# BuddyBench: A Privacy-Constrained Multi-Task Benchmark for Pediatric Social-Communication Personalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28089/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Deep Learning Models for Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11959/) (2021)
- [Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00503/) (2019)
- [TabNet: Attentive Interpretable Tabular Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07442/) (2019)
- [Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.04342/) (2015)
- [Meta-learners for Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03461/) (2017)
- [TabTransformer: Tabular Data Modeling Using Contextual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06678/) (2020)
- [Deep Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05908/) (2015)
- [Quasi-Oracle Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04912/) (2017)
- [SAINT: Improved Neural Networks for Tabular Data via Row Attention and Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01342/) (2021)
- [Adapting Neural Networks for the Estimation of Treatment Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02120/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Dynamic Key-Value Memory Networks for Knowledge Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08108/) (2016)
- [TabM: Advancing Tabular Deep Learning with Parameter-Efficient Ensembling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24210/) (2024)
- [EdNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Dataset in Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03072/) (2019)
- [Better by Default: Strong Pre-Tuned MLPs and Boosted Trees on Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04491/) (2024)
- [RecVAE: a New Variational Autoencoder for Top-N Recommendations with Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11160/) (2019)
- [pyKT: A Python Library to Benchmark Deep Learning based Knowledge Tracing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11460/) (2022)
- [Bayesian regression tree models for causal inference: regularization, confounding, and heterogeneous effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09523/) (2017)
- [Tenrec: A Large-scale Multipurpose Benchmark Dataset for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10629/) (2022)
- [MMASD: A Multimodal Dataset for Autism Intervention Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08243/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

BuddyBench introduces a privacy-constrained multi-task benchmark for pediatric social-communication personalization. Unlike existing neurodevelopmental repositories that primarily emphasize imaging, genetics, or cross-sectional clinical phenotyping, BuddyBench links drill-level learning trajectories, standardized clinical assessments, BuddyPlan self-report, and randomized-treatment endpoints within a unified benchmark schema. BuddyBench combines two cohorts: ND-03 is an observational cohort with dense drill coverage for Tasks1-2 (n = 189), and ND-02 is a randomized controlled trial cohort for Tasks3-4 (n = 86 ITT). Together, they support knowledge tracing, next-drill recommendation, clinical prediction, and causal inference, linking behavioral personalization to clinical evaluation. We additionally introduce BuddyBench-Sim, a synthetic companion dataset for reproducible evaluation. Baselines show signal across tasks while keeping pediatric clinical records protected.
