Work

Enhancing knowledge tracing with multi-level individualized perception and teacher-student semantic distillation

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Knowledge tracing aims to model students' dynamic knowledge states based on their historical learning interactions and predict future learning performance. Existing sequence modeling methods often overlook individual differences and have limited semantic modeling capability. To address these issues, this paper proposes a knowledge tracing model that combines personalized modeling with knowledge distillation. The model introduces three personalized modules: (1) a personalized question understanding module that captures individual differences in students' understanding of the same question; (2) a personalized question-knowledge association module that models relationships between questions and relevant knowledge concepts; and (3) a personalized knowledge state forgetting module that simulates students' memory decay patterns. These modules allow for more accurate modeling of students' dynamic knowledge states. Furthermore, to overcome the semantic limitations of lightweight models, a large language model (LLM) is used as the teacher, and its semantic modeling capability is transferred to an LSTM-based student model via knowledge distillation. Experiments show that the proposed method consistently improves prediction performance on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in modeling personalized learning and enhancing semantic representation.

Source: Neural Networks

DOI: 10.1016/j.neunet.2026.109576

Authors: Zhenqiang Yu, Luyao Huang, Xingbing Li, Yuncheng Jiang

Institution: South China Normal University

Language: English

Topic: Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Adaptive Learning

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,110