arXiv Machine Learning By Qikai Chang, Zhenrong Zhang, Linbo Chen, Pengfei Hu, Jianshu Zhang, Youhui Guo, Jun Du

PEARL: Training Socratic Tutors with Pedagogically Aligned Reinforcement Learning

Read the original on arXiv Machine 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.

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 Machine Learning.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

UCO: A Multi-Turn Interactive Reinforcement Learning Method for Adaptive Teaching with Large Language Models

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 AI
Oct 12

MENTOR: Learning from Failure with On-Policy Pedagogical Intervention

The paper introduces MENTOR, a multi‑agent framework that provides on‑policy pedagogical intervention to address zero‑reward collapse in reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards. MENTOR diagnoses failures in real time and generates targeted prompts to guide the learning agent, integrating seamlessly with existing policy optimization pipelines such as GRPO. Experiments on math and code generation tasks show that MENTOR significantly reduces collapse, achieving up to 78.3% relative gains on Llama‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct.

By Guanlan Yue, Hang Yu, Xiaoyong Huang, Ruipeng Li, Wei Zhang, Bingchang Liu, Rui Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

CoLearn: An Agentic Tutor that Learns its Learner in a Human--AI Co-Learning Loop

CoLearn is an interactive, agentic tutoring system that learns about each learner through a persistent memory of mastery and misconceptions, updated with a Bayesian Knowledge Tracing model that uses a large language model as an observation function. It generates personalized questions targeting the learner’s weakest topics and recurring misconceptions, and provides a live evidence view for progress visualization and blind A/B comparison. In blind A/B tests, learners preferred questions conditioned on this memory 68‑69% of the time, and simulations show the agent’s belief converges toward the learner’s true mastery.

By Kailai He, Zhihao Wu, Linhai Zhang, Runcong Zhao, Yulan He, Jiazheng Li