# Decoding Student Minds: Leveraging Conversational Agents for Psychological and Learning Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10441 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10441/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Educational agents and math problem solving, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 12 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Educational agents and math problem solving](https://mlsanity.com/agents/educational-agents-and-math-problem-solving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01116/) (2023)
- [KG-BERT: BERT for Knowledge Graph Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03193/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Alignment and Fusion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17040/) (2024)
- [LLM Agents for Education: Advances and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11733/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Graph Enhanced Language Agents for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19627/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations: A Survey of Methods, Trends, Challenges and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20511/) (2025)
- [GraphMFT: A Graph Network based Multimodal Fusion Technique for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00339/) (2022)
- [How to Build an Adaptive AI Tutor for Any Course Using Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17696/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Embedding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07766/) (2025)
- [A Knowledge-Enhanced Disease Diagnosis Method Based on Prompt Learning and BERT Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10403/) (2024)
- [MathBuddy: A Multimodal System for Affective Math Tutoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19993/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a psychologically-aware conversational agent designed to enhance both learning performance and emotional well-being in educational settings. The system combines Large Language Models (LLMs), a knowledge graph-enhanced BERT (KG-BERT), and a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network with attention to classify students' cognitive and affective states in real time. Unlike prior chatbots limited to either tutoring or affective support, our approach leverages multimodal data-including textual semantics, prosodic speech features, and temporal behavioral trends-to infer engagement, stress, and conceptual understanding. A pilot study with 45 university students demonstrated improved motivation, reduced stress, and moderate academic gains compared to unimodal baselines. We explicitly discuss the exploratory nature of this small-sample pilot, report effect sizes and inter-rater reliability alongside significance tests, and provide an ablation analysis isolating the contribution of the knowledge-graph component and of each modality. These results underline the promise-while acknowledging the current limits in scale and modality balance-of integrating semantic reasoning, multimodal fusion, and temporal modeling to support adaptive, student-centered educational interventions.