Effective tutoring requires determining not only what information to provide, but also which form of assistance to deliver. A tutor may address the same student error using various pedagogical strategies, adapting its approach as the interaction progresses. We introduce Comparative Pedagogical Supervision (CPS), a training framework to learn to select the optimal strategy and feedback for student learning. We evaluate CPS on math and science reasoning datasets. After five tutoring turns, CPS outperforms the strongest fixed-strategy baselines. The learned tutor transfers across datasets, and its strategy selection can also inform a separate API-based tutor.
Kerem Zaman Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Shashank Srivastava University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
原文摘要
Recent work, using the Biasing Features metric, labels a CoT as unfaithful if it omits a prompt-injected hint that affected the prediction. We argue this metric adopts a narrow notion of faithfulness and confuses unfaithfulness with incompleteness, the lossy compression needed to turn distributed transformer computation into a linear natural language narrative. On multi-hop reasoning tasks with instruct-tuned and reasoning models, many CoTs flagged as unfaithful by Biasing Features are judged faithful by other metrics, exceeding 50% in some models. With a new faithful@k metric, we show that larger inference-time budgets greatly increase hint verbalization (up to 90% in some settings), suggesting much apparent unfaithfulness is due to tight token limits. Using Causal Mediation Analysis, we further show that even non-verbalized hints can causally mediate prediction changes through the CoT. We therefore caution against relying solely on hint-based evaluations and advocate a broader interpretability toolkit, including causal mediation and corruption-based metrics. We do not claim all CoTs are faithful, only that the absence of hint words alone does not prove unfaithfulness.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表