Priority Guided Explanation for Knowledge Tracing with Dual Ranking and Similarity Consistency

Priority Guided Explanation for Knowledge Tracing with Dual Ranking and Similarity Consistency

Fan Li, Tiancheng Zhang, Yifang Yin, Minghe Yu, Mengxiang Wang, Ge Yu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 430-438. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/49

Knowledge tracing plays a pivotal role in enabling personalized learning on online platforms. While deep learning-based approaches have achieved impressive predictive performance, their limited interpretability poses a significant barrier to practical adoption. Existing explanation methods primarily focus on specific model architectures and fall short in 1) explicitly prioritizing critical interactions to generate fine-grained explanations, and 2) maintaining similarity consistency across interaction importance. These limitations hinder actionable insights for improving student outcomes. To bridge the gap, we propose a model-agnostic approach that provides enhanced explanations applicable to diverse knowledge tracing methods. Specifically, we propose a novel ranking loss designed to explicitly optimize the importance ranking of past interactions by comparing their corresponding perturbed outputs. Furthermore, we introduce a similarity loss to capture temporal dependencies, ensuring consistency in the assigned importance scores for conceptually similar interactions. Extensive experiments conducted on various knowledge tracing models and benchmark datasets demonstrate substantial enhancements in explanation quality.
Keywords:
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Explainability and interpretability
Machine Learning: ML: Explainable/Interpretable machine learning
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Education