Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate distractors for multiple-choice questions (MCQs), especially in domains like math education. However, existing approaches are limited in ensuring that the generated distractors are consistent with common student errors. We propose LookAlike, a method that improves error-distractor consistency via preference optimization. Our two main innovations are: (a) mining synthetic preference pairs from model inconsistencies, and (b) alternating supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to stabilize training. Unlike prior work that relies on heuristics or manually annotated preference data, LookAlike uses its own generation inconsistencies as dispreferred samples, thus enabling scalable and stable training. Evaluated on a real-world dataset of 1,400+ math MCQs, LookAlike achieves 51.6% accuracy in distractor generation and 57.2% in error generation under LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, outperforming an existing state-of-the-art method (45.6% / 47.7%). These improvements highlight the effectiveness of preference-based regularization and inconsistency mining for generating consistent math MCQ distractors at scale.
Evaluating generative models with open-ended generation is challenging due to inconsistencies in response formats. Multiple-choice (MC) evaluation mitigates this issue, but generating high-quality distractors is time-consuming and labor-intensive. We introduce D-GEN, the first open-source distractor generator model that transforms open-ended data into an MC format. To evaluate distractor quality, we propose two novel methods: (1) ranking alignment, ensuring generated distractors retain the discriminatory power of ground-truth distractors, and (2) entropy analysis, comparing model confidence distributions. Our results show that D-GEN preserves ranking consistency (Spearman's rho 0.99, Kendall's tau 0.94) and closely matches the entropy distribution of ground-truth distractors. Human evaluation further confirms the fluency, coherence, distractiveness, and incorrectness. Our work advances robust and efficient distractor generation with automated evaluation, setting a new standard for MC evaluation.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing information retrieval, with chatbots becoming an important source for answering user queries. As by their design, LLMs prioritize generating correct answers, the value of highly plausible yet incorrect answers (candidate answers) tends to be overlooked. However, such answers can still prove useful, for example, they can play a crucial role in tasks like Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) and QA Robustness Assessment (QARA). Existing QA datasets primarily focus on correct answers without explicit consideration of the plausibility of other candidate answers, limiting opportunity for more nuanced evaluations of models. To address this gap, we introduce PlausibleQA, a large-scale dataset comprising 10,000 questions and 100,000 candidate answers, each annotated with plausibility scores and justifications for their selection. Additionally, the dataset includes 900,000 justifications for pairwise comparisons between candidate answers, further refining plausibility assessments. We evaluate PlausibleQA through human assessments and empirical experiments, demonstrating its utility in MCQA and QARA analysis. Our findings show that plausibility-aware approaches are effective for MCQA distractor generation and QARA. We release PlausibleQA as a resource for advancing QA research and enhancing LLM performance in distinguishing plausible distractors from correct answers.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various educational tasks, yet their alignment with human learning patterns, particularly in predicting which incorrect options students are most likely to select in multiple-choice questions (MCQs), remains underexplored. Our work investigates the relationship between LLM generation likelihood and student response distributions in MCQs with a specific focus on distractor selections. We collect a comprehensive dataset of MCQs with real-world student response distributions to explore two fundamental research questions: (1). RQ1 - Do the distractors that students more frequently select correspond to those that LLMs assign higher generation likelihood to? (2). RQ2 - When an LLM selects a incorrect choice, does it choose the same distractor that most students pick? Our experiments reveals moderate correlations between LLM-assigned probabilities and student selection patterns for distractors in MCQs. Additionally, when LLMs make mistakes, they are more likley to select the same incorrect answers that commonly mislead students, which is a pattern consistent across both small and large language models. Our work provides empirical evidence that despite LLMs' strong performance on generating educational content, there remains a gap between LLM's underlying reasoning process and human cognitive processes in identifying confusing distractors. Our findings also have significant implications for educational assessment development. The smaller language models could be efficiently utilized for automated distractor generation as they demonstrate similar patterns in identifying confusing answer choices as larger language models. This observed alignment between LLMs and student misconception patterns opens new opportunities for generating high-quality distractors that complement traditional human-designed distractors.
