Cultivating Helpful, Personalized, and Creative AI Tutors: A Framework for Pedagogical Alignment using Reinforcement Learning

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into education presents unprecedented opportunities for scalable personalized learning. However, standard LLMs often function as generic information providers, lacking alignment with fundamental pedagogical principles such as helpfulness, student-centered personalization, and creativity cultivation. To bridge this gap, we propose EduAlign, a novel framework designed to guide LLMs toward becoming more effective and responsible educational assistants. EduAlign consists of two main stages. In the first stage, we curate a dataset of 8k educational interactions and annotate them-both manually and automatically-along three key educational dimensions: Helpfulness, Personalization, and Creativity (HPC). These annotations are used to train HPC-RM, a multi-dimensional reward model capable of accurately scoring LLM outputs according to these educational principles. We further evaluate the consistency and reliability of this reward model. In the second stage, we leverage HPC-RM as a reward signal to fine-tune a pre-trained LLM using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on a set of 2k diverse prompts. We then assess the pre- and post-finetuning models on both educational and general-domain benchmarks across the three HPC dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that the fine-tuned model exhibits significantly improved alignment with pedagogical helpfulness, personalization, and creativity stimulation. This study presents a scalable and effective approach to aligning LLMs with nuanced and desirable educational traits, paving the way for the development of more engaging, pedagogically aligned AI tutors.

TopicVD: A Topic-Based Dataset of Video-Guided Multimodal Machine Translation for Documentaries

Most existing multimodal machine translation (MMT) datasets are predominantly composed of static images or short video clips, lacking extensive video data across diverse domains and topics. As a result, they fail to meet the demands of real-world MMT tasks, such as documentary translation. In this study, we developed TopicVD, a topic-based dataset for video-supported multimodal machine translation of documentaries, aiming to advance research in this field. We collected video-subtitle pairs from documentaries and categorized them into eight topics, such as economy and nature, to facilitate research on domain adaptation in video-guided MMT. Additionally, we preserved their contextual information to support research on leveraging the global context of documentaries in video-guided MMT. To better capture the shared semantics between text and video, we propose an MMT model based on a cross-modal bidirectional attention module. Extensive experiments on the TopicVD dataset demonstrate that visual information consistently improves the performance of the NMT model in documentary translation. However, the MMT model's performance significantly declines in out-of-domain scenarios, highlighting the need for effective domain adaptation methods. Additionally, experiments demonstrate that global context can effectively improve translation performance. % Dataset and our implementations are available at https://github.com/JinzeLv/TopicVD