Using Vision + Language Models to Predict Item Difficulty

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Khan, Samin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Khan, Samin
author_facet Khan, Samin
contents This project investigates the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to determine the difficulty of data visualization literacy test items. We explore whether features derived from item text (question and answer options), the visualization image, or a combination of both can predict item difficulty (proportion of correct responses) for U.S. adults. We use GPT-4.1-nano to analyze items and generate predictions based on these distinct feature sets. The multimodal approach, using both visual and text features, yields the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) (0.224), outperforming the unimodal vision-only (0.282) and text-only (0.338) approaches. The best-performing multimodal model was applied to a held-out test set for external evaluation and achieved a mean squared error of 0.10805, demonstrating the potential of LLMs for psychometric analysis and automated item development.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_04670
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Using Vision + Language Models to Predict Item Difficulty
Khan, Samin
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.7; K.3.2
This project investigates the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to determine the difficulty of data visualization literacy test items. We explore whether features derived from item text (question and answer options), the visualization image, or a combination of both can predict item difficulty (proportion of correct responses) for U.S. adults. We use GPT-4.1-nano to analyze items and generate predictions based on these distinct feature sets. The multimodal approach, using both visual and text features, yields the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) (0.224), outperforming the unimodal vision-only (0.282) and text-only (0.338) approaches. The best-performing multimodal model was applied to a held-out test set for external evaluation and achieved a mean squared error of 0.10805, demonstrating the potential of LLMs for psychometric analysis and automated item development.
title Using Vision + Language Models to Predict Item Difficulty
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.7; K.3.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04670