DeepTutor: Towards Agentic Personalized Tutoring

arXiv cs.CL / 5/1/2026

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Key Points

  • DeepTutor is an open-source, agent-native tutoring framework aimed at overcoming limitations of static LLM knowledge and insufficiently personalized RAG-based tutoring.
  • It uses a hybrid personalization engine that combines citation-grounded problem solving with dynamically updated, multi-resolution memory to maintain a continuously evolving learner profile.
  • DeepTutor introduces a closed tutoring loop that connects source-grounded solutions with difficulty-calibrated question generation, and extends personalization to collaborative writing and multi-agent guided learning.
  • A proactive multi-agent layer called TutorBot delivers tutoring capabilities via extensible skills and unified multi-channel access, providing a consistent cross-platform experience.
  • The work also proposes TutorBench, a student-centric evaluation benchmark and protocol, and reports experimental results showing improved tutoring quality without degrading core agentic reasoning performance.

Abstract

Education represents one of the most promising real-world applications for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, conventional tutoring systems rely on static pre-training knowledge that lacks adaptation to individual learners, while existing RAG-augmented systems fall short in delivering personalized, guided feedback. To bridge this gap, we present DeepTutor, an agent-native open-source framework for personalized tutoring where every feature shares a common personalization substrate. We propose a hybrid personalization engine that couples static knowledge grounding with dynamic multi-resolution memory, distilling interaction history into a continuously evolving learner profile. Moreover, we construct a closed tutoring loop that bidirectionally couples citation-grounded problem solving with difficulty-calibrated question generation. The personalization substrate further supports collaborative writing, multi-agent deep research, and interactive guided learning, enabling cross-modality coherence. To move beyond reactive interfaces, we introduce TutorBot, a proactive multi-agent layer that deploys tutoring capabilities through extensible skills and unified multi-channel access, providing consistent experience across platforms. To better evaluate such tutoring systems, we construct TutorBench, a student-centric benchmark with source-grounded learner profiles and a first-person interactive protocol that measures adaptive tutoring from the learner's perspective. We further evaluate foundational agentic reasoning abilities across five authoritative benchmarks. Experiments show that DeepTutor improves personalized tutoring quality while maintaining general agentic reasoning abilities. We hope DeepTutor provides unique insights into next-generation AI-powered and personalized tutoring systems for the community.