As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly prevalent in education, a fundamental challenge emerges: how can we verify if an AI truly understands how students think and reason? Traditional evaluation methods like measuring learning gains require lengthy studies confounded by numerous variables. We present a novel evaluation framework based on a two-phase Turing-like test. In Phase 1, students provide open-ended responses to questions, revealing natural misconceptions. In Phase 2, both AI and human experts, conditioned on each student's specific mistakes, generate distractors for new related questions. By analyzing whether students select AI-generated distractors at rates similar to human expert-generated ones, we can validate if the AI models student cognition. We prove this evaluation must be conditioned on individual responses - unconditioned approaches merely target common misconceptions. Through rigorous statistical sampling theory, we establish precise requirements for high-confidence validation. Our research positions conditioned distractor generation as a probe into an AI system's fundamental ability to model student thinking - a capability that enables adapting tutoring, feedback, and assessments to each student's specific needs.
By simply incorporating demonstrations into the context, in-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to yield awesome performance on many tasks. In this paper, we focus on passage-level long-context ICL for generation tasks and find that LLMs cannot learn the intrinsic relationships between the demonstration passage and the generation output. We conduct experiments with different LLMs on two typical generation tasks including single-document QA and distractor generation, demonstrating that even a completely meaningless demonstration passage with 1/4 length achieves much better performance than the original full passage. Analysis via attention score reveals that LLMs pay little attention to passages compared to other components in prompt and little attention flows from the passage to other parts of the demonstration, which further confirms our finding. Additionally, experiments on context compression indicate that compression approaches proven effective on other long-context tasks are not suitable for passage-level ICL, since simply using shorter meaningless demonstration passages has achieved competitive performance.
The evaluation of cross-lingual semantic search capabilities of models is often limited to existing datasets from tasks such as information retrieval and semantic textual similarity. To allow for domain-specific evaluation, we introduce Cross Lingual Semantic Discrimination (CLSD), a novel cross-lingual semantic search task that requires only a set of parallel sentence pairs of the language pair of interest within the target domain. This task focuses on the ability of a model to cross-lingually rank the true parallel sentence higher than hard negatives generated by a large language model. We create four instances of our introduced CLSD task for the language pair German-French within the domain of news. Within this case study, we find that models that are also fine-tuned for retrieval tasks (e.g., multilingual E5) benefit from using English as the pivot language, while bitext mining models such as LaBSE perform best directly cross-lingually. We also show a fine-grained similarity analysis enabled by our distractor generation strategy, indicating that different embedding models are sensitive to different types of perturbations.
In designing multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in education, creating plausible distractors is crucial for identifying students' misconceptions and gaps in knowledge and accurately assessing their understanding. However, prior studies on distractor generation have not paid sufficient attention to enhancing the difficulty of distractors, resulting in reduced effectiveness of MCQs. This study presents a pipeline for training a model to generate distractors that are more likely to be selected by students. First, we train a pairwise ranker to reason about students' misconceptions and assess the relative plausibility of two distractors. Using this model, we create a dataset of pairwise distractor ranks and then train a distractor generator via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to generate more plausible distractors. Experiments on computer science subjects (Python, DB, MLDL) demonstrate that our pairwise ranker effectively identifies students' potential misunderstandings and achieves ranking accuracy comparable to human experts. Furthermore, our distractor generator outperforms several baselines in generating plausible distractors and produces questions with a higher item discrimination index (DI).
Vocabulary acquisition is essential to second language learning, as it underpins all core language skills. Accurate vocabulary assessment is particularly important in standardized exams, where test items evaluate learners' comprehension and contextual use of words. Previous research has explored methods for generating distractors to aid in the design of English vocabulary tests. However, current approaches often rely on lexical databases or predefined rules, and frequently produce distractors that risk invalidating the question by introducing multiple correct options. In this study, we focus on English vocabulary questions from Taiwan's university entrance exams. We analyze student response distributions to gain insights into the characteristics of these test items and provide a reference for future research. Additionally, we identify key limitations in how large language models (LLMs) support teachers in generating distractors for vocabulary test design. To address these challenges, we propose the iterative selection with self-review (ISSR) framework, which makes use of a novel LLM-based self-review mechanism to ensure that the distractors remain valid while offering diverse options. Experimental results show that ISSR achieves promising performance in generating plausible distractors, and the self-review mechanism effectively filters out distractors that could invalidate the question.
Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have impacted numerous sub-fields such as natural language generation, natural language inference, question answering, and more. However, in the field of question generation, the creation of distractors for multiple-choice questions (MCQ) remains a challenging task. In this work, we present a simple, generic framework for distractor generation using readily available Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Unlike previous methods, our framework relies solely on pre-trained language models and does not require additional training on specific datasets. Building upon previous research, we introduce a two-stage framework consisting of candidate generation and candidate selection. Our proposed distractor generation framework outperforms previous methods without the need for training or fine-tuning. Human evaluations confirm that our approach produces more effective and engaging distractors. The related codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/obss/disgem.
High-quality distractors are crucial to both the assessment and pedagogical value of multiple-choice questions (MCQs), where manually crafting ones that anticipate knowledge deficiencies or misconceptions among real students is difficult. Meanwhile, automated distractor generation, even with the help of large language models (LLMs), remains challenging for subjects like math. It is crucial to not only identify plausible distractors but also understand the error behind them. In this paper, we introduce DiVERT (Distractor Generation with Variational Errors Represented as Text), a novel variational approach that learns an interpretable representation of errors behind distractors in math MCQs. Through experiments on a real-world math MCQ dataset with 1,434 questions used by hundreds of thousands of students, we show that DiVERT, despite using a base open-source LLM with 7B parameters, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches using GPT-4o on downstream distractor generation. We also conduct a human evaluation with math educators and find that DiVERT leads to error labels that are of comparable quality to human-authored ones.
In this paper, we tackle the task of distractor generation (DG) for multiple-choice questions. Our study introduces two key designs. First, we propose \textit{retrieval augmented pretraining}, which involves refining the language model pretraining to align it more closely with the downstream task of DG. Second, we explore the integration of knowledge graphs to enhance the performance of DG. Through experiments with benchmarking datasets, we show that our models significantly outperform the state-of-the-art results. Our best-performing model advances the F1@3 score from 14.80 to 16.47 in MCQ dataset and from 15.92 to 16.50 in Sciq dataset.
Within the context of reading comprehension, the task of Distractor Generation (DG) aims to generate several incorrect options to confuse readers. Traditional supervised methods for DG rely heavily on expensive human-annotated distractor labels. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised DG framework, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as cost-effective annotators to enhance the DG capability of smaller student models. Specially, to perform knowledge distilling, we propose a dual task training strategy that integrates pseudo distractors from LLMs and the original answer in-formation as the objective targets with a two-stage training process. Moreover, we devise a counterfactual contrastive decoding mechanism for increasing the distracting capability of the DG model. Experiments show that our unsupervised generation method with Bart-base greatly surpasses GPT-3.5-turbo performance with only 200 times fewer model parameters. Our proposed unsupervised DG method offers a cost-effective framework for practical reading comprehension applications, without the need of laborious distractor annotation and costly large-size models
When evaluating a learner's knowledge proficiency, the multiple-choice question is an efficient and widely used format in standardized tests. Nevertheless, generating these questions, particularly plausible distractors (incorrect options), poses a considerable challenge. Generally, the distractor generation can be classified into cloze-style distractor generation (CDG) and natural questions distractor generation (NQDG). In contrast to the CDG, utilizing pre-trained language models (PLMs) for NQDG presents three primary challenges: (1) PLMs are typically trained to generate ``correct'' content, like answers, while rarely trained to generate ``plausible" content, like distractors; (2) PLMs often struggle to produce content that aligns well with specific knowledge and the style of exams; (3) NQDG necessitates the model to produce longer, context-sensitive, and question-relevant distractors. In this study, we introduce a fine-tuning framework named DGRC for NQDG in Chinese multi-choice reading comprehension from authentic examinations. DGRC comprises three major components: hard chain-of-thought, multi-task learning, and generation mask patterns. The experiment results demonstrate that DGRC significantly enhances generation performance, achieving a more than 2.5-fold improvement in BLEU scores.
Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are commonly used across all levels of math education since they can be deployed and graded at a large scale. A critical component of MCQs is the distractors, i.e., incorrect answers crafted to reflect student errors or misconceptions. Automatically generating them in math MCQs, e.g., with large language models, has been challenging. In this work, we propose a novel method to enhance the quality of generated distractors through overgenerate-and-rank, training a ranking model to predict how likely distractors are to be selected by real students. Experimental results on a real-world dataset and human evaluation with math teachers show that our ranking model increases alignment with human-authored distractors, although human-authored ones are still preferred over generated ones.
Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are ubiquitous in almost all levels of education since they are easy to administer, grade, and are a reliable format in assessments and practices. One of the most important aspects of MCQs is the distractors, i.e., incorrect options that are designed to target common errors or misconceptions among real students. To date, the task of crafting high-quality distractors largely remains a labor and time-intensive process for teachers and learning content designers, which has limited scalability. In this work, we study the task of automated distractor generation in the domain of math MCQs and explore a wide variety of large language model (LLM)-based approaches, from in-context learning to fine-tuning. We conduct extensive experiments using a real-world math MCQ dataset and find that although LLMs can generate some mathematically valid distractors, they are less adept at anticipating common errors or misconceptions among real students.
Manually designing cloze test consumes enormous time and efforts. The major challenge lies in wrong option (distractor) selection. Having carefully-design distractors improves the effectiveness of learner ability assessment. As a result, the idea of automatically generating cloze distractor is motivated. In this paper, we investigate cloze distractor generation by exploring the employment of pre-trained language models (PLMs) as an alternative for candidate distractor generation. Experiments show that the PLM-enhanced model brings a substantial performance improvement. Our best performing model advances the state-of-the-art result from 14.94 to 34.17 (NDCG@10 score). Our code and dataset is available at https://github.com/AndyChiangSH/CDGP.
The increasing depth of parametric domain knowledge in large language models (LLMs) is fueling their rapid deployment in real-world applications. Understanding model vulnerabilities in high-stakes and knowledge-intensive tasks is essential for quantifying the trustworthiness of model predictions and regulating their use. The recent discovery of named entities as adversarial examples (i.e. adversarial entities) in natural language processing tasks raises questions about their potential impact on the knowledge robustness of pre-trained and finetuned LLMs in high-stakes and specialized domains. We examined the use of type-consistent entity substitution as a template for collecting adversarial entities for billion-parameter LLMs with biomedical knowledge. To this end, we developed an embedding-space attack based on powerscaled distance-weighted sampling to assess the robustness of their biomedical knowledge with a low query budget and controllable coverage. Our method has favorable query efficiency and scaling over alternative approaches based on random sampling and blackbox gradient-guided search, which we demonstrated for adversarial distractor generation in biomedical question answering. Subsequent failure mode analysis uncovered two regimes of adversarial entities on the attack surface with distinct characteristics and we showed that entity substitution attacks can manipulate token-wise Shapley value explanations, which become deceptive in this setting. Our approach complements standard evaluations for high-capacity models and the results highlight the brittleness of domain knowledge in LLMs.
The distractor generation task focuses on generating incorrect but plausible options for objective questions such as fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions. This task is widely utilized in educational settings across various domains and subjects. The effectiveness of these questions in assessments relies on the quality of the distractors, as they challenge examinees to select the correct answer from a set of misleading options. The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has transitioned the task from traditional methods to the use of neural networks and pre-trained language models. This shift has established new benchmarks and expanded the use of advanced deep learning methods in generating distractors. This survey explores distractor generation tasks, datasets, methods, and current evaluation metrics for English objective questions, covering both text-based and multi-modal domains. It also evaluates existing AI models and benchmarks and discusses potential future research directions.
We introduce a multi-stage prompting approach (MSP) for the generation of multiple choice questions (MCQs), harnessing the capabilities of GPT models such as text-davinci-003 and GPT-4, renowned for their excellence across various NLP tasks. Our approach incorporates the innovative concept of chain-of-thought prompting, a progressive technique in which the GPT model is provided with a series of interconnected cues to guide the MCQ generation process. Automated evaluations consistently demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MSP method over the traditional single-stage prompting (SSP) baseline, resulting in the production of high-quality distractors. Furthermore, the one-shot MSP technique enhances automatic evaluation results, contributing to improved distractor generation in multiple languages, including English, German, Bengali, and Hindi. In human evaluations, questions generated using our approach exhibit superior levels of grammaticality, answerability, and difficulty, highlighting its efficacy in various languages.