A Computational Model of Teacher-Student Co-Adaptation
Francesco Balzan, Pedro P. Santos, Maurizio Gabbrielli, Mahault Albarracin, Manuel Lopes
原文摘要
Effective teaching involves mutual adaptation: teachers adjust instruction based on student responses, while students actively seek information to resolve uncertainty. Yet many computational models of teaching treat instruction as a one-way process. This paper presents a Bayesian computational framework for studying teacher-student co-adaptation under partial observability in a stylized concept-learning task. Students are organized in heterogeneous groups that differ in which features of a target concept they can observe, and the teacher infers these constraints from limited feedback. We compare five interaction modes (active teaching, active learning, turn-based interaction, adaptive teaching and full co-adaptation) and three teacher-led controls across 100 independent matched simulation runs. Learner-initiated queries resolve information gaps left by the baseline teachers' stopping rules, while teacher-led continuation also achieves complete identification in the observed episodes. Bayesian belief tracking reduces the mean interaction steps required by full co-adaptation as teacher experience accumulates. At experience level 40, full co-adaptation requires fewer interaction steps on average than active learning, turn-based interaction and all three teacher-led controls, with complete observed coverage shared by these policies. Analyses by group and student type, together with sensitivity analyses, clarify the conditions and distributional limits of these results. The framework is interpretable and modular. Its findings provide a computational proof of concept for investigating interaction structure in heterogeneous groups, rather than direct evidence about classroom practice.
cs.CY · cs.AI · cs.LG