Improving Interpretability of Cognitive Diagnosis Models with LLM-based Semantic Augmentation
Abstract
Cognitive diagnosis aims to infer students' mastery levels over knowledge components from their learning interactions, supporting personalized education applications. However, existing models encode responses as binary correctness labels, discarding information about which specific option a student selected. This input-level information loss limits their ability to distinguish qualitatively different error types. As a result, providing interpretable diagnostic outputs becomes challenging. To address these limitations, we propose SACD, a semantic-augmented cognitive diagnosis framework that integrates LLM-based semantic analysis with student behavioral modeling. SACD comprises the following key components. First, an LLM-based exercise diagnostic generator analyzes exercise content and produces structured semantic annotations for each answer choice, capturing the specific misconceptions each option represents. Second, a kernel-based alignment mechanism projects semantic embeddings and behavioral representations into a unified kernel space, enabling effective fusion of heterogeneous information. Third, an interpretable diagnosis layer predicts student performance and generates fine-grained mastery estimates, which LLMs further process to produce actionable learning plans. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that SACD achieves superior prediction accuracy while enabling interpretable, actionable diagnostics.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weizhou Shen | 41 | 68 Multi-Party Conversation Modeling for Emotion Recognition (2024) Social Media and User Modelling 68 DialogXL: All-in-One XLNet for Multi-Party Conversation Emotion Recognition (2021) Social Media and User Modelling 68 Directed Acyclic Graph Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition (2021) Social Media and User Modelling |
|
| 2 | Jimeng Sun 0001 | 39 | 73 Patent partner recommendation in enterprise social networks (2013) Social Media and User Modelling 68 Confluence: conformity influence in large social networks (2013) Social Media and User Modelling 68 MetaFac: community discovery via relational hypergraph factorization (2009) Social Media and User Modelling |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Ziyi Ye | 39 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Ziyi Ye assigned | 39 | 14 papers | |
| Yi R. Fung 0001 | 38 | 10 papers | |
| Kam-Fai Wong | 35 | 6 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia COI: co-author | 34 | 10 papers | |
| Yankai Chen 0001 | 32 | 6 papers | |
| Yanan Niu | 32 | 15 papers | |
| Kun Gai COI: co-author | 31 | 5 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weizhou Shen assigned | 41 | 3 | 68 Multi-Party Conversation Modeling for Emotion Recognition (2024) Social Media and User Modelling 68 DialogXL: All-in-One XLNet for Multi-Party Conversation Emotion Recognition (2021) Social Media and User Modelling |
|
| 2 | Sruthi Gorantla | 41 | 3 | 68 Aspect-Sentiment Embeddings for Company Profiling and Employee Opinion Mining (2018) Social Media and User Modelling 68 CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums (2018) Social Media and User Modelling |
|
| 4 | Jimeng Sun 0001 assigned | 39 | 3 | 73 Patent partner recommendation in enterprise social networks (2013) Social Media and User Modelling 68 Confluence: conformity influence in large social networks (2013) Social Media and User Modelling |
|
| 6 | Yang Zhang 0072 | 38 | 3 | 65 AlpsBench: An LLM Personalization Benchmark for Real-Dialogue Memorization and Preference Alignment (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 61 LLM Personalization: Foundations, Breakthroughs, and Frontiers (2026) User Profile and Persona Modeling |
|
| 7 | Chongming Gao | 37 | 3 | 63 Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation (2025) User Profile and Persona Modeling 37 Reformulating Conversational Recommender Systems as Tri-Phase Offline Policy Learning (2024) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
|
| 8 | Jizhi Zhang | 36 | 3 | 63 Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation (2025) User Profile and Persona Modeling 38 Navigating Large Language Models for Recommendation: From Architecture to Learning Paradigms and Deployment (2025) Efficiency and Deployment |
|
| 9 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 36 | 3 | 36 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 36 Addressing Missing Data Issue for Diffusion-based Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
|
| 10 | Jianling Wang | 36 | 3 | 48 LLMs for User Interest Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 41 User Recommendation in Content Curation Platforms (2020) Social and Group Recommendation |
|
| 11 | Jin Chen 0008 COI: co-author | 36 | 3 | 68 When large language models meet personalization: perspectives of challenges and opportunities (2024) User Profile and Persona Modeling 37 Enhancing Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommenders with Behavior-Aware Regularization (2025) Multi-Behavior Recommendation |
|
| 12 | Shijie Wang 0002 COI: co-author | 35 | 3 | 71 Score-Based Generative Diffusion Models for Social Recommendations (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 65 Towards Next-Generation Recommender Systems: A Benchmark for Personalized Recommendation Assistant with LLMs (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
|
| 13 | Huifeng Guo COI: co-author | 35 | 3 | 50 Prompt Tuning as User Inherent Profile Inference Machine (2025) Efficiency and Deployment 49 Personalize Before Retrieve: LLM-based Personalized Query Expansion for User-Centric Retrieval (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG |
|
| 14 | James Caverlee | 35 | 3 | 72 Learning Geo-Social User Topical Profiles with Bayesian Hierarchical User Factorization (2018) Social Media and User Modelling 41 User Recommendation in Content Curation Platforms (2020) Social and Group Recommendation |
|
| 16 | Lingling Yi | 35 | 3 | 68 WeSeer: Visual Analysis for Better Information Cascade Prediction of WeChat Articles (2020) Social Media and User Modelling 35 Robust Preference-Guided Denoising for Graph based Social Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation |
|
| 17 | Jiancan Wu | 35 | 3 | 57 Let Me Do It For You: Towards LLM Empowered Recommendation via Tool Learning (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks 34 LLaRA: Large Language-Recommendation Assistant (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
|
| 18 | Bo Peng 0009 | 35 | 3 | 38 HAM: Hybrid Associations Models for Sequential Recommendation (Extended abstract) (2023) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 38 $\mathop {\mathtt {HAM}}$HAM: Hybrid Associations Models for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
|
| 19 | Fei Sun 0001 COI: co-author | 35 | 3 | 38 XDM: Improving Sequential Deep Matching with Unclicked User Behaviors for Recommender System (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 37 SDM: Sequential Deep Matching Model for Online Large-scale Recommender System (2019) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation |
|
| 20 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 34 | 3 | 39 Temporal Linear Item-Item Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 39 Empowering Retrieval-based Conversational Recommendation with Contrasting User Preferences (2025) Conversational and Interactive Recommendation |
|
| 21 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 34 | 3 | 47 Similarity = Value? Consultation Value-Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search (2025) Personalized and Context-Aware Retrieval 38 Test-Time Alignment with State Space Model for Tracking User Interest Shifts in Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
|
| 23 | Junjie Zhang 0009 | 34 | 3 | 59 AgentCF: Collaborative Learning with Autonomous Language Agents for Recommender Systems (2024) RL Training of Search Agents 45 STARec: An Efficient Agent Framework for Recommender Systems via Autonomous Deliberate Reasoning (2025) RL Training of Search Agents |
|
| 24 | Bo Chen 0023 COI: co-author | 34 | 3 | 37 Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 36 ELCoRec: Enhance Language Understanding with Co-Propagation of Numerical and Categorical Features for Recommendation (2024) LLM-Collaborative Filtering Integration |
|
| 25 | Xinhang Li 0001 COI: co-author | 33 | 3 | 68 Conditional Cross-Platform User Engagement Prediction (2024) Social Media and User Modelling 32 OpenSiteRec: An Open Dataset for Site Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
|
| 26 | Hyunsik Yoo | 33 | 3 | 39 Capturing User Interests from Data Streams for Continual Sequential Recommendation (2026) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 38 Mixture of Sequence: Theme-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Long-Sequence Recommendation (2026) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation |
|
| 27 | Shuchang Liu 0001 COI: co-author | 33 | 3 | 40 Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5) (2022) Knowledge Infusion and Open-World Augmentation 36 Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
|
| 28 | Chen Wang 0052 | 32 | 3 | 40 Group-Aware Interest Disentangled Dual-Training for Personalized Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Recommendation 40 Ranking-based Group Identification via Factorized Attention on Social Tripartite Graph (2023) Social and Group Recommendation |
|
| 29 | Yi Zhang 0103 | 32 | 3 | 67 Bi-Directional Transfer Graph Contrastive Learning for Social Recommendation (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 61 ProEx: A Unified Framework Leveraging Large Language Model with Profile Extrapolation for Recommendation (2026) User Profile and Persona Modeling |
|
| 30 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 32 | 3 | 38 Reciprocal Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 35 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
|
| 31 | Yang Song 0008 | 32 | 3 | 37 Understanding and Modeling Passive-Negative Feedback for Short-video Sequential Recommendation (2023) Multi-Behavior Recommendation 35 Learning and Optimization of Implicit Negative Feedback for Industrial Short-video Recommender System (2023) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation |
|
| 32 | Wenlin Zhang 0001 COI: co-author | 32 | 3 | 41 Bridging Personalization and AI: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG 41 A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG |
|
| 33 | Ching Law | 32 | 3 | 63 Think Then Recommend: An LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Framework for Personalized Conversational Recommender System in E-Commerce (2026) Conversational Recommendation Systems 59 Profiling Users from Online Social Behaviors with Applications for Tencent Social Ads (2016) Social Media and User Modelling |
|
| 36 | Wei Guo 0006 | 32 | 3 | 38 Dataset Regeneration for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 37 Multi-Behavior Sequential Transformer Recommender (2022) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation |