Cognitive Structure Generation: From Educational Priors to Policy Optimization

Abstract: Cognitive structure is a student's subjective organization of an objective knowledge system, reflected in the psychological construction of concepts and their relations. However, cognitive structure assessment remains a long-standing challenge in student modeling and psychometrics, persisting as a foundational yet largely unassessable concept in educational practice. This paper introduces a novel framework, Cognitive Structure Generation (CSG), in which we first pretrain a Cognitive Structure Diffusion Probabilistic Model (CSDPM) to generate students' cognitive structures from educational priors, and then further optimize its generative process as a policy with hierarchical reward signals via reinforcement learning to align with genuine cognitive development levels during students' learning processes. Experimental results on four popular real-world education datasets show that cognitive structures generated by CSG offer more comprehensive and effective representations for student modeling, substantially improving performance on KT and CD tasks while enhancing interpretability.