ACL2026
LongTutor: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Long-term Personalized Tutoring
Ning Li, Zheng Zhang, Zhenya Huang, Rui Li, Yi Zhan, Yinbo Luo, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen
Abstract
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has driven the deployment of LLMbased AI tutors on online learning platforms. This widespread adoption highlights an urgent need for systematic benchmarks to evaluate their tutoring capabilities. However, existing evaluations predominantly focus on isolated, short-term interactions, overlooking the inherently long-term nature of learning. To bridge this gap, we introduce LongTutor, a benchmark for long-term personalized tutoring grounded in formative assessment theory. Built from expertannotated real-world learning logs, LongTutor evaluates LLMs across three progressive tasks: historical evidence acquisition, knowledge state diagnosis, and adaptive teaching action. Our experiments reveal a critical capability mismatch: while LLMs excel at evidence acquisition, they struggle to effectively leverage long-term history for accurate diagnosis and adaptive teaching. To enable scalable benchmark expansion, we further propose an automated generator-verifier pipeline, paving the way toward truly long-term AI tutoring systems. We release our code and dataset at https://github.com/liano3/LongTutor .