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Nigel Fernandez

5 accepted papers

2026

RADAR: Reasoning–Ability and Difficulty-Aware Routing in Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Reasoning language models have demonstrated remarkable performance on many challenging tasks in math, science, and coding. Choosing the right reasoning model for practical deployment involves a performance and cost tradeoff at two key levels: model size and reasoning budget, where larger models and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SMART: Simulated Students Aligned with Item Response Theory for Question Difficulty Prediction

EMNLP 2025

Item (question) difficulties play a crucial role in educational assessments, enabling accurate and efficient assessment of student abilities and personalization to maximize learning outcomes. Traditionally, estimating item difficulties can be costly, requiring real students to respond to items, foll

2024

DiVERT: Distractor Generation with Variational Errors Represented as Text for Math Multiple-choice Questions

EMNLP 2024main

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 hel…

2020

Synthesizing Tasks for Block-based Programming

NeurIPS 2020poster

Block-based visual programming environments play a critical role in introducing computing concepts to K-12 students. One of the key pedagogical challenges in these environments is in designing new practice tasks for a student that match a desired level of difficulty and exercise specific programming…