Improving Socratic Question Generation using Data Augmentation and Preference Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Kumar, Nischal Ashok, Lan, Andrew
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Kumar, Nischal Ashok
Lan, Andrew
author_facet Kumar, Nischal Ashok
Lan, Andrew
contents The Socratic method is a way of guiding students toward solving a problem independently without directly revealing the solution to the problem. Although this method has been shown to significantly improve student learning outcomes, it remains a complex labor-intensive task for instructors. Large language models (LLMs) can be used to augment human effort by automatically generating Socratic questions for students. However, existing methods that involve prompting these LLMs sometimes produce invalid outputs, e.g., those that directly reveal the solution to the problem or provide irrelevant or premature questions. To alleviate this problem, inspired by reinforcement learning with AI feedback (RLAIF), we first propose a data augmentation method to enrich existing Socratic questioning datasets with questions that are invalid in specific ways. Next, we propose a method to optimize open-source LLMs such as LLama 2 to prefer ground-truth questions over generated invalid ones, using direct preference optimization (DPO). Our experiments on a Socratic questions dataset for student code debugging show that a DPO-optimized 7B LLama 2 model can effectively avoid generating invalid questions, and as a result, outperforms existing state-of-the-art prompting methods.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_00199
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Socratic Question Generation using Data Augmentation and Preference Optimization
Kumar, Nischal Ashok
Lan, Andrew
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
The Socratic method is a way of guiding students toward solving a problem independently without directly revealing the solution to the problem. Although this method has been shown to significantly improve student learning outcomes, it remains a complex labor-intensive task for instructors. Large language models (LLMs) can be used to augment human effort by automatically generating Socratic questions for students. However, existing methods that involve prompting these LLMs sometimes produce invalid outputs, e.g., those that directly reveal the solution to the problem or provide irrelevant or premature questions. To alleviate this problem, inspired by reinforcement learning with AI feedback (RLAIF), we first propose a data augmentation method to enrich existing Socratic questioning datasets with questions that are invalid in specific ways. Next, we propose a method to optimize open-source LLMs such as LLama 2 to prefer ground-truth questions over generated invalid ones, using direct preference optimization (DPO). Our experiments on a Socratic questions dataset for student code debugging show that a DPO-optimized 7B LLama 2 model can effectively avoid generating invalid questions, and as a result, outperforms existing state-of-the-art prompting methods.
title Improving Socratic Question Generation using Data Augmentation and Preference Optimization
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00199