TRACE-BN: Transferring Bangla-English Tutoring Behavior to a Sub-1B Offline Language Model

Bangla-English tutoring requires more than producing a correct translation: learners also need explanations of grammar differences, awareness of their likely errors, and targeted practice. We present TRACE-BN, a curriculum-guided dataset of structured tutoring traces for Bangla-speaking learners of English at the CEFR A1-A2 level. Each trace combines word-level glosses, literal and natural translations, Bangla grammar explanations, a plausible learner error, and a targeted practice question with its answer. The traces are generated by Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite as the teacher model from NCTB Classes 9-10 English curriculum units, then filtered for structural validity, script integrity, and semantic duplication. We transfer the resulting structured tutoring behavior to Qwen3-0.6B using LoRA with 4-bit quantization for resource-constrained offline deployment. On held-out inputs, schema validity increases from 85.4% to 95.8%, while, against teacher-model references, chrF++ improves from 15.28 to 34.77 and BLEU from 4.52 to 21.03. Field-level evaluation by two independent judges shows improvements across translation, grammar explanation, learner-error diagnosis, and practice alignment, while a human audit supports the quality of the supervision data. The results show that curriculum-guided structured supervision can transfer multi-component tutoring behavior to a sub-1B model under these resource constraints. The dataset, model checkpoints, and code are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/RaiyanKhaan/Trace-BN

Rethinking LLM-Judged Helpfulness as a Pedagogy Signal: A Pre-Registered Audit Across Tutor Models

LLM tutoring poses a measurement problem: can a general-purpose helpfulness rubric distinguish direct answer-giving from pedagogical guidance? We audit this signal in a pre-registered study. Within each of three tutor bases, we compare conversational and pedagogical policies instantiated with the same underlying model and paired with one fixed weak simulated student. Deterministic detectors measure answer leakage and next-turn independent work. Claude Opus 4.8 is the frozen, condition-blind primary judge. After the Opus scores were fixed, GPT-5.6 Sol was prospectively specified for a post hoc robustness audit of the same 1,179 confirmatory answer-phase tutor turns under the frozen helpfulness and pedagogy rubrics. On the primary base under Opus, the policies do not differ significantly in helpfulness but are perfectly rank-separated under the pedagogy rubric (Cliff's $|δ|{=}0.10$ vs. $1.0$). Across the two judges, pedagogy contrasts retain their direction where detected, whereas the helpfulness ordering is judge-contingent, reversing between judges on two of three bases. In an Opus-only ablation, seven primary-base policies span $2.3$ points in mean judged pedagogy within a $0.25$-point band of mean judged helpfulness. Separately, answer-revealing turns are followed by less independent student work on every base, a result that is judge-invariant by construction. In this controlled setting, general-purpose helpfulness is not a reliable pedagogy signal. Tutor evaluation should pair pedagogy-targeted rubrics with deterministic process measures.

Uncertainty-Aware Generation and Decision-Making Under Ambiguity

With rapidly improving capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in many complex real-world tasks. Beyond requiring in-depth knowledge and reasoning skills, many of these tasks exhibit a high degree of subjectivity and require that the outputs of the model can be trusted. While a lot of progress has been made to train better models, decision-making algorithms have received less attention. In this work, we present and evaluate various uncertainty-aware decision-making algorithms based on Bayesian decision theory and risk-averse decision making on the tasks of tutoring and automatic peer reviewing. Concretely, we take uncertainty over tutoring strategies and review scores into account when generating a tutor response or review and use conformal prediction to provide guarantees over strategy and score. We find empirically that these algorithms can improve the utility of the generations but need to be carefully implemented when ambiguity is high. For example, risk-averse rules can degrade performance by optimizing for generic outputs, while Bayesian methods tend to perform better. Our work uses techniques from decision theory to improve LLM-based decision-making and outlines open challenges for the community.

Curiosity as Linguistic Intervention: Using LLM Tutoring Dialogues to Influence Exploratory Learning Behavior

Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a new opportunity to study how language shapes exploratory cognition because conversational strategies can be systematically manipulated at inference time. We introduce CURIOBOT, a framework that operationalizes Berlyne's collative variables, novelty, complexity, conflict, and uncertainty, as adaptive linguistic interventions for conversational tutoring. Across 270 tutoring conversations spanning multiple model families, domains, and topic complexity levels, curiosity-oriented interventions consistently increased exploratory learner behaviors, producing up to 2.4x more conversational turns under fixed time budgets. To measure these effects, we further introduce a learner-centered evaluation framework capturing exploratory questioning, conversational agency, productive struggle, and observable curiosity. Learner-side gains persisted even when tutor-side instructional quality remained unchanged, suggesting that curiosity functions as a partially independent interaction-level mechanism. More broadly, our results demonstrate that LLM-mediated dialogue can serve as a scalable experimental framework for studying how language shapes exploratory learning behavior.

Hey Chat, Can You Teach Me? Structuring Socratic Dialogue for Human Learning in the Wild

Large language models are now widely used for everyday learning, but the underlying interactions are typically unstructured chats rather than following a curriculum. Unlike formal online learning systems, these interactions carry no prior record of the student, so any estimate of what the student already knows must be inferred from the dialogue itself. We show that this gap is not closed by scaling models alone. Frontier and education-tuned LLMs perform poorly when asked to tutor a student over an extended session, because doing so requires three things at once. The tutor must sequence a curriculum, conduct Socratic dialogue, and infer the student's knowledge state from that dialogue. We propose separating these responsibilities. Given a student query, our system constructs a prerequisite knowledge graph in which subtopics are nodes and dependencies are edges, and frames tutoring as deciding which node to teach next and how many dialogue turns to spend on it before moving on. A lightweight PPO policy handles this sequencing decision, while an LLM conducts the Socratic exchange at the chosen node and returns a signal of student progress. Across held-out STEM and non-STEM topics, our PPO-paired tutor outperforms heuristic baselines, frontier general-purpose models, and a model specialised for Socratic dialogue: on both the rate at which students reach full curriculum mastery and the number of turns required. Explicit curriculum structure delivers gains that scaling the underlying model does not.