Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wang, Jian, Dai, Yinpei, Zhang, Yichi, Ma, Ziqiao, Li, Wenjie, Chai, Joyce
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Wang, Jian
Dai, Yinpei
Zhang, Yichi
Ma, Ziqiao
Li, Wenjie
Chai, Joyce
author_facet Wang, Jian
Dai, Yinpei
Zhang, Yichi
Ma, Ziqiao
Li, Wenjie
Chai, Joyce
contents Intelligent tutoring agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly explored to deliver personalized knowledge in areas such as language learning and science education. However, their capabilities in guiding users to solve complex real-world tasks remain underexplored. To address this limitation, in this work, we focus on coding tutoring, a challenging problem that requires tutors to proactively guide students towards completing predefined coding tasks. We propose a novel agent workflow, Trace-and-Verify (TRAVER), which combines knowledge tracing to estimate a student's knowledge state and turn-by-turn verification to ensure effective guidance toward task completion. We introduce DICT, an automatic evaluation protocol that assesses tutor agents using controlled student simulation and code generation tests. Extensive experiments reveal the challenges of coding tutoring and demonstrate that TRAVER achieves a significantly higher success rate. Although we use code tutoring as an example in this paper, our approach can be extended beyond coding, providing valuable insights into advancing tutoring agents for human task learning.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13311
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors
Wang, Jian
Dai, Yinpei
Zhang, Yichi
Ma, Ziqiao
Li, Wenjie
Chai, Joyce
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Intelligent tutoring agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly explored to deliver personalized knowledge in areas such as language learning and science education. However, their capabilities in guiding users to solve complex real-world tasks remain underexplored. To address this limitation, in this work, we focus on coding tutoring, a challenging problem that requires tutors to proactively guide students towards completing predefined coding tasks. We propose a novel agent workflow, Trace-and-Verify (TRAVER), which combines knowledge tracing to estimate a student's knowledge state and turn-by-turn verification to ensure effective guidance toward task completion. We introduce DICT, an automatic evaluation protocol that assesses tutor agents using controlled student simulation and code generation tests. Extensive experiments reveal the challenges of coding tutoring and demonstrate that TRAVER achieves a significantly higher success rate. Although we use code tutoring as an example in this paper, our approach can be extended beyond coding, providing valuable insights into advancing tutoring agents for human task learning.
title Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13311