arXiv AI

SocraticRepair: Planning-Guided Socratic Tutoring for Program Debugging and Misconception Repair

arXiv AI
Jul 28

Beyond Direct Answering: Aligning Educational LLMs as Socratic Guides via Heuristic Reinforcement Learning

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.

By Xiaokun Wang, Siyu Song, Wentao Liu, Xiaodong Zou
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

A Dataset for Modeling Iterative Problem-Solving

The paper introduces CodeInsight, a large-scale dataset of over 3 million code submissions from 3,286 undergraduate students in two introductory C++ courses, capturing test‑case outcomes, timestamps, and source code. It presents a benchmark that evaluates various modeling approaches—including a Recurrent State Space Model and an LLM‑based predictor—on their ability to predict iterative problem‑solving dynamics such as performance changes and error persistence. The study finds that the RSSM outperforms other models on most courses, while the LLM generates full submissions but with lower predictive accuracy, suggesting it functions more as a generative solver than a behavior predictor.

By Fagun Patel, Sang T. Truong, Duc Q. Nguyen, Kazunori Fukuhara, Benjamin W. Domingue, Sanmi Koyejo, Nick Haber
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Effective Personalized AI Tutors via LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning

The paper presents a tutoring platform that combines a generative AI chatbot with a reinforcement learning algorithm to adaptively sequence practice problems for students learning Python. In a five‑month field study across ten high schools, the adaptive sequencing improved unassisted final exam performance by 0.15 standard deviations, with mediation analysis indicating that higher engagement drove the gains. The study demonstrates that signals from student‑chatbot interactions can be leveraged to personalize and optimize learning at scale.

By Angel Tsai-Hsuan Chung, Botong Zhang, Ling-Chieh Kung, Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani
arXiv AI
Oct 5

CONTRA: Discovering and Qualifying Behavior-Changing Questions for Selective Clarification in LLM Code Generation

CONTRA is a training‑free method that discovers and qualifies behavior‑changing questions for selective clarification in large language model (LLM) code generation. It first generates candidate questions, filters out those unrelated to required behavior or already resolved, then creates programs conditioned on two plausible answers to check for stable behavioral differences on shared inputs. Experiments on ClarifyCodeBench show that CONTRA achieves the highest F1 across four coding agents, outperforming baselines by 13.88 percentage points, and it is also implemented as a Claude Code plugin for practical use.

By Zheng Fang, Yongmin Li, Yichang Zhang, Dongming Jin, Haoyu Wang, Shuai Wang, Zhi Jin, Ge Li
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Mitigating Scaffolding Collapse in Socratic Tutors via Representation Alignment

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.

By Jing Shao, Qifeng Wu, Hanyu Zhang, Sixia Sun, Jun Zhuang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

PEARL: Training Socratic Tutors with Pedagogically Aligned Reinforcement Learning

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