Related papers: Confirming Correct, Missing the Rest: LLM Tutoring…

Instruction-tuned large language models produce helpful, structured responses, but how robust is this helpfulness under trivial constraints? We show that simple lexical constraints (banning a single punctuation character or common word)…

Difficulty spillover and suboptimal help-seeking challenge the sequential, knowledge-intensive nature of digital tasks. In online surveys, tough questions can drain mental energy and hurt performance on later questions, while users often…

As NLP evaluation shifts from static benchmarks to multi-turn interactive settings, LLM-based simulators have become widely used as user proxies, serving two roles: generating user turns and providing evaluation signals. Yet, these…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as proxy students in the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and in piloting test questions. However, to what extent these proxy students accurately emulate the behavior and…

As students increasingly adopt large language models (LLMs) as learning aids, it is crucial to build models that are adept at handling the nuances of tutoring: they need to identify the core needs of students, be adaptive, provide…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, yet their deployment in enterprise environments reveals a critical limitation: inconsistent adherence to custom instructions.…

Large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to scale high-quality personalized education to all. A promising approach towards this means is to build dialog tutoring models that scaffold students' problem-solving. However, even…

The dream of achieving a student-teacher ratio of 1:1 is closer than ever thanks to the emergence of large language models (LLMs). One potential application of these models in the educational field would be to provide feedback to students…

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming knowledge work by improving the quality and efficiency of tasks such as writing, coding, and data analysis. However, their growing use in education has exposed a learning-performance…

Aligning LLMs for math tutoring typically requires RL-based training with multi-GPU infrastructure. We investigate whether training-free prompt optimization-evolving only the system prompt via API calls-can serve as a practical alternative.…

A hallmark property of explainable AI models is the ability to teach other agents, communicating knowledge of how to perform a task. While Large Language Models perform complex reasoning by generating explanations for their predictions, it…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in AI-based tutoring systems. Can they faithfully model novice reasoning and metacognitive judgments? Existing evaluations emphasize problem-solving accuracy, overlooking the fragmented…

Large language models are increasingly deployed as specialized agents that plan, call tools, and take actions over extended horizons. Yet many existing evaluations assume a "clean interface" where dynamics are specified and stable, tools…

Modeling plausible student misconceptions is critical for AI in education. In this work, we examine how large language models (LLMs) reason about misconceptions when generating multiple-choice distractors, a task that requires modeling…

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for automated grading, but their outputs can be unreliable. Rather than improving grading accuracy directly, we address a complementary problem: \textit{predicting when an LLM grader is likely to be…

Large language models (LLMs) could be valuable personal AI agents across various domains, provided they can precisely follow user instructions. However, recent studies have shown significant limitations in LLMs' instruction-following…

Novice programmers benefit from timely, personalized support that addresses individual learning gaps, yet the availability of instructors and teaching assistants is inherently limited. Large language models (LLMs) present opportunities to…

Conversations with LMs involve two participants: a human user leading the conversation, and an LM assistant responding to the user's request. To satisfy this specific role, LMs are post-trained to be helpful assistants -- optimized to…

Education is one of the most promising real-world applications for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current LLMs rely on static pre-training knowledge and lack adaptation to individual learners, while existing RAG systems fall short…

To assist users in complex tasks, LLMs generate plans: step-by-step instructions towards a goal. While alignment methods aim to ensure LLM plans are helpful, they train (RLHF) or evaluate (ChatbotArena) on what users prefer, assuming this…