Wanpeng Xu
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.
Lost in Execution: On the Multilingual Robustness of Tool Calling in Large Language Models
Zheng Luo | T Pranav Kutralingam | Ogochukwu N. Okoani | Wanpeng Xu | Hua Wei | Xiyang Hu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zheng Luo | T Pranav Kutralingam | Ogochukwu N. Okoani | Wanpeng Xu | Hua Wei | Xiyang Hu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that invoke external tools through structured function calls. While recent work reports strong tool-calling performance under standard English-centric evaluations, the robustness of tool calling under multilingual user interactions remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce MLCL, a diagnostic benchmark, and conduct a systematic evaluation of multilingual tool calling across Chinese, Hindi, and the low-resource language Igbo. Through fine-grained error analysis, we show that many failures occur despite correct intent understanding and tool selection. We identify parameter value language mismatch as a dominant failure mode, where models generate semantically appropriate parameter values in the user’s language, violating language-invariant execution conventions. We further evaluate several inference-time system strategies and find that while these strategies substantially reduce language-induced execution errors, none of them can fully recover English-level performance.