arXiv AI By Olga Manakina, Igor Bogdanov

Learning to Grade Efficiently: A Bandit-Driven Prompt-Selection Framework for Low-Cost LLM Essay Scoring

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper introduces a cost‑aware framework that treats each prompt type as an arm in a multi‑armed bandit controller, enabling adaptive selection of optimal prompting strategies during inference for automated essay scoring. Experiments on IELTS Writing Task 2 essays demonstrate that this bandit-driven approach achieves comparable scoring accuracy to exhaustive grid search while reducing LLM calls by 78.4%. The study also presents the first cost‑reliability learning curves for essay scoring, offering actionable insights for educational technology platforms balancing operational costs against assessment validity.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

Beyond Score Prediction: LLM-Based Essay Scoring and Feedback Generation via Reinforcement Learning with Rubric Rewards

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to automated essay scoring (AES) and automated feedback generation (AFG). However, existing studies rely primarily on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning, while systematic research on reinforcement learning (RL) post-training and automated evaluation of feedback quality remains limited.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

Goldilocks RL: Tuning Task Difficulty to Escape Sparse Rewards for Reasoning

Goldilocks RL proposes an adaptive data‑selection strategy for reinforcement learning in language models, using a Selector network to predict reward variability and prioritize questions that are neither too easy nor too hard. By continuously adapting to the model’s evolving abilities, Goldilocks improves training efficiency on large‑scale reasoning datasets, achieving up to 78% fewer optimization steps compared to standard GRPO. The approach addresses the sample‑inefficiency problem of sparse rewards in reasoning tasks.

By Ilia Mahrooghi, Aryo Lotfi, Emmanuel Abbe