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
arXiv:2608. 10492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based simulators often reproduce observable actions but fail to capture the underlying reasoning behind them.
By Rose Niousha, Minwoo Kang, Narges Norouzi
arXiv:2610.19532v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Existing student models in educational applications largely focus on student responses to questions. However, as tutoring becomes more accessible at...
By Zhangqi Duan, Simon Woodhead, Maya Miller-Vedam, Andrew Lan
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: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.
By Sidney Tio, Arunesh Sinha, Pradeep Varakantham
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:2606. 15225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale learner-task interaction data are crucial for intelligent educational systems but are costly to collect and constrained by privacy and learner engagement.
By Weibo Gao, Qi Liu, Linan Yue, Zheng Zhang, Yichao Du, Fangzhou Yao, Ao Yu, Zhenya Huang, Shijin Wang
The paper introduces SWIM, a task that frames student writing simulation as proficiency‑conditioned essay generation. It evaluates prompting, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning for aligning generated essays with student proficiency profiles, using automated essay scoring as a metric. Results show that prompting alone offers limited control, while supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning significantly improve alignment across content, lexical, grammatical, and organizational traits, though low‑proficiency writing remains difficult to replicate.
By Heejin Do, Jakub Kontak, Mrinmaya Sachan
arXiv:2606. 01584v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational tutoring agents have been shown to improve learning engagement and student outcomes, and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in these systems to provide scalable, personalized feedback.
By Aitor Arronte Alvarez, Naiyi Xie Fincham
The paper introduces UserRepGen-4B, a representation generator that creates natural-language user representations to condition user simulators for more faithful conversation simulation. By formulating a conversation reconstruction task and using hindsight distillation, the system learns to generate representations that improve simulation fidelity across 700 conversations from seven datasets. The improved representations also enhance diversity preservation and user distinction in unseen tasks.
By Shuhaib Mehri, Philippe Laban, Michel Galley, Dilek T\"ur, Jennifer Neville, Jianfeng Gao
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:2609.15972v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As language models become more capable, long-term collaboration in learning, reasoning, and decision-making calls for a deeper understanding of the p...
By Zixuan Wang, Yufan Zhou, Jinzhou Tang, Xinle Yu, Chengjun Wu, Lyumanshan Ye, Zhaoxiang Feng, Letian Peng, Adyasha Patra, Fan Bai, Enze Ma, Zhengding Hu, Jianyang Gu, Zhao Wang, Yufei Ding, Jingbo Shang, Tianmin Shu, Zhiting Hu, Zhen Wang