# Misconception Diagnosis From Student-Tutor Dialogue: Generate, Retrieve, Rerank

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02414/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07316/) (2022)
- [Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05672/) (2024)
- [One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09741/) (2022)
- [Deep Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05908/) (2015)
- [Context-Aware Attentive Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12324/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Exploring Knowledge Tracing in Tutor-Student Dialogues using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16490/) (2024)
- [Learning to Make MISTAKEs: Modeling Incorrect Student Thinking And Key Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11502/) (2025)
- [DrawEduMath: Evaluating Vision Language Models with Expert-Annotated Students' Hand-Drawn Math Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14877/) (2025)
- [Toward In-Context Teaching: Adapting Examples to Students' Misconceptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04495/) (2024)
- [MalAlgoQA: Pedagogical Evaluation of Counterfactual Reasoning in Large Language Models and Implications for AI in Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00938/) (2024)
- [MiRAGE: Misconception Detection with Retrieval-Guided Multi-Stage Reasoning and Ensemble Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01182/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Faster, Cheaper, More Accurate: Specialised Knowledge Tracing Models Outperform LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02830/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Timely and accurate identification of student misconceptions is key to improving learning outcomes and pre-empting the compounding of student errors. However, this task is highly dependent on the effort and intuition of the teacher. In this work, we present a novel approach for detecting misconceptions from student-tutor dialogues using large language models (LLMs). First, we use a fine-tuned LLM to generate plausible misconceptions, and then retrieve the most promising candidates among these using embedding similarity with the input dialogue. These candidates are then assessed and re-ranked by another fine-tuned LLM to improve misconception relevance. Empirically, we evaluate our system on real dialogues from an educational tutoring platform. We consider multiple base LLM models including LLaMA, Qwen and Claude on zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We find that our approach improves predictive performance over baseline models and that fine-tuning improves both generated misconception quality and can outperform larger closed-source models. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to both validate the importance of our generation and reranking steps on misconception generation quality.