Towards LLM-Empowered Knowledge Tracing via LLM-Student Hierarchical Behavior Alignment in Hyperbolic Space

Knowledge Tracing (KT) infers a student's knowledge state from past interactions to predict future performance. Conventional Deep Learning (DL)-based KT models are typically tied to platform-specific identifiers and latent representations, making them hard to transfer and interpret. Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods can be either ungrounded under prompting or overly domain-dependent under fine-tuning. In addition, most existing KT methods are developed and evaluated under a same-distribution assumption. In real deployments, educational data often arise from heterogeneous platforms with substantial distribution shift, which often degrades generalization. To this end, we propose RAG-KT, a retrieval-augmented paradigm that frames cross-platform KT as reliable context constrained inference with LLMs. It builds a unified multi-source structured context with cross-source alignment via Question Group abstractions and retrieves complementary rich and reliable context for each prediction, enabling grounded prediction and interpretable diagnosis. Experiments on three public KT benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains in accuracy and robustness, including strong performance under cross-platform conditions.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is important for personalized education but traditionally suffers from two key limitations: a reliance on shallow ID-based representations that neglect semantic depth and a restriction to single-granularity mastery estimation that overlooks hierarchical knowledge dependencies. To address these challenges, we propose MOSAIC (Multi-granularity Online Semantic AI for Collaborative Knowledge), a novel framework that orchestrates LLM-driven semantic alignment with sequential modeling. Unlike methods that use LLMs solely as predictors, MOSAIC leverages a frozen LLM to generate dynamic, context-aware embeddings and hierarchical prediction prompts, explicitly capturing collaborative signals and peer interactions. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-granularity consistency objective that jointly regularizes mastery estimation across concept, topic-cluster, and global proficiency levels. Extensive experiments on ASSISTments, EdNet, and a newly collected large-scale MOOC dataset demonstrate that MOSAIC establishes new state-of-the-art results. Specifically, our method achieves AUC improvements of up to 3.4% and Accuracy gains of up to 2.5 % across all benchmarks. Notably, MOSAIC exhibits superior robustness in collaboration-rich environments and long-sequence scenarios (AUC 0.862 on MOOC), offering both high predictive precision and semantically grounded interpretability.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a critical technique for modeling student knowledge to support personalized learning. However, most KT systems focus on binary correctness prediction and cannot diagnose the underlying conceptual misunderstandings that lead to errors. Such fine-grained diagnostic feedback is essential for designing targeted instruction and effective remediation. In this work, we introduce the task of concept-level deficiency prediction, which extends traditional KT by identifying the specific concepts a student is likely to struggle with on future problems. We present ConceptKT, a dataset annotated with labels that capture both the concepts required to solve each question and the missing concepts underlying incorrect responses. We investigate in-context learning approaches to KT and evaluate the diagnostic capabilities of various Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). Different strategies for selecting informative historical records are explored. Experimental results demonstrate that selecting response histories based on conceptual alignment and semantic similarity leads to improved performance on both correctness prediction and concept-level deficiency identification.