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Main Authors: Huang, Shuyan, Liu, Zitao, Zhao, Xiangyu, Luo, Weiqi, Weng, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17097
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author Huang, Shuyan
Liu, Zitao
Zhao, Xiangyu
Luo, Weiqi
Weng, Jian
author_facet Huang, Shuyan
Liu, Zitao
Zhao, Xiangyu
Luo, Weiqi
Weng, Jian
contents Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of predicting students' future performance based on their historical interaction sequences. With the advanced capability of capturing contextual long-term dependency, attention mechanism becomes one of the essential components in many deep learning based KT (DLKT) models. In spite of the impressive performance achieved by these attentional DLKT models, many of them are often vulnerable to run the risk of overfitting, especially on small-scale educational datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we propose \textsc{sparseKT}, a simple yet effective framework to improve the robustness and generalization of the attention based DLKT approaches. Specifically, we incorporate a k-selection module to only pick items with the highest attention scores. We propose two sparsification heuristics : (1) soft-thresholding sparse attention and (2) top-$K$ sparse attention. We show that our \textsc{sparseKT} is able to help attentional KT models get rid of irrelevant student interactions and have comparable predictive performance when compared to 11 state-of-the-art KT models on three publicly available real-world educational datasets. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at \url{https://github.com/pykt-team/pykt-toolkit}\footnote{We merged our model to the \textsc{pyKT} benchmark at \url{https://pykt.org/}.}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_17097
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Robust Knowledge Tracing Models via k-Sparse Attention
Huang, Shuyan
Liu, Zitao
Zhao, Xiangyu
Luo, Weiqi
Weng, Jian
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of predicting students' future performance based on their historical interaction sequences. With the advanced capability of capturing contextual long-term dependency, attention mechanism becomes one of the essential components in many deep learning based KT (DLKT) models. In spite of the impressive performance achieved by these attentional DLKT models, many of them are often vulnerable to run the risk of overfitting, especially on small-scale educational datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we propose \textsc{sparseKT}, a simple yet effective framework to improve the robustness and generalization of the attention based DLKT approaches. Specifically, we incorporate a k-selection module to only pick items with the highest attention scores. We propose two sparsification heuristics : (1) soft-thresholding sparse attention and (2) top-$K$ sparse attention. We show that our \textsc{sparseKT} is able to help attentional KT models get rid of irrelevant student interactions and have comparable predictive performance when compared to 11 state-of-the-art KT models on three publicly available real-world educational datasets. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at \url{https://github.com/pykt-team/pykt-toolkit}\footnote{We merged our model to the \textsc{pyKT} benchmark at \url{https://pykt.org/}.}.
title Towards Robust Knowledge Tracing Models via k-Sparse Attention
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17097