arXiv:2607. 22996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deployed in educational settings often behave as direct answerers: they disclose target concepts in the opening turn instead of guiding students through progressive inquiry, as Socratic pedagogy prescribes.
arXiv:2607. 19371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based Socratic tutors increasingly guide students through multi-turn questioning, but they can suffer from scaffolding collapse: under sustained student pressure, a tutor gradually abandons guided inquiry and reveals solutions directly.
arXiv:2606. 09887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models usually supervises reasoning with scalar outcome rewards, such as binary correctness.
arXiv:2606. 11744v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are now widely used for everyday learning, but the underlying interactions are typically unstructured chats rather than following a curriculum.
The paper introduces an exploration-guided prompt scaffolding framework for multimodal large language models, dynamically adjusting the prompt distribution during reinforcement learning post-training. It uses an Exploration Potential Score (EPS) derived from KL-regularized policy improvement to assess prompt utility without extra overhead, and a teacher model rewrites low-utility prompts to preserve intent while improving informativeness. Experiments on Geo3K, MMK12, MathVision, and MMMU-Pro show consistent performance gains, up to 9.7% in-domain and over 11% on out-of-distribution benchmarks.
The paper introduces UCO, a multi‑turn interactive reinforcement learning method designed to improve adaptive teaching with large language models. UCO employs two reward functions—Progress Reward to gauge genuine cognitive advancement and Scaffold Reward to keep instruction within each student’s Zone of Proximal Development. Experiments on BigMath and MathTutorBench show UCO outperforming 11 baseline models and matching advanced closed‑source systems.
arXiv:2606. 18257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLMs show promise in automating educational content creation, their ability to generate questions that stimulate higher-order thinking remains understudied.
EduDial is a large-scale multi-turn teacher‑student dialogue corpus covering 345 core knowledge points and 34,250 dialogue sessions, designed around Bloom’s taxonomy and ten questioning strategies such as situational, ZPD, and metacognitive questioning. The dataset includes differentiated teaching strategies for students at varying cognitive levels to provide targeted guidance. Using EduDial, the authors trained EduDial‑LLM 32B and introduced an 11‑dimensional evaluation framework that measures teaching quality and content quality, showing that most mainstream LLMs struggle with student‑centered teaching while EduDial‑LLM outperforms all baselines across all metrics.
arXiv:2609.24290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instruction-tuned LLMs faced with underspecified queries often commit to a single interpretation rather than ask for clarification, producing confident...
The paper investigates how different reward specifications affect the reliability of unlearning in large language models using a LoRA-GRPO framework. It compares four reward designs—lexical suppression, anti-refusal shaping, rubric-based broad answering, and explicit refusal contrast—both with and without a supervised fine-tuning warm-up. The results reveal that successful optimization does not guarantee behavioral unlearning, as various evaluation metrics can yield conflicting conclusions due to reward-hacking, policy-support limits, and benchmark probe limitations.
The paper introduces T2T (Thickening-to-Thinning), a dynamic reward framework for large language models that mimics human learning by separating exploration and consolidation phases. During incorrect attempts, T2T encourages exploration to broaden the search space, while after correct solutions it applies length penalties to promote concise reasoning. Experiments on mathematical benchmarks across five mainstream LLMs show that T2T outperforms standard GRPO and recent baselines, improving overall reasoning performance.
arXiv:2606. 09052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-evolution offers a scalable path to stronger reasoning: a pretrained language model improves itself with only minimal external supervision.
arXiv:2608. 03952v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide conversational practice for English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners.