Collaborative Cognitive Diagnosis with Disentangled Representation Learning for Learner Modeling

Abstract: Learners sharing similar implicit cognitive states often display comparable observable problem-solving performances. Leveraging collaborative connections among such similar learners proves valuable in comprehending human learning. Motivated by the success of collaborative modeling in various domains, such as recommender systems, we aim to investigate how collaborative signals among learners contribute to the diagnosis of human cognitive states (i.e., knowledge proficiency) in the context of intelligent education. The primary challenges lie in identifying implicit collaborative connections and disentangling the entangled cognitive factors of learners for improved explainability and controllability in learner Cognitive Diagnosis (CD). However, there has been no work on CD capable of simultaneously modeling collaborative and disentangled cognitive states. To address this gap, we present Coral, a Collaborative cognitive diagnosis model with disentangled representation learning. Specifically, Coral first introduces a disentangled state encoder to achieve the initial disentanglement of learners' states. Subsequently, a meticulously designed collaborative representation learning procedure captures collaborative signals. It dynamically constructs a collaborative graph of learners by iteratively searching for optimal neighbors in a context-aware manner. Using the constructed graph, collaborative information is extracted through node representation learning. Finally, a decoding process aligns the initial cognitive states and collaborative states, achieving co-disentanglement with practice performance reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of Coral, showcasing significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods across several real-world datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/bigdata-ustc/Coral.