arXiv subjects

Rose E Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Rose E Wang.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Discovering High-Quality Chess Puzzles with Offline Reinforcement Learning

Learning and skill mastery require extensive and deliberate practice. In many learning settings, producing high-quality pedagogical materials can require a high level of domain expertise and be very time-consuming. Pedagogical materials often need to train students to engage in different thinking patterns. In some domains, such as chess, puzzles are used to help students practice their skills in calculating the next moves and recognizing known patterns on a board. Giving students a practice set of puzzles to help them learn different modes of thinking is challenging because the teacher needs to carefully balance between different motifs and how many look-ahead steps a student needs to perform. Popular online platforms like Chess.com and Lichess offer players millions of puzzles. Unlike chess tactics puzzles procured by human experts, where chess beginners can learn valuable insights, these puzzles are automatically generated and often regarded as having low pedagogical value. These platforms also rely on a heuristic to recommend puzzles to users for practice. Using the user history data over an entire year, a total of 1.5 billion puzzle-solving histories, we learn the pedagogical value of a puzzle and how to automatically choose a set of puzzles to better support chess learners using insights from offline reinforcement learning. We show that using offline policy evaluation, our trained policy has significant impact on beginners with puzzle-solving Elo range of 100--1000, particularly for the group of beginners whose learning growth was stagnant. We also performed a qualitative analysis of the puzzles discovered by our model by collecting annotation ratings from expert chess players. The success of our pipeline shows promise for a future where we can understand the pedagogical values of practice items given general user interaction data.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

"Mistakes Help Us Grow": Facilitating and Evaluating Growth Mindset Supportive Language in Classrooms

Teachers' growth mindset supportive language (GMSL)--rhetoric emphasizing that one's skills can be improved over time--has been shown to significantly reduce disparities in academic achievement and enhance students' learning outcomes. Although teachers espouse growth mindset principles, most find it difficult to adopt GMSL in their practice due the lack of effective coaching in this area. We explore whether large language models (LLMs) can provide automated, personalized coaching to support teachers' use of GMSL. We establish an effective coaching tool to reframe unsupportive utterances to GMSL by developing (i) a parallel dataset containing GMSL-trained teacher reframings of unsupportive statements with an accompanying annotation guide, (ii) a GMSL prompt framework to revise teachers' unsupportive language, and (iii) an evaluation framework grounded in psychological theory for evaluating GMSL with the help of students and teachers. We conduct a large-scale evaluation involving 174 teachers and 1,006 students, finding that both teachers and students perceive GMSL-trained teacher and model reframings as more effective in fostering a growth mindset and promoting challenge-seeking behavior, among other benefits. We also find that model-generated reframings outperform those from the GMSL-trained teachers. These results show promise for harnessing LLMs to provide automated GMSL feedback for teachers and, more broadly, LLMs' potentiality for supporting students' learning in the classroom. Our findings also demonstrate the benefit of large-scale human evaluations when applying LLMs in educational domains.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Language modeling via stochastic processes

Modern language models can generate high-quality short texts. However, they often meander or are incoherent when generating longer texts. These issues arise from the next-token-only language modeling objective. Recent work in self-supervised learning suggests that models can learn good latent representations via contrastive learning, which can be effective for discriminative tasks. Our work analyzes the application of contrastive representations for generative tasks, like long text generation. We propose one approach for leveraging constrastive representations, which we call Time Control (TC). TC first learns a contrastive representation of the target text domain, then generates text by decoding from these representations. Compared to domain-specific methods and fine-tuning GPT2 across a variety of text domains, TC performs competitively to methods specific for learning sentence representations on discourse coherence. On long text generation settings, TC preserves the text structure both in terms of ordering (up to $+15\%$ better) and text length consistency (up to $+90\%$ better).

cs.CL↗