan Yao | Jia Chen | Evangelos E. Papalexakis | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tiejin Chen | Huaiyuan Yao | Jia Chen | Evangelos E. Papalexakis | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) consistently outperform single-agent systems on complex tasks, their intricate interactions introduce critical reliability challenges arising from communication dynamics and role dependencies. Existing Uncertainty Quantification methods, typically designed for single-turn outputs, fail to address the unique complexities of the MAS. Specifically, these methods struggle with three distinct challenges: the cascading uncertainty in multi-step reasoning, the variability of inter-agent communication paths, and the diversity of communication topologies. To bridge this gap, we introduce MATU, a novel framework that quantifies uncertainty through tensor decomposition. MATU moves beyond analyzing final text outputs by representing entire reasoning trajectories as embedding matrices and organizing multiple execution runs into a higher-order tensor. By applying tensor decomposition, we disentangle and quantify distinct sources of uncertainty, offering a comprehensive reliability measure that is generalizable across different agent structures. We provide comprehensive experiments to show that MATU effectively estimates holistic and robust uncertainty across diverse tasks and communication topologies.