Large language models are zero-shot cross-domain diagnosticians in cognitive diagnosis
Higher Education PressWith the rapid development of online education, cognitive diagnosis has become a key task in intelligent education, particularly for student ability assessments and resource recommendations. However, existing cognitive diagnosis models face the diagnostic system cold-start problem, whereby there are no response logs in new domains, making accurate student diagnosis challenging. This research defines this task as zero-shot cross-domain cognitive diagnosis (ZCCD), which aims to diagnose students’ cognitive abilities in the target domain using only the response logs from the source domain without prior interaction data. To address this, a novel paradigm, large language model (LLM)-guided cognitive state transfer (LCST) is proposed, which leverages the powerful capabilities of LLMs to bridge the gap between the source and target domains. By modelling cognitive states as natural language tasks, LLMs act as intermediaries to transfer students’ cognitive states across domains. The research uses advanced LLMs to analyze the relationships between knowledge concepts and diagnose students’ mastery of the target domain. The experimental results on real-world datasets shows that the LCST significantly improves cognitive diagnostic performance, which highlights the potential of LLMs as educational experts in this context. This approach provides a promising direction for solving the ZCCD challenge and advancing the application of LLMs in intelligent education.
- Journal
- Frontiers of Digital Education