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Main Authors: Ozyurt, Yilmazcan, Almaci, Tunaberk, Feuerriegel, Stefan, Sachan, Mrinmaya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11060
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author Ozyurt, Yilmazcan
Almaci, Tunaberk
Feuerriegel, Stefan
Sachan, Mrinmaya
author_facet Ozyurt, Yilmazcan
Almaci, Tunaberk
Feuerriegel, Stefan
Sachan, Mrinmaya
contents We introduce ExRec, a general framework for personalized exercise recommendation with semantically-grounded knowledge tracing. Our method builds on the observation that existing exercise recommendation approaches simulate student performance via knowledge tracing (KT) but they often overlook two key aspects: (a) the semantic content of questions and (b) the sequential, structured progression of student learning. To address this, our ExRec presents an end-to-end pipeline, from annotating the KCs of questions and learning their semantic representations to training KT models and optimizing several reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Moreover, we improve standard Q-learning-based continuous RL methods via a tailored model-based value estimation (MVE) approach that directly leverages the components of KT model in estimating cumulative knowledge improvement. We validate the effectiveness of our ExRec using various RL methods across four real-world tasks with different educational goals in online math learning. We further show that ExRec generalizes robustly to new, unseen questions and that it produces interpretable student learning trajectories. Together, our findings highlight the promise of KT-guided RL for effective personalization in education.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_11060
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Personalized Exercise Recommendation with Semantically-Grounded Knowledge Tracing
Ozyurt, Yilmazcan
Almaci, Tunaberk
Feuerriegel, Stefan
Sachan, Mrinmaya
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce ExRec, a general framework for personalized exercise recommendation with semantically-grounded knowledge tracing. Our method builds on the observation that existing exercise recommendation approaches simulate student performance via knowledge tracing (KT) but they often overlook two key aspects: (a) the semantic content of questions and (b) the sequential, structured progression of student learning. To address this, our ExRec presents an end-to-end pipeline, from annotating the KCs of questions and learning their semantic representations to training KT models and optimizing several reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Moreover, we improve standard Q-learning-based continuous RL methods via a tailored model-based value estimation (MVE) approach that directly leverages the components of KT model in estimating cumulative knowledge improvement. We validate the effectiveness of our ExRec using various RL methods across four real-world tasks with different educational goals in online math learning. We further show that ExRec generalizes robustly to new, unseen questions and that it produces interpretable student learning trajectories. Together, our findings highlight the promise of KT-guided RL for effective personalization in education.
title Personalized Exercise Recommendation with Semantically-Grounded Knowledge Tracing
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11060