RAG-KT: Cross-platform Explainable Knowledge Tracing with Multi-view Fusion Retrieval Generation

Zhiyi Duan, Hongyu Yuan, Rui Liu


Abstract
Knowledge Tracing (KT) infers a student’s knowledge state from past interactions to predict future performance. Conventional Deep Learning (DL)-based KT models are typically tied to platform-specific identifiers and latent representations, making them hard to transfer and interpret. Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods can be either ungrounded under prompting or overly domain-dependent under fine-tuning. In addition, most existing KT methods are developed and evaluated under a same-distribution assumption. In real deployments, educational data often arise from heterogeneous platforms with substantial distribution shift, which often degrades generalization. To this end, we propose RAG-KT, a retrieval-augmented paradigm that frames cross-platform KT as reliable context constrained inference with LLMs. It builds a unified multi-source structured context with cross-source alignment via Question Group abstractions and retrieves complementary rich and reliable context for each prediction, enabling grounded prediction and interpretable diagnosis. Experiments on three public KT benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains in accuracy and robustness, including strong performance under cross-platform conditions.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.257
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
5217–5232
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.257/
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Cite (ACL):
Zhiyi Duan, Hongyu Yuan, and Rui Liu. 2026. RAG-KT: Cross-platform Explainable Knowledge Tracing with Multi-view Fusion Retrieval Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 5217–5232, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RAG-KT: Cross-platform Explainable Knowledge Tracing with Multi-view Fusion Retrieval Generation (Duan et al., Findings 2026)
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