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.
By Shouang Wei, Min Zhang, Xin Lin, Bo Jiang, Kun Kuang, Zhongxiang Dai
arXiv:2608. 03206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) power educational applications from tutoring to essay scoring, but each is a point solution to a single task, and only recently have these point solutions been integrated into agents operating over a learning management system (LMS).
By Unggi Lee, Sookbun Lee, Yeil Jeong, Eunjoo Lee, Minchul Shin, Hoilym Kwon
PEARL is a framework that trains Socratic tutoring agents using pedagogically aligned reinforcement learning. It introduces a controllable student simulator to model diverse cognitive states, a reward model that jointly evaluates pedagogical quality and correctness, and a stable multi‑objective RL approach to balance competing tutoring goals. Experiments demonstrate that PEARL competes with both open‑source tutoring systems and leading proprietary LLMs.
By Qikai Chang, Zhenrong Zhang, Linbo Chen, Pengfei Hu, Jianshu Zhang, Youhui Guo, Jun Du
The paper introduces Multi-Teacher Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (MT‑SDPO), an on‑policy distillation method that combines multiple frozen teachers into a single student model. MT‑SDPO uses self‑anchors, answer‑verified eligibility, and privileged distillation to select reliable teachers per sample rather than per domain. Experiments on five students from three model families show that MT‑SDPO improves the weakest domain of Qwen3‑8B by 14.79 points and reduces its domain gap by 74.7%, achieving a more balanced performance than matching a single teacher to each domain.
By Xixiang He, Xingming Li, Baiqi Wu, Qiyao Sun, Xuanyu Ji, Ao Cheng, Qingyong Hu
arXiv:2606. 27814v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training small language-model agents for long-horizon interactive tasks requires both fast imitation and reward-driven improvement.
By Qitai Tan, Zefang Zong, Yang Li, Peng Chen
The paper introduces Multi-Teacher Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (MT‑SDPO), an on‑policy distillation method that combines multiple frozen teachers into a single student model. MT‑SDPO uses self‑anchors, answer‑verified eligibility, and privileged distillation to identify the most reliable teacher for each sample rather than relying on domain labels. Experiments on five students from three model families show that MT‑SDPO improves the weakest domain of Qwen3‑8B by 14.79 points and reduces its domain gap by 74.7%, achieving a better balance than matching a single teacher per domain.
arXiv:2509. 14257v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model agents achieve strong performance on multi-step reasoning and tool-use tasks, but their impressive capabilities typically rely on extremely large backbones.
By Yuanjie Lyu, Chengyu Wang, Jun Huang, Tong Xu
arXiv:2609.28470v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Artificial intelligence offers an unprecedented opportunity to augment human capabilities, yet progress at the frontier has focused primarily on advanc...
By Curtis Northcutt, Inaara Hasmani, Kevin Feng, Trevor Khangi, Andreas Plesner, Jonas Mueller
arXiv:2606. 27814v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training small language-model agents for long-horizon interactive tasks requires both fast imitation and reward-driven improvement.
By Qitai Tan, Zefang Zong, Mo Li, Yipeng Shi, Yang Li, Peng Chen
arXiv:2604. 26962v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Education is one of the most promising real-world applications for Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Bingxi Zhao, Jiahao Zhang, Xubin Ren, Zirui Guo, Tianzhe Chu, Yi Ma, Chao Huang
arXiv:2609.01591v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: AI tutors are most useful when they adapt to each student's strengths, weaknesses, and preferred guidance, but evidence about which guidance works for...
By Ke Yang, Chenglong Wang, Michel Galley, Chandan Singh, Jeevana Priya Inala, ChengXiang Zhai, Jianfeng Gao
arXiv:2606. 30774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study when natural-language feedback produces improvement beyond the gains obtainable from repeated attempts alone.
By Bart{\l}omiej Cupia{\l}, Jan {\L}ojek, Miko{\l}aj Garstecki, Szymon Pob{\l}ocki, Alicja Ziarko, Piotr Mi{\l}o\'s