# LLM-KT: Aligning Large Language Models with Knowledge Tracing using a Plug-and-Play Instruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02945 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02945/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in LLM preference optimization methods, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 6 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [LLM preference optimization methods](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/llm-preference-optimization-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [A Self-Attentive model for Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06837/) (2019)
- [Instructions and Guide for Diagnostic Questions: The NeurIPS 2020 Education Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12061/) (2020)
- [Integrating LSTM and BERT for Long-Sequence Data Analysis in Intelligent Tutoring Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05136/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Problems With Large Language Models for Learner Modelling: Why LLMs Alone Fall Short for Responsible Tutoring in K--12 Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23036/) (2025)
- [Language Bottleneck Models for Qualitative Knowledge State Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16982/) (2025)
- [HISE-KT: Synergizing Heterogeneous Information Networks and LLMs for Explainable Knowledge Tracing with Meta-Path Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15191/) (2025)
- [RAG-KT: Cross-platform Explainable Knowledge Tracing with Multi-view Fusion Retrieval Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10960/) (2026)
- [Knowing When to Defer: Selective Prediction for Responsible Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21514/) (2025)
- [ConceptKT: A Benchmark for Concept-Level Deficiency Prediction in Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24073/) (2026)
- [MOSAIC: Orchestrating Collaborative Knowledge Tracing with Hierarchical Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29049/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The knowledge tracing (KT) problem is an extremely important topic in personalized education, which aims to predict whether students can correctly answer the next question based on their past question-answer records. Prior work on this task mainly focused on learning the sequence of behaviors based on the IDs or textual information. However, these studies usually fail to capture students' sufficient behavioral patterns without reasoning with rich world knowledge about questions. In this paper, we propose a large language models (LLMs)-based framework for KT, named textttLLM-KT, to integrate the strengths of LLMs and traditional sequence interaction models. For task-level alignment, we design Plug-and-Play instruction to align LLMs with KT, leveraging LLMs' rich knowledge and powerful reasoning capacity. For modality-level alignment, we design the plug-in context and sequence to integrate multiple modalities learned by traditional methods. To capture the long context of history records, we present a plug-in context to flexibly insert the compressed context embedding into LLMs using question-specific and concept-specific tokens. Furthermore, we introduce a plug-in sequence to enhance LLMs with sequence interaction behavior representation learned by traditional sequence models using a sequence adapter. Extensive experiments show that textttLLM-KT obtains state-of-the-art performance on four typical datasets by comparing it with approximately 20 strong baselines.