Learning path recommendation seeks to provide students with a structured sequence of learning items (e.g., knowledge concepts or exercises) to optimize their learning efficiency. Despite significant efforts in this area, most existing methods primarily rely on prerequisite relations, which present two major limitations: (1) Prerequisite relations between knowledge concepts are difficult to obtain due to the cost of expert annotation, hindering the application of current learning path recommendation methods. (2) Relying on a single sequentially dependent knowledge structure based on prerequisite relations implies that a confusing knowledge concept can disrupt subsequent learning processes, which is referred to as blocked learning. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel approach, GraphRAG-Induced Dual Knowledge Structure Graphs for Personalized Learning Path Recommendation (KnowLP), which enhances learning path recommendations by incorporating both prerequisite and similarity relations between knowledge concepts. Specifically, we introduce a knowledge structure graph generation module EDU-GraphRAG that constructs knowledge structure graphs for different educational datasets, significantly improving the applicability of learning path recommendation methods. We then propose a Discrimination Learning-driven Reinforcement Learning (DLRL) module that utilizes similarity relations as fallback relations when prerequisite relations become ineffective, thereby alleviating the blocked learning. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, demonstrating that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also generates more effective and longer learning paths.

Personalized exercise recommendation systems aim to enhance learning efficiency by dynamically guiding students toward content aligned with their evolving knowledge states. Among various approaches, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as an effective framework for modeling student-environment interactions as sequential decision-making processes. However, most existing RL-based methods typically reward recommendations that target unmastered knowledge concepts.Such reward-driven strategies are prone to local optima, restricting exploration of unattempted or less familiar knowledge concepts. In addition, they often overlook key learning factors, such as forgetting dynamics and exercise difficulty, leading to suboptimal outcomes. To address these issues, we propose a novelIntegratingEntropyRegulation andDual-objectiveOptimizationExerciseRecommendation (IERDO-ER)method. Specifically, we introduce an entropy-based function to encourage broader exploration in the exercise space. We also design an end-to-end policy network that generates candidate exercises as next-step actions for the recommendation agent. To enable more adaptive and pedagogically sound recommendations, we develop a dual-objective reward mechanism that incorporates both anti-forgetting and gentleness objectives. This mechanism continuously balances policy optimization through a synergy of rewards and penalties. Experiments on three real-world educational datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating its effectiveness.

With the widespread adoption of online education platforms, an increasing number of students are gaining new knowledge through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Exercise recommendation have made strides toward improving student learning outcomes. However, existing methods not only struggle with high dropout rates but also fail to match the diverse learning pace of students. They frequently face difficulties in adjusting to inactive students' learning patterns and in accommodating individualized learning paces, resulting in limited accuracy and diversity in recommendations. To tackle these challenges, we propose Neural Re-ranking for Diversified Exercise Recommendation (in short, NR4DER). NR4DER first leverages the mLSTM model to improve the effectiveness of the exercise filter module. It then employs a sequence enhancement method to enhance the representation of inactive students, accurately matches students with exercises of appropriate difficulty. Finally, it utilizes neural re-ranking to generate diverse recommendation lists based on individual students' learning histories. Extensive experimental results indicate that NR4DER significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple real-world datasets and effectively caters to the diverse learning pace of students.

Recommending suitable exercises and providing the reasons for these recommendations is a highly valuable task, as it can significantly improve students' learning efficiency. Nevertheless, the extensive range of exercise resources and the diverse learning capacities of students present a notable difficulty in recommending exercises. Collaborative filtering approaches frequently have difficulties in recommending suitable exercises, whereas deep learning methods lack explanation, which restricts their practical use. To address these issue, this paper proposes KG4EER, an explainable exercise recommendation with a knowledge graph. KG4EER facilitates the matching of various students with suitable exercises and offers explanations for its recommendations. More precisely, a feature extraction module is introduced to represent students' learning features, and a knowledge graph is constructed to recommend exercises. This knowledge graph, which includes three primary entities - knowledge concepts, students, and exercises - and their interrelationships, serves to recommend suitable exercises. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets, coupled with expert interviews, establish the superiority of KG4EER over existing baseline methods and underscore its robust explainability.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are playing a key role in improving educational ways. Abundant learning resources make it difficult for online users to find suitable learning content. The current personalized service in the field of online education relies more on course recommendations. However, coarse-grained recommendations cannot help users discover the defects of their knowledge network effectively. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Meta-Concept (KAMC) framework to provide fine-grained recommendation services. We innovatively incorporate Knowledge Graph (KG) into the field of educational recommendation to provide abundant auxiliary information. However, simply combining knowledge graphs with educational recommender systems cannot improve the performance of existing recommendation models, and may even weaken the performance of the models. Because the modeled KG ignores the enhancements on the user side and only considers the enhancements on the item side. We further propose to enrich the semantic representation of users with collaborative information in user-item interactions, and at the same time enrich the semantic representation of items with information in KG. Furthermore, to provide users with more accurate and fine-grained personalized recommendation services, we propose a user-based attention mechanism to capture users’ fine-grained semantic information. Our method is experimentally validated on three real-world datasets. In the three datasets, KAMC’s AUC evaluation index is $$6.2\%$$ , $$6.9\%$$ , and $$2.2\%$$ higher than the latest baseline method (KGAN), respectively. Experimental results show that the KAMC method outperforms the current state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Effective exercise recommendation is crucial for guiding students' learning trajectories and fostering their interest in the subject matter. However, the vast exercise resource and the varying learning abilities of individual students pose a significant challenge in selecting appropriate exercise questions. Collaborative filtering-based methods often struggle with recommending suitable exercises, while deep learning-based methods lack explanation, limiting their practical adoption. To address these limitations, this paper proposes KG4Ex, a knowledge graph-based exercise recommendation method. KG4Ex facilitates the matching of diverse students with suitable exercises while providing recommendation reasons. Specifically, we introduce a feature extraction module to represent students' learning states and construct a knowledge graph for exercise recommendation. This knowledge graph comprises three key entities (knowledge concepts, students, and exercises) and their interrelationships, and can be used to recommend suitable exercises. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets and expert interviews demonstrate the superiority of KG4Ex over existing baseline methods and highlight its strong explainability.

Abstract In recent years, with the rapid development of mobile applications, user check-in histories have been increasing. Successive point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has gained growing attention. Existing successive point-of-interest recommendation methods learn long- and short-term user preferences through historical check-in sequences to provide more personalized services. However, due to sparse data and complicated temporal patterns, the application of such technique is still limited by two challenges: 1) difficulty meeting user travel needs in time; 2) difficulty capturing users complicated behavior patterns. To address this problem, we propose a new Influence-Aware successive POI recommendation Model (InfAM), which can learn the influence of POIs in a short-term sequence fragment for next point-of-interest recommendation. To capture periodic patterns of user movements, InfAM takes a user’s check-in data within a day as an input sequence to address the current travel needs of the user. In addition, based on multihead attention mechanism and user embedding, InfAM focuses on the influence of POIs in short-term sequences and general user preferences in these sequences. Therefore, InfAM integrates three specific dependencies, which can fully learn the dynamic interaction between short-term preferences: the influence of POIs in short-term sequence fragments (POI-poi), user preferences (POI-user), and the periodicity of check-ins (POI-time). Evaluation results on real-world datasets show that InfAM achieves state-of-the-art recommendation performance.