HierLLM: Hierarchical Large Language Model for Question Recommendation

Question recommendation is a task that sequentially recommends questions for students to enhance their learning efficiency. That is, given the learning history and learning target of a student, a question recommender is supposed to select the question that will bring the most improvement for students. Previous methods typically model the question recommendation as a sequential decision-making problem, estimating students' learning state with the learning history, and feeding the learning state with the learning target to a neural network to select the recommended question from a question set. However, previous methods are faced with two challenges: (1) learning history is unavailable in the cold start scenario, which makes the recommender generate inappropriate recommendations; (2) the size of the question set is much large, which makes it difficult for the recommender to select the best question precisely. To address the challenges, we propose a method called hierarchical large language model for question recommendation (HierLLM), which is a LLM-based hierarchical structure. The LLM-based structure enables HierLLM to tackle the cold start issue with the strong reasoning abilities of LLM. The hierarchical structure takes advantage of the fact that the number of concepts is significantly smaller than the number of questions, narrowing the range of selectable questions by first identifying the relevant concept for the to-recommend question, and then selecting the recommended question based on that concept. This hierarchical structure reduces the difficulty of the recommendation.To investigate the performance of HierLLM, we conduct extensive experiments, and the results demonstrate the outstanding performance of HierLLM.

Contrastive Diffuser: Planning Towards High Return States via Contrastive Learning

Applying diffusion models in reinforcement learning for long-term planning has gained much attention recently. Several diffusion-based methods have successfully leveraged the modeling capabilities of diffusion for arbitrary distributions. These methods generate subsequent trajectories for planning and have demonstrated significant improvement. However, these methods are limited by their plain base distributions and their overlooking of the diversity of samples, in which different states have different returns. They simply leverage diffusion to learn the distribution of offline dataset, generate the trajectories whose states share the same distribution with the offline dataset. As a result, the probability of these models reaching the high-return states is largely dependent on the dataset distribution. Even equipped with the guidance model, the performance is still suppressed. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel method called CDiffuser, which devises a return contrast mechanism to pull the states in generated trajectories towards high-return states while pushing them away from low-return states to improve the base distribution. Experiments on 14 commonly used D4RL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

DiffStitch: Boosting Offline Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion-based Trajectory Stitching

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the performance of the learned policy highly depends on the quality of offline datasets. However, in many cases, the offline dataset contains very limited optimal trajectories, which poses a challenge for offline RL algorithms as agents must acquire the ability to transit to high-reward regions. To address this issue, we introduce Diffusion-based Trajectory Stitching (DiffStitch), a novel diffusion-based data augmentation pipeline that systematically generates stitching transitions between trajectories. DiffStitch effectively connects low-reward trajectories with high-reward trajectories, forming globally optimal trajectories to address the challenges faced by offline RL algorithms. Empirical experiments conducted on D4RL datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffStitch across RL methodologies. Notably, DiffStitch demonstrates substantial enhancements in the performance of one-step methods (IQL), imitation learning methods (TD3+BC), and trajectory optimization methods (DT).

GMOCAT: A Graph-Enhanced Multi-Objective Method for Computerized Adaptive Testing

Computerized Adaptive Testing(CAT) refers to an online system that adaptively selects the best-suited question for students with various abilities based on their historical response records. Most CAT methods only focus on the quality objective of predicting the student ability accurately, but neglect concept diversity or question exposure control, which are important considerations in ensuring the performance and validity of CAT. Besides, the students' response records contain valuable relational information between questions and knowledge concepts. The previous methods ignore this relational information, resulting in the selection of sub-optimal test questions. To address these challenges, we propose a Graph-Enhanced Multi-Objective method for CAT (GMOCAT). Firstly, three objectives, namely quality, diversity and novelty, are introduced into the Scalarized Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning framework of CAT, which respectively correspond to improving the prediction accuracy, increasing the concept diversity and reducing the question exposure. We use an Actor-Critic Recommender to select questions and optimize three objectives simultaneously by the scalarization function. Secondly, we utilize the graph neural network to learn relation-aware embeddings of questions and concepts. These embeddings are able to aggregate neighborhood information in the relation graphs between questions and concepts. We conduct experiments on three real-world educational datasets, and show that GMOCAT not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the ability prediction, but also achieve superior performance in improving the concept diversity and alleviating the question exposure. Our code is available at https://github.com/justarter/GMOCAT.

Multi-View Graph Representation for Programming Language Processing: An Investigation into Algorithm Detection

Program representation, which aims at converting program source code into vectors with automatically extracted features, is a fundamental problem in programming language processing (PLP). Recent work tries to represent programs with neural networks based on source code structures. However, such methods often focus on the syntax and consider only one single perspective of programs, limiting the representation power of models. This paper proposes a multi-view graph (MVG) program representation method. MVG pays more attention to code semantics and simultaneously includes both data flow and control flow as multiple views. These views are then combined and processed by a graph neural network (GNN) to obtain a comprehensive program representation that covers various aspects. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed MVG approach in the context of algorithm detection, an important and challenging subfield of PLP. Specifically, we use a public dataset POJ-104 and also construct a new challenging dataset ALG-109 to test our method. In experiments, MVG outperforms previous methods significantly, demonstrating our model's strong capability of representing source code.