Pre-Conference Talk by Sidney TIO Xi Rong | EduQate: Generating Adaptive Curricula through RMAB in Education Settings

There has been significant interest in the development of personalized and adaptive educational tools that cater to a student's individual learning progress. A crucial aspect in developing such tools is in exploring how mastery can be achieved across a diverse yet related range of content in an efficient manner. While Reinforcement Learning and Multi-armed Bandits have shown promise in educational settings, existing works often assume the independence of learning content, neglecting the prevalent interdependencies between such content. In response, we introduce Education Network Restless Multi-armed Bandits (EdNetRMABs), utilizing a network to represent the relationships between interdependent arms. Subsequently, we propose EduQate, a method employing interdependency-aware Q-learning to make informed decisions on arm selection at each time step. We establish the optimality guarantee of EduQate and demonstrate its efficacy compared to baseline policies, using students modeled from both synthetic and real-world data.

This is a Pre-Conference talk for The 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2025).

Sidney TIO is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the SMU School of Computing and Information Systems. He is supervised by Professor Pradeep VARAKANTHAM. His research area focused in maximizing training gains for both humans and artificial agents through research in Reinforcement Learning.