Accurate Predictions in Education with Discrete Variational Inference

Abstract

One of the largest drivers of social inequality is unequal access to personal tutoring, with wealthier individuals able to afford it, while the majority cannot. Affordable, effective AI tutors offer a scalable solution. We focus on adaptive learning, predicting whether a student will answer a question correctly, a key component of any effective tutoring system. Yet many platforms struggle to achieve high prediction accuracy, especially in data-sparse settings. To address this, we release the largest open dataset of professionally marked formal mathematics exam responses to date. We introduce a probabilistic modelling framework rooted in Item Response Theory (IRT) that achieves over 80 percent accuracy, setting a new benchmark for mathematics prediction accuracy of formal exam papers. Extending this, our collaborative filtering models incorporate topic-level skill profiles, but reveal a surprising and educationally significant finding, a single latent ability parameter alone is needed to achieve the maximum predictive accuracy. Our main contribution though is deriving and implementing a novel discrete variational inference framework, achieving our highest prediction accuracy in low-data settings and outperforming all classical IRT and matrix factorisation baselines.