FedCD: A Fairness-aware Federated Cognitive Diagnosis Framework

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yang, Shangshang, Han, Jialin, Yu, Xiaoshan, Wang, Ziwen, Jiang, Hao, Ma, Haiping, Zhang, Xingyi, Min, Geyong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909718812819456
author Yang, Shangshang
Han, Jialin
Yu, Xiaoshan
Wang, Ziwen
Jiang, Hao
Ma, Haiping
Zhang, Xingyi
Min, Geyong
author_facet Yang, Shangshang
Han, Jialin
Yu, Xiaoshan
Wang, Ziwen
Jiang, Hao
Ma, Haiping
Zhang, Xingyi
Min, Geyong
contents Online intelligent education platforms have generated a vast amount of distributed student learning data. This influx of data presents opportunities for cognitive diagnosis (CD) to assess students' mastery of knowledge concepts while also raising significant data privacy and security challenges. To cope with this issue, federated learning (FL) becomes a promising solution by jointly training models across multiple local clients without sharing their original data. However, the data quality problem, caused by the ability differences and educational context differences between different groups/schools of students, further poses a challenge to the fairness of models. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a fairness-aware federated cognitive diagnosis framework (FedCD) to jointly train CD models built upon a novel parameter decoupling-based personalization strategy, preserving privacy of data and achieving precise and fair diagnosis of students on each client. As an FL paradigm, FedCD trains a local CD model for the students in each client based on its local student learning data, and each client uploads its partial model parameters to the central server for parameter aggregation according to the devised innovative personalization strategy. The main idea of this strategy is to decouple model parameters into two parts: the first is used as locally personalized parameters, containing diagnostic function-related model parameters, to diagnose each client's students fairly; the second is the globally shared parameters across clients and the server, containing exercise embedding parameters, which are updated via fairness-aware aggregation, to alleviate inter-school unfairness. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FedCD framework and the personalization strategy compared to five FL approaches under three CD models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01296
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FedCD: A Fairness-aware Federated Cognitive Diagnosis Framework
Yang, Shangshang
Han, Jialin
Yu, Xiaoshan
Wang, Ziwen
Jiang, Hao
Ma, Haiping
Zhang, Xingyi
Min, Geyong
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
Online intelligent education platforms have generated a vast amount of distributed student learning data. This influx of data presents opportunities for cognitive diagnosis (CD) to assess students' mastery of knowledge concepts while also raising significant data privacy and security challenges. To cope with this issue, federated learning (FL) becomes a promising solution by jointly training models across multiple local clients without sharing their original data. However, the data quality problem, caused by the ability differences and educational context differences between different groups/schools of students, further poses a challenge to the fairness of models. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a fairness-aware federated cognitive diagnosis framework (FedCD) to jointly train CD models built upon a novel parameter decoupling-based personalization strategy, preserving privacy of data and achieving precise and fair diagnosis of students on each client. As an FL paradigm, FedCD trains a local CD model for the students in each client based on its local student learning data, and each client uploads its partial model parameters to the central server for parameter aggregation according to the devised innovative personalization strategy. The main idea of this strategy is to decouple model parameters into two parts: the first is used as locally personalized parameters, containing diagnostic function-related model parameters, to diagnose each client's students fairly; the second is the globally shared parameters across clients and the server, containing exercise embedding parameters, which are updated via fairness-aware aggregation, to alleviate inter-school unfairness. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FedCD framework and the personalization strategy compared to five FL approaches under three CD models.
title FedCD: A Fairness-aware Federated Cognitive Diagnosis Framework
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01296