Educational Data Mining (EDM) has emerged as a vital field of research, which harnesses the power of computational techniques to analyze educational data. With the increasing complexity and diversity of academic data, Deep Learning techniques have shown significant advantages in addressing the challenges associated with analyzing and modeling this data. Existing studies are scattered across various domains, making it challenging to gain a comprehensive understanding of how Deep Learning techniques can transform educational practices. This survey aims to systematically review the state-of-the-art in EDM with Deep Learning. We begin by providing a brief introduction to EDM and Deep Learning, highlighting their relevance in the context of modern education. Next, we present a detailed review of Deep Learning techniques applied in four typical educational scenarios, including knowledge tracing, student behavior detection, performance prediction, and personalized recommendation. Furthermore, a comprehensive overview of public datasets and processing tools for EDM is provided. Finally, we point out emerging trends and future directions, aiming to guide researchers and practitioners in advancing the field of EDM.

In response to the limitations of reinforcement learning and Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) in complex problem-solving, Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (EvoRL) has emerged as a synergistic solution. This systematic review aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of EvoRL, examining the symbiotic relationship between EAs and reinforcement learning algorithms and identifying critical gaps in relevant application tasks. The review begins by outlining the technological foundations of EvoRL, detailing the complementary relationship between EAs and reinforcement learning algorithms to address the limitations of reinforcement learning, such as parameter sensitivity, sparse rewards, and its susceptibility to local optima. We then delve into the challenges faced by both reinforcement learning and EvoRL, exploring the utility and limitations of EAs in EvoRL. EvoRL itself is constrained by the sampling efficiency and algorithmic complexity, which affect its application in areas like robotic control and large-scale industrial settings. Furthermore, we address significant open issues in the field, such as adversarial robustness, fairness, and ethical considerations. Finally, we propose future directions for EvoRL, emphasizing research avenues that strive to enhance self-adaptation, self-improvement, scalability, interpretability, and so on. To quantify the current state, we analyzed about 100 EvoRL studies, categorizing them based on algorithms, performance metrics, and benchmark tasks. Serving as a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners, this systematic review provides insights into the current state of EvoRL and offers a guide for advancing its capabilities in the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence.

In recommendation tasks, most existing models that learn users’ preferences from user–item interactions ignore the relationships between items. Additionally, ensuring that the crossed features capture both global graph structures and local context is non-trivial, requiring innovative techniques for multi-scale representation learning. To overcome these difficulties, we develop a novel neural network, CoGraph, which uses a graph to build the relations between items. The item co-occurrence pattern assumes that certain items consistently appear in pairs in users’ viewing or consumption logs. First, to learn relationships between items, a graph whose distance is measured by Normalised Point-Wise Mutual Information (NPMI) is applied to link items for the co-occurrence pattern. Then, to learn as many useful features as possible for higher recommendation quality, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Transformer model are used to parallelly learn local and global feature interactions. Finally, a series of comprehensive experiments were conducted on several public data sets to show the performance of our model. It provides valuable insights into the capability of our model in recommendation tasks and offers a viable pathway for the public data operation.

Federated learning offers a privacy-preserving solution for personalized recommendation by enabling collaborative model training across multiple clients without sharing sensitive user data. However, existing federated recommendation systems still struggle with three intertwined challenges: capturing multi-dimensional user preferences, modeling complex user–item interactions in distributed settings, and balancing the trade-off between privacy protection and recommendation accuracy. To this end, we propose Attention-based Personalized Federated Recommendation (APFR), a novel framework that integrates attention mechanisms to enhance both personalization and contextual understanding. APFR introduces a personalized score function and user embedding strategy to more precisely represent diverse user preferences, while multi-head attention is employed to capture intricate user–item relationships and contextual dependencies. Furthermore, APFR incorporates differential privacy techniques, such as Laplace and Gaussian noise, to ensure robust privacy protection with minimal accuracy loss. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that APFR achieves superior performance in recommendation accuracy and privacy preservation, compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/lyg2618/APFR.