MetaCD: A Meta Learning Framework for Cognitive Diagnosis based on Continual Learning
This work addresses challenges in intelligent education for assessing student skill mastery, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing deep learning and meta-learning approaches.
The paper tackled the limitations of existing cognitive diagnosis methods due to long-tailed data distributions and dynamic changes by proposing MetaCD, a meta-learning framework with continual learning, which outperformed baselines on five real-world datasets in accuracy and generalization.
Cognitive diagnosis is an essential research topic in intelligent education, aimed at assessing the level of mastery of different skills by students. So far, many research works have used deep learning models to explore the complex interactions between students, questions, and skills. However, the performance of existing method is frequently limited by the long-tailed distribution and dynamic changes in the data. To address these challenges, we propose a meta-learning framework for cognitive diagnosis based on continual learning (MetaCD). This framework can alleviate the long-tailed problem by utilizing meta-learning to learn the optimal initialization state, enabling the model to achieve good accuracy on new tasks with only a small amount of data. In addition, we utilize a continual learning method named parameter protection mechanism to give MetaCD the ability to adapt to new skills or new tasks, in order to adapt to dynamic changes in data. MetaCD can not only improve the plasticity of our model on a single task, but also ensure the stability and generalization of the model on sequential tasks. Comprehensive experiments on five real-world datasets show that MetaCD outperforms other baselines in both accuracy and generalization.