MC-CPO: Mastery-Conditioned Constrained Policy Optimization for Pedagogically Safe Intelligent Tutoring Systems
About
Intelligent tutoring systems increasingly rely on reinforcement learning to personalise instruction, yet optimising for observable engagement signals can systematically decouple learner activity from genuine knowledge acquisition. Analysing over 21 million student interactions across two deployed platforms, we find engagement events without corresponding mastery gains occur in 26.5% of interactions on Junyi Academy (72,758 students) and 3.1% on XES3G5M (14,453 students, NeurIPS 2023), confirming this pattern is directly observable in deployed educational technology at scale. We introduce Mastery-Conditioned Constrained Policy Optimisation (MC-CPO), a reinforcement learning framework that addresses this problem structurally. MC-CPO conditions the admissible instructional action space on learner mastery state: a concept becomes available only when prerequisite knowledge meets a mastery threshold, yielding an action space that expands naturally as learners acquire knowledge. Pedagogical safety constraints are enforced by construction, with formal guarantees of structural prerequisite safety, primal-dual convergence, and strict dominance over post-hoc filtering. MC-CPO is the only method to reduce reward hacking severity across all conditions. Mean per-episode mastery gain increases by 18.3% on Junyi Academy and 54.0% on XES3G5M relative to all baselines, while competitive engagement performance is maintained. These results support structural constraint modelling as a principled foundation for safer adaptive instructional policies in deployed tutoring systems.