MyCo Le

Shashank Sonkar, MyCo Le, Xinghe Chen et al.

High-quality conversational datasets are crucial for the successful development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that utilize a Large Language Model (LLM) backend. Synthetic student-teacher dialogues, generated using advanced GPT-4 models, are a common strategy for creating these datasets. However, subjects like physics that entail complex calculations pose a challenge. While GPT-4 presents impressive language processing capabilities, its limitations in fundamental mathematical reasoning curtail its efficacy for such subjects. To tackle this limitation, we introduce in this paper an innovative stateful prompt design. Our design orchestrates a mock conversation where both student and tutorbot roles are simulated by GPT-4. Each student response triggers an internal monologue, or `code soliloquy' in the GPT-tutorbot, which assesses whether its subsequent response would necessitate calculations. If a calculation is deemed necessary, it scripts the relevant Python code and uses the Python output to construct a response to the student. Our approach notably enhances the quality of synthetic conversation datasets, especially for subjects that are calculation-intensive. Our preliminary Subject Matter Expert evaluations reveal that our Higgs model, a fine-tuned LLaMA model, effectively uses Python for computations, which significantly enhances the accuracy and computational reliability of Higgs' responses. Code, models, and datasets is available at https://github.com/luffycodes/Tutorbot-Spock-Phys.

Naiming Liu, Shashank Sonkar, Myco Le et al.

This paper introduces MalAlgoQA, a novel dataset designed to evaluate the counterfactual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through a pedagogical approach. The dataset comprises mathematics and reading comprehension questions, each accompanied by four answer choices and their corresponding rationales. At the heart of MalAlgoQA are ``malgorithms'' - rationales behind incorrect answer choices that represent flawed yet logically coherent reasoning paths. These malgorithms serve as counterfactual scenarios, allowing us to assess an LLM's ability to identify and analyze flawed reasoning patterns. We propose the Malgorithm Identification task, where LLMs are assessed based on their ability to identify corresponding malgorithm given an incorrect answer choice. To evaluate the model performance, we introduce two metrics: Algorithm Identification Accuracy (AIA) for correct answer rationale identification, and Malgorithm Identification Accuracy (MIA) for incorrect answer rationale identification. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit significant performance drops in MIA compared to AIA, highlighting the challenges in counterfactual reasoning. Surprisingly, we find that the chain-of-thought prompting technique not only fails to consistently enhance MIA but can sometimes lead to underperformance compared to simple prompting. These findings have important implications for developing LLMs with improved counterfactual reasoning, particularly relevant for AI-powered tutoring systems, where identifying and addressing student misconceptions is essential. MalAlgoQA dataset is available \href{https://github.com/luffycodes/MalAlgoQA-Dataset}{here}.