@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-planning,
    title = "Planning-Guided Tutoring with Assessment-Driven Memory for Pedagogical {LLM} Tutors",
    author = "Li, Zechen  and
      Zhu, Qiannan  and
      Wang, Mei  and
      Li, Jia  and
      Huang, Hua",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.325/",
    pages = "7165--7188",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with pedagogical tutoring capabilities holds significant promise for education. Existing approaches simulate tutor behaviors or preferences and use them to prompt or fine-tune LLMs for dialogue tutoring. However, such methods often fail to sustain high-quality pedagogical conversations that provide explicit stepwise scaffolding and adapt to learners' evolving cognitive states. To address this, we propose ScaffoldLM, a planning-guided tutoring framework with an assessment-driven memory for multi-turn math dialogue tutoring. ScaffoldLM first generates a stepwise pedagogical plan from solution steps, which serves as a stable backbone for explicit scaffolding. During tutoring, the tutoring memory is updated by an assessment-driven control loop that infers the learner{'}s cognitive state, evaluates whether the current step target is met, and adaptively selects tutoring actions. The plan, step-level progress, inferred learner states, and dialogue history are maintained in memory to support coherent multi-turn guidance. Experiments on multi-turn math tutoring benchmarks demonstrate that ScaffoldLM substantially improves pedagogical tutoring quality over strong baselines. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/BNU-ERC-ITEA/ScaffoldLM."
}