Improving Low-Resource Knowledge Tracing Tasks by Supervised Pre-training and Importance Mechanism Fine-tuning

Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to estimate student's knowledge mastery based on their historical interactions. Recently, the deep learning based KT (DLKT) approaches have achieved impressive performance in the KT task. These DLKT models heavily rely on the large number of available student interactions. However, due to various reasons such as budget constraints and privacy concerns, observed interactions are very limited in many real-world scenarios, a.k.a, low-resource KT datasets. Directly training a DLKT model on a low-resource KT dataset may lead to overfitting and it is difficult to choose the appropriate deep neural architecture. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a low-resource KT framework called LoReKT to address above challenges. Inspired by the prevalent "pre-training and fine-tuning" paradigm, we aim to learn transferable parameters and representations from rich-resource KT datasets during the pre-training stage and subsequently facilitate effective adaptation to low-resource KT datasets. Specifically, we simplify existing sophisticated DLKT model architectures with purely a stack of transformer decoders. We design an encoding mechanism to incorporate student interactions from multiple KT data sources and develop an importance mechanism to prioritize updating parameters with high importance while constraining less important ones during the fine-tuning stage. We evaluate LoReKT on six public KT datasets and experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of AUC and Accuracy. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at https://github.com/rattlesnakey/LoReKT.