AD4CD: Causal-Guided Anomaly Detection for Enhancing Cognitive Diagnosis

Haiping Ma, Yue Yao, Changqian Wang, Siyu Song, Yong Yang

Abstract: Cognitive diagnosis is a key task in computer-aided education, aimed at assessing a students' proficiency in specific knowledge concepts based on their responses to exercises. However, existing cognitive diagnosis models often overlook anomalies in students and exercises. For instance, some students might incorrectly response exercises despite having a strong grasp of the knowledge concept, or they might response correctly despite a lack of understanding. Such subtle anomalies can adversely affect the diagnostic results of the models. To address these anomalies, we conduct a qualitative analysis of how anomalous student states and exercise properties impact response outcomes using causal diagrams. We propose a framework named Anomaly Detection for Cognitive Diagnosis (AD4CD) to enhance the ability of Learning-to-Detect-Anomalous. AD4CD approaches the problem from a causal perspective, analyzing confounding paths that affect the true causal relationship between student ability and response outcomes, and designing an anomaly detection mechanism suitable for cognitive diagnostic models. Specifically, we first account for anomalous student behaviors and exercise properties and introduce response times from both students and exercises as modeling factors. By quantifying the response time distributions in high-dimensional features, we identify anomalies within skewed distributions, including both left-tail and right-tail anomalies. Using the detected anomaly scores, we comprehensively model the students' anomalous behaviors and exercise anomalies. Additionally, we reconstruct unbiased true abilities under natural conditions and use reconstruction loss as an anomaly score to assist in modeling guessing and slipping features. Lastly, AD4CD leverages a general cognitive diagnosis model as its backbone, optimizing the guessing and slipping features to provide unbiased and accurate feedback. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AD4CD effectively captures anomalous data in the diagnostic process across three real-world datasets, enhancing the accuracy of the diagnostic results.