RESEARCH_ROADMAP.md

# 🔬 Eidolon Cognitive Tutor - Research Lab Roadmap

## Vision: Showcase Cutting-Edge AI/ML Research in Education

Transform the tutor into a **living research demonstration** that visualizes state-of-the-art AI concepts, inspired by recent breakthrough papers (2020-2024).

---

## 🎯 Core Research Themes

### 1. **Explainable AI & Interpretability**
*Show users HOW the AI thinks, not just WHAT it outputs*

#### 🧠 Cognitive Architecture Visualization
**Papers:**
- "Attention is All You Need" (Vaswani et al., 2017)
- "A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits" (Elhage et al., 2021)
- "Interpretability in the Wild" (Anthropic, 2023)

**Implementation:**
```
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  🧠 COGNITIVE PROCESS VIEWER            │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Query: "Explain quantum entanglement"  │
│                                         │
│  [1] Token Attention Heatmap            │
│      ████████░░░░ "quantum" → physics   │
│      ██████████░░ "entangle" → connect  │
│                                         │
│  [2] Knowledge Retrieval                │
│      ↳ Quantum Mechanics (0.94)         │
│      ↳ Bell's Theorem (0.87)            │
│      ↳ EPR Paradox (0.81)               │
│                                         │
│  [3] Reasoning Chain                    │
│      Think: Need simple analogy         │
│      → Retrieve: coin flip metaphor     │
│      → Synthesize: connected particles  │
│      → Verify: scientifically accurate  │
│                                         │
│  [4] Confidence: 89% ±3%                │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

**Features:**
- Real-time attention weight visualization
- Interactive layer-by-layer activation inspection
- Concept activation mapping
- Neuron-level feature visualization

---

### 2. **Meta-Learning & Few-Shot Adaptation**
*Demonstrate how AI learns to learn*

#### 🎓 Adaptive Learning System
**Papers:**
- "Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML)" (Finn et al., 2017)
- "Learning to Learn by Gradient Descent" (Andrychowicz et al., 2016)
- "Meta-Learning with Implicit Gradients" (Rajeswaran et al., 2019)

**Implementation:**
```python
class MetaLearningTutor:
    """
    Adapts teaching strategy based on learner's responses.
    Uses inner loop (student adaptation) and outer loop (strategy refinement).
    """
    
    def adapt(self, student_responses: List[Response]) -> TeachingPolicy:
        # Extract learning patterns
        mastery_curve = self.estimate_mastery(student_responses)
        confusion_points = self.identify_gaps(student_responses)
        
        # Few-shot adaptation: learn from 3-5 interactions
        adapted_policy = self.maml_adapt(
            base_policy=self.teaching_policy,
            support_set=student_responses[-5:],  # Last 5 interactions
            adaptation_steps=3
        )
        
        return adapted_policy
```

**Visualization:**
- Learning curve evolution
- Gradient flow diagrams
- Task similarity clustering
- Adaptation trajectory in embedding space

---

### 3. **Knowledge Graphs & Multi-Hop Reasoning**
*Show structured knowledge retrieval and reasoning*

#### 🕸️ Interactive Knowledge Graph
**Papers:**
- "Graph Neural Networks: A Review" (Zhou et al., 2020)
- "Knowledge Graphs" (Hogan et al., 2021)
- "REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training" (Guu et al., 2020)

**Implementation:**
```
Query: "How does photosynthesis relate to climate change?"

Knowledge Graph Traversal:
  [Photosynthesis] ──produces──→ [Oxygen]
         ↓                            ↓
    absorbs CO2              breathed by animals
         ↓                            ↓
  [Carbon Cycle] ←──affects── [Climate Change]
         ↓
    regulated by
         ↓
   [Deforestation] ──causes──→ [Global Warming]

Multi-Hop Reasoning Path (3 hops):
  1. Photosynthesis absorbs CO2 (confidence: 0.99)
  2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas (confidence: 0.98)
  3. Therefore photosynthesis mitigates climate change (confidence: 0.92)
```

**Features:**
- Interactive graph exploration (zoom, filter, highlight)
- GNN reasoning path visualization
- Confidence propagation through graph
- Counterfactual reasoning ("What if we remove this node?")

---

### 4. **Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)**
*Transparent source attribution and knowledge grounding*

#### 📚 RAG Pipeline Visualization
**Papers:**
- "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP" (Lewis et al., 2020)
- "Dense Passage Retrieval" (Karpukhin et al., 2020)
- "REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models" (Shi et al., 2023)

**Implementation:**
```
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  RAG PIPELINE INSPECTOR                 │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  [1] Query Encoding                     │
│      "Explain transformer architecture" │
│      → Embedding: [0.23, -0.45, ...]    │
│                                         │
│  [2] Semantic Search                    │
│      🔍 Searching 10M+ passages...      │
│      ✓ Top 5 retrieved in 12ms          │
│                                         │
│  [3] Retrieved Context                  │
│      📄 "Attention is All You Need"     │
│         Relevance: 0.94 | Cited: 87k    │
│      📄 "BERT: Pre-training..."         │
│         Relevance: 0.89 | Cited: 52k    │
│      [show more...]                     │
│                                         │
│  [4] Re-ranking (Cross-Encoder)         │
│      Passage 1: 0.94 → 0.97 ⬆           │
│      Passage 2: 0.89 → 0.85 ⬇           │
│                                         │
│  [5] Generation with Attribution        │
│      "Transformers use self-attention   │
│       [1] to process sequences..."      │
│                                         │
│      [1] Vaswani et al. 2017, p.3       │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

**Features:**
- Embedding space visualization (t-SNE/UMAP)
- Semantic similarity scores
- Source credibility indicators
- Hallucination detection

---

### 5. **Uncertainty Quantification & Calibration**
*Show when the AI is confident vs. uncertain*

#### 📊 Confidence Calibration System
**Papers:**
- "On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks" (Guo et al., 2017)
- "Uncertainty in Deep Learning" (Gal, 2016)
- "Conformal Prediction Under Covariate Shift" (Tibshirani et al., 2019)

**Implementation:**
```python
class UncertaintyQuantifier:
    """
    Estimates epistemic (model) and aleatoric (data) uncertainty.
    """
    
    def compute_uncertainty(self, response: str) -> Dict:
        return {
            "epistemic": self.model_uncertainty(),  # What model doesn't know
            "aleatoric": self.data_uncertainty(),   # Inherent ambiguity
            "calibration_score": self.calibration(), # How well-calibrated
            "conformal_set": self.conformal_predict() # Prediction interval
        }
```

**Visualization:**
```
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  UNCERTAINTY DASHBOARD                  │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Overall Confidence: 76% ±8%            │
│                                         │
│  Epistemic (Model) ██████░░░░ 60%      │
│  → Model hasn't seen enough examples    │
│                                         │
│  Aleatoric (Data)  █████████░ 85%      │
│  → Question has inherent ambiguity      │
│                                         │
│  Calibration Plot:                      │
│   1.0 ┤        ╱                        │
│       │      ╱                          │
│       │    ╱ (perfectly calibrated)     │
│   0.0 └──────────────                   │
│                                         │
│  ⚠️  Low confidence detected!           │
│  💡 Suggestion: "Could you clarify...?" │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

---

### 6. **Constitutional AI & Safety**
*Demonstrate alignment and safety mechanisms*

#### 🛡️ Safