Towards Reward Modeling for AI Tutors in Math Mistake Remediation
Kseniia Petukhova, Ekaterina Kochmar · Mar 25, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this page
Moderate trustUse this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.
Best use
Secondary protocol comparison source
What to verify
Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.
Evidence quality
Moderate
Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.
Abstract
Evaluating the pedagogical quality of AI tutors remains challenging: standard NLG metrics do not determine whether responses identify mistakes, scaffold reasoning, or avoid revealing the answers. For the task of mistake remediation, we derive a hierarchy of pedagogical aspects from human pairwise preferences on MRBench, and synthesize minimally contrastive response pairs that differ along key aspects (e.g., mistake identification and location, targetedness, scaffolding, actionability, clarity, and coherence). We develop and release Bradley-Terry preference models trained on weighted-sum rankings that we automatically create from MRBench, synthetic pairs, and data combinations. Using only synthetic data, our best model reaches 0.69 pairwise accuracy on a human preference test, and combining weighted-sum data with targeted synthetic groups improves accuracy to 0.74, outperforming larger general-purpose reward models while using only a 0.5B-parameter backbone.