Ruohua Zhang

Tao Liu, Ye Lu, Ruohua Zhang et al.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for education requires measuring how models teach, not only what they know. Existing benchmarks emphasize domain-general correctness or depend on manually designed rubrics that scale poorly to long-tail pedagogical scenarios. We introduce Elmes*, an end-to-end framework for constructing, refining, and applying fine-grained scenario-specific rubrics. Elmes* combines a declarative multi-agent engine for teacher--student--judge interactions with SceneGen, a self-evolving module that co-optimizes evaluation criteria and test data from expert-defined pedagogical dimensions. Using Elmes*, we build Edu-330, covering 330 scenarios across 11 subjects, 3 grade bands, and 10 task types, with over 1{,}000 second-level indicators. Experiments on Edu-330 and four expert-authored gold-standard scenarios show that educational capability is multidimensional: top-tier LLMs differ mainly in creativity and values integration, knowledge-strong models may fail at Socratic scaffolding, and the education-specialized InnoSpark achieves the best human-evaluated average score. LLM judges preserve human-comparable rankings with much lower scoring variance, but exhibit judge-specific biases such as self-preference. Ablations show that expert-scored few-shot anchoring improves human--LLM alignment, while reasoning enforcement and greedy decoding are model-dependent. Elmes* thus provides scalable diagnostic infrastructure for pedagogically grounded LLM evaluation.

WenTao Liu, Ruohua Zhang, Aimin Zhou et al.

Research on large language models (LLMs) has shown remarkable performance in domains such as mathematics, programming, and literary creation. However, most studies have focused on semantic memory-based question answering, neglecting LLMs' potential to handle episodic memory (EM)-related queries. This oversight has led to suboptimal performance in applications requiring EM, including emotional companionship, personal AI assistants, and AI teachers. To address this gap, we introduce Echo, a LLM enhanced with temporal episodic memory. We propose a Multi-Agent Data Generation Framework that guides the model in generating multi-turn, complex scenario episodic memory dialogue data (EM-Train). Temporal information is innovatively incorporated into the LLM training process, and Echo is trained using the EM-Train. Furthermore, We develop an EM-Test benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs' episodic memory capabilities. The EM-Test assesses performance across various time spans and difficulty levels, providing a comprehensive evaluation of multi-turn episodic memory dialogues. Our experiments demonstrate that Echo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs on EM-Test. Additionally, a qualitative analysis reveals Echo's potential to exhibit human-like episodic memory capabilities. We will open-source all datasets, code, and model weights.

Siyu Song, Wentao Liu, Ye Lu et al.

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into education presents unprecedented opportunities for scalable personalized learning. However, standard LLMs often function as generic information providers, lacking alignment with fundamental pedagogical principles such as helpfulness, student-centered personalization, and creativity cultivation. To bridge this gap, we propose EduAlign, a novel framework designed to guide LLMs toward becoming more effective and responsible educational assistants. EduAlign consists of two main stages. In the first stage, we curate a dataset of 8k educational interactions and annotate them-both manually and automatically-along three key educational dimensions: Helpfulness, Personalization, and Creativity (HPC). These annotations are used to train HPC-RM, a multi-dimensional reward model capable of accurately scoring LLM outputs according to these educational principles. We further evaluate the consistency and reliability of this reward model. In the second stage, we leverage HPC-RM as a reward signal to fine-tune a pre-trained LLM using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on a set of 2k diverse prompts. We then assess the pre- and post-finetuning models on both educational and general-domain benchmarks across the three HPC dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that the fine-tuned model exhibits significantly improved alignment with pedagogical helpfulness, personalization, and creativity stimulation. This study presents a scalable and effective approach to aligning LLMs with nuanced and desirable educational traits, paving the way for the development of more engaging, pedagogically aligned AI tutors.