Recently, the premier global AI conference NeurIPS 2020 (2020 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, abbreviated as "NeurIPS 2020") released its competition rankings.

TAL Education Group's AI Research Lab's Machine Learning Team secured one first-place and one second-place in individual tasks, plus an overall second-place finish in the "Education Challenge" competition's four tasks at NeurIPS 2020, demonstrating China's leadership in AI+Education (AIED) to the world.

NeurIPS 2020 is one of the top international conferences on artificial intelligence

As one of the top global conferences in artificial intelligence and machine learning, NeurIPS aims to promote knowledge exchange and interdisciplinary research in neural information processing systems across biology, technology, mathematics and theory, garnering widespread recognition across academia and industry. This year's NeurIPS hosted its inaugural education-focused challenge, marking a milestone in the field and attracting over 80 world-class competing teams from Peking University, USTC, Pennsylvania State University and others.

01 Global AI Competition Victory Demonstrates AIED Leadership

Global AI Competition Victory Demonstrates AIED Leadership The NeurIPS 2020 "Education Challenge" competition centered on "learning diagnostics" in education. It required participating teams to analyze students' responses to approximately 1,000 math multiple - choice questions over the past two years, accurately predict students' answers, determine which questions had higher - quality answers, and generate personalized learning paths most capable of predicting the answers for each student.

For the competition, the AI Research Lab of TAL Education Group used state - of - the - art NLP (Natural Language Processing) models to reframe the challenge as an adaptive learning problem for prediction, leveraging the sequence information of student exercises. They ultimately achieved first place in the "evaluation of question quality" task, second place in the "diagnosing the abilities of new students through a small number of questions" task, and second place in the overall ranking.

Email to the TAL Education Group's AI Middle Platform Machine Learning Team

With the pervasive integration of digital technology in education, the global demand for personalized, high - quality educational resources is becoming increasingly urgent. As one of the top international conferences on artificial intelligence, the breakthrough findings of the NeurIPS 2020 "Education Challenge" competition in the field of AI may have a transformative potential on the personalized education of millions of students worldwide.

The AI Middle Platform Machine Learning Team of TAL Education Group, through long - term research in the fields of NLP and data mining, can better understand the learning trajectories of students accurately and provide personalized learning suggestions, establishing robust frameworks for the application of data analysis, content recognition, and automatic correction technologies in educational scenarios, for scalable personalized learning.

02 Expanding R&D Talent Investments to Promote AIED Implementation

With proven technological expertise and domain expertise of smart education, in August 2019, TAL Education Group was approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology to establish China's National AI Open Innovation Platform for smart education, to foster industry collaboration and to help small and medium - sized enterprises grow. At the same time, TAL Education Group continues to strengthen the construction of fundamental R&D infrastructure, establishing joint laboratories or carrying out joint scientific research projects with Tsinghua University, the Institute of Computing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and six other universities and institutions, expanding its research initiatives.

At the same time, TAL Education Group continues to increase the training of educational talents, attracting a large number of top - tier AI researchers who are committed to educational innovation through technology.

Dozens of academic achievements in which the AI team of TAL Education Group participated were published at premier academic conferences such as NeurIPS, AAAI, WWW, EMNLP, AIED, and NCME, and garnered top honors including in the world's top conference in the field of computer vision, CVPR - EmotioNet competition, the championship in the world conference in the field of human - computer interaction and pervasive computing, UbiComp competition, and the championship in the Chinese Computational Linguistics Conference CCL2020 competition, and other honors. At the New York International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the AI team of TAL Education Group successfully organized the first AI for Education academic symposium, advancing global academic discourse in the field of "AI + Education".

While increasing investment in scientific research and talents, TAL Education Group is also continuously applying AI technology to authentic learning environments.

In recent years, TAL Education Group has continuously made breakthroughs in cutting - edge core technologies and, based on the continuous accumulation of AI capabilities in areas such as speech technology, visual understanding, and knowledge graph, has realized the technology commercialization of multiple technologies and developed innovative product solutions including AI classrooms, teaching process evaluation, oral expression ability assessment, homework photo search and correction, and more. Currently, TAL Education Group has explored and formed over 100 AI - powered features covering various teaching stages ("teach, learn, test, practice, evaluate") and more than 10 AI application solutions in educational scenarios.

For example, TAL Education Group's independently developed "Chinese - English Oral Expression Ability Assessment Solution", based on cutting - edge speech recognition for young learners and multi - dimensional oral expression evaluation algorithms, generates comprehensive assessments from dimensions such as fluency, emotion, content relevance, semantic logic, and language use. This solution is not only widely used in brands such as Xueersi Peiyou and Xueersi Online School under TAL Education Group but is also available to other industry educators. TAL Education Group's homework photo search software "Hipai Pai" with the core function of "Can't find the question, teachers can answer for free" has powerful AI technology and a huge high - quality question bank, enabling instant access to step - by - step solutions and detailed step analysis with just one photo, and continues to launch more intelligent AI features.

Consistent industry recognition in international authoritative competitions signifies the international academic recognition of the research capabilities of TAL Education Group and highlights the tangible educational impact of TAL Education Group's AI technology in the implementation of educational scenarios.

In the future, TAL Education Group will continue to advance in - depth research in the field of educational technology and, based on the new generation of national artificial intelligence open innovation platform for intelligent education, deliver comprehensive edtech solutions for education practitioners in all scenarios, processes, and cycles, and provide children with equitable, high - quality learning experiences.