SocialCoach: Personalized Social Skill Learning with RL-based Agentic Tutoring and Practice
For learners seeking scalable social skill training, SocialCoach addresses the scarcity of expert coaching by providing personalized, adaptive tutoring, though the improvements are incremental over existing LLM-based approaches.
SocialCoach is an LLM-powered agentic tutoring system for personalized social skill development that uses reinforcement learning to optimize adaptive practice scheduling. It improves simulated pathway quality and judge-rated tutoring quality over baselines, with early user feedback indicating strong engagement and usefulness.
Social skills such as negotiation and leadership are crucial for personal and professional success in today's interconnected world. However, scalable and effective training remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity of expert coaching. In this paper, we introduce SocialCoach, a holistic LLM-powered agentic tutoring system for personalized social skill development at scale. First, SocialCoach automatically constructs a pedagogically-grounded, theory-to-practice knowledge corpus from diverse expert sources, leveraging a multi-agent pipeline. Second, to personalize the learning journey, it employs an adaptive practice scheduling module that follows a prescription-retrieval-adaptation process. To maximize the long-term learning experience while overcoming the cold-start problem, this policy is optimized within a learner simulation environment through reinforcement learning. Finally, SocialCoach integrates immersive, goal-driven practice, causality-driven proficiency assessment and knowledge-grounded, reflective tutoring to help address the knowing-doing gap. We deploy it in our product, EQoach, and conduct extensive experiments. The results show that SocialCoach improves simulated pathway quality and judge-rated tutoring quality over baseline approaches, while early user feedback indicates strong perceived engagement and usefulness. These findings suggest a practical architecture for personalized and gamified pedagogical platforms on soft skill learning.