Uncertainty-aware Knowledge Tracing

TL;DR

This paper introduces UKT, a novel uncertainty-aware knowledge tracing model that uses stochastic embeddings and a Wasserstein self-attention mechanism to better model student learning states and uncertainties, outperforming existing models.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new UKT model that incorporates uncertainty modeling through stochastic distributions and a Wasserstein self-attention mechanism, enhancing knowledge tracing accuracy.

Findings

UKT significantly outperforms existing models in KT prediction.

UKT effectively handles uncertainty in student interactions.

Experiments on six datasets validate the robustness of UKT.

Abstract

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is crucial in education assessment, which focuses on depicting students' learning states and assessing students' mastery of subjects. With the rise of modern online learning platforms, particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs), an abundance of interaction data has greatly advanced the development of the KT technology. Previous research commonly adopts deterministic representation to capture students' knowledge states, which neglects the uncertainty during student interactions and thus fails to model the true knowledge state in learning process. In light of this, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Tracing model (UKT) which employs stochastic distribution embeddings to represent the uncertainty in student interactions, with a Wasserstein self-attention mechanism designed to capture the transition of state distribution in student learning behaviors. Additionally, we introduce the aleatory uncertainty-aware contrastive learning loss, which strengthens the model's robustness towards different types of uncertainties. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that UKT not only significantly surpasses existing deep learning-based models in KT prediction, but also shows unique advantages in handling the uncertainty of student interactions.