Edu-Theater: A Data-Efficient Agent Framework for Scalable Learner Behavior Simulation through Staging Roll-Call
For intelligent educational systems, this provides a data-efficient and privacy-preserving method to simulate learner behavior at scale, addressing cold-start and computational bottlenecks.
Edu-Theater introduces a cohort-aware roll-call simulation paradigm for learner behavior simulation, achieving higher accuracy with significantly fewer LLM calls compared to individual-centric methods, and producing synthetic data that improves adaptive testing.
Large-scale learner-task interaction data are crucial for intelligent educational systems but are costly to collect and constrained by privacy and learner engagement. Learner simulators play a critical role in simulating scalable learner behavior without the need for continuous involvement of real learners. However, existing methods are predominantly \textbf{individual-centric}, pairing a simulator with each learner to iteratively infer latent knowledge states from dense interaction histories, which is both data- and computation-intensive, and fragile in cold-start scenarios. We propose a \textbf{cohort-aware roll-call simulation paradigm} that first constructs cohort-level proficiency priors and refines individual learner states through a small number of targeted diagnostic queries. Based on this paradigm, we introduce \textbf{Edu-Theater}, an LLM-powered agent system that performs cohort-aware learner simulation via a teacher agent and retrospective roll-call probing over learner logs. Edu-Theater enables scalable future behavior simulation without the need for dense per-learner histories. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Edu-Theater achieves higher simulation accuracy with significantly fewer LLM calls, producing synthetic data that enhances downstream applications such as adaptive testing.