Ken Utilization Layer: Hebbian Replay Within a Student's Ken for Adaptive Exercise Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kuling, Grey, Zitnik, Marinka
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Kuling, Grey
Zitnik, Marinka
author_facet Kuling, Grey
Zitnik, Marinka
contents Adaptive exercise recommendation (ER) aims to choose the next activity that matches a learner's evolving Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). We present KUL-Rec, a biologically inspired ER system that couples a fast Hebbian memory with slow replay-based consolidation to enable continual, few-shot personalization from sparse interactions. The model operates in an embedding space, allowing a single architecture to handle both tabular knowledge-tracing logs and open-ended short-answer text. We align evaluation with tutoring needs using bidirectional ranking and rank-sensitive metrics (nDCG, Recall@K). Across ten public datasets, KUL-Rec improves macro nDCG (0.316 vs. 0.265 for the strongest baseline) and Recall@10 (0.305 vs. 0.211), while achieving low inference latency and an $\approx99$\% reduction in peak GPU memory relative to a competitive graph-based model. In a 13-week graduate course, KUL-Rec personalized weekly short-answer quizzes generated by a retrieval-augmented pipeline and the personalized quizzes were associated with lower perceived difficulty and higher helpfulness (p < .05). An embedding robustness audit highlights that encoder choice affects semantic alignment, motivating routine audits when deploying open-response assessment. Together, these results indicate that Hebbian replay with bounded consolidation offers a practical path to real-time, interpretable ER that scales across data modalities and classroom settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_00032
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ken Utilization Layer: Hebbian Replay Within a Student's Ken for Adaptive Exercise Recommendation
Kuling, Grey
Zitnik, Marinka
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Adaptive exercise recommendation (ER) aims to choose the next activity that matches a learner's evolving Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). We present KUL-Rec, a biologically inspired ER system that couples a fast Hebbian memory with slow replay-based consolidation to enable continual, few-shot personalization from sparse interactions. The model operates in an embedding space, allowing a single architecture to handle both tabular knowledge-tracing logs and open-ended short-answer text. We align evaluation with tutoring needs using bidirectional ranking and rank-sensitive metrics (nDCG, Recall@K). Across ten public datasets, KUL-Rec improves macro nDCG (0.316 vs. 0.265 for the strongest baseline) and Recall@10 (0.305 vs. 0.211), while achieving low inference latency and an $\approx99$\% reduction in peak GPU memory relative to a competitive graph-based model. In a 13-week graduate course, KUL-Rec personalized weekly short-answer quizzes generated by a retrieval-augmented pipeline and the personalized quizzes were associated with lower perceived difficulty and higher helpfulness (p < .05). An embedding robustness audit highlights that encoder choice affects semantic alignment, motivating routine audits when deploying open-response assessment. Together, these results indicate that Hebbian replay with bounded consolidation offers a practical path to real-time, interpretable ER that scales across data modalities and classroom settings.
title Ken Utilization Layer: Hebbian Replay Within a Student's Ken for Adaptive Exercise Recommendation
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00032