cd /news/artificial-intelligence/uiuc-ai-teaching-assistant Β· home β€Ί topics β€Ί artificial-intelligence β€Ί article
[ARTICLE Β· art-63013] src=github.com β†— pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

UIUC AI Teaching Assistant

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have released an open-source AI teaching assistant that runs 11 models in parallel for text/image retrieval, generation, moderation, and ranking, achieving a median 2-second response time. The system uses data from textbooks, lecture videos, and student QA forums, and includes a novel semantic search retrieval approach during RLHF. The project is fully open source except for commercial textbooks, and the team encourages others to plug in their own document databases.

read2 min views1 publishedJul 17, 2026
UIUC AI Teaching Assistant
Image: source

We're live on HuggingFace: πŸ‘‰ https://huggingface.co/spaces/kastan/ai-teaching-assistant πŸ‘ˆ

Our system runs 11 separate models in parallel for text/image retrieval, generation, moderation and ranking and still achieves a median 2-second response time.

We use data from textbooks, lecture videos, and student QA forums (ordered, subjuctively, by importance). None of this data is currently available publically because this project was not granted those rights by the authors.

My favorite contribution is the novel approach of semantic search retrieval during RLHF, using a dataset I iteratively produced by hiring a team of five Electrical Engineering students. That data is freely available on Huggingface here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/kastan/rlhf-qa-comparisons. We specifically cover the material necessary in the UIUC course ECE 120, intro to Electrical Engineering.

We have a lot of models here. To evaluate which ones are helping, and which hurt, every time we push a new feature we re-run this evaluation. Our evaluation dataset of QA pairs is produced in house, written by expert electrical engineers. Using these questions, we generate answers with each of our models. Finally, we ask GPT-3 if the generated are "better" or "worse" than the ground truth answers written by humans. One limitation is that GPT-3 evaluates itself. GPT-3 nearly always thinks that GPT-3 is great, which is probably not true and a limitation of this evaluation method. Maybe we should run this same evaluation with Cohere's models to compare.

Nevertheless, iterative evaluation was crucial to ensure our new features were making our system better.

See the full evalaution results here. See the evaluation code here.

This project is fully open source, with the exception of commercial textbooks. I highly encourage you to simply plug in your own Pinecone database of documents and use this in your work!

  • Python requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt
  • API keys

We rely on these APIs enumerated in run_ta_gradio.sh

. Be sure to add your own πŸ˜„

  • Document store for retrieval-augmented generation

Simply build your own Pinecone database of your documents. We open source the scripts we use for this, where our source material is in PDF or plaintext and our lecture slides are .jpg images (sneakily exported from .pptx).

Data cleaning utils:

And you're done! You can now run the app πŸŽ‰

bash run_ta_gradio.sh

main.py

: The main aggregator of our many LLM implementations.TA_gradio_ux.py

: Defines the Gradio UX, and calls models defined inmain.py

.prompting.py

: Our home for prompt engineering.evaluation.py

: Run GPT-3 powered evaluation of our system. We routinely run this to determine if each additional feature makes responses "better" or "worse".feedback.json

: Collection of real user feedback via the Gradio web app.run_ta_gradio.sh

: Entrypoint launch script.

── more in #artificial-intelligence 4 stories Β· sorted by recency
── more on @uiuc 3 stories trending now
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain β€” perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
β†’ Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host βœ“
Get free account β†’ Pricing
from €0/mo Β· no card required
LIVE [news/uiuc-ai-teaching-ass…] indexed:0 read:2min 2026-07-17 Β· β€”