Ability-Residual Decoupled Modeling for Affective Cognitive Diagnosis

Boyuan Zhao, Meng Ye

Cognitive diagnosis infers students' concept mastery from response logs. However, students' responses are not determined by mastery alone: non-cognitive factors such as emotion, engagement, and fatigue can also affect performance. Affective cognitive diagnosis therefore extends conventional cognitive diagnosis by incorporating affective states. Existing methods often assume that the cognitive diagnosis backbone has already explained ability, item, and concept effects, so the remaining errors can be attributed mainly to affect. We argue that this assumption can be insufficient in real educational data: item calibration bias, systematic concept bias, personalized student-concept deviations, and latent student-item matching can form stable cognitive residuals. Without an explicit modeling pathway, these residuals may leak into affective representations, producing affect contamination. To address this problem, we propose an ability-residual decoupled framework for affective cognitive diagnosis. The model first captures unmodeled cognitive residuals through student, item, concept, student-concept, and low-rank student-item components, and then uses an affective module to modulate…