ANT-KT: Adaptive NAS Transformers for Knowledge Tracing

Knowledge Tracing aims to assess students’ mastery of knowledge concepts in real time, playing a crucial role in providing personalized learning services in intelligent tutoring systems. In recent years, researchers have attempted to introduce Neural Architecture Search (NAS) into knowledge tracing tasks to automatically design more efficient network structures. However, existing NAS-based methods for Knowledge Tracing suffer from excessively large search spaces and slow search efficiency, which significantly constrain their practical applications. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an Adaptive Neural Architecture Search framework based on Transformers for KT, called ANT-KT. Specifically, we design an enhanced encoder that combines convolution operations with state vectors to capture both local and global dependencies in students’ learning sequences. Moreover, an optimized decoder with a linear attention mechanism is introduced to improve the efficiency of modeling long-term student knowledge state evolution. We further propose an evolutionary NAS algorithm that incorporates a model optimization efficiency objective and a dynamic search space reduction strategy, enabling the discovery of high-performing yet computationally efficient architectures. Experimental results on two large-scale real-world datasets, EdNet and RAIEd2020, demonstrate that ANT-KT significantly reduces time costs across all stages of NAS while achieving performance improvements on multiple evaluation metrics, validating the efficiency and practicality of the proposed method.