To Align Long, Plan Short: Simulating Diverse Profile-Aligned Students by Realizing Short-Term Plans in Long-Horizon Learning Environments

Abstract

Simulated students offer a scalable way to test learning platforms and AI tutors before deployment with real students and to augment scarce data for studying learning at scale. Existing LLM-based simulators primarily target short, language-centered interactions. In open-ended learning environments, however, student behavior emerges from patterns across long-horizon interaction trajectories, where turn-level prompting can drift from an assigned behavior profile. We introduce ALPS (Align Long-term by Planning Short-term), a hierarchical simulated student conditioned on observable, environment-specific behavior profiles. Rather than selecting every action independently, ALPS alternates between planning profile-aligned task segments and generating the corresponding actions. We evaluate ALPS in both data-sufficient and data-scarce settings, where supervision comes either from real student trajectories or from a teacher LLM. Across both settings, we compare in-context learning (ICL), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reward-ranked fine-tuning (RAFT), and their sequential combination (SFT followed by RAFT). Experiments in an inquiry-based physics game and a pharmacy simulation evaluate behavioral density and coverage against held-out real data, and profile consistency using a human-aligned LLM judge. Across both settings, ALPS consistently outperforms turn-level generation, achieving comparable density and judge pass rates under scarce supervision, although coverage remains lower. These results show that hierarchical planning enables faithful, profile-aligned simulation over long interaction horizons, even with limited real student data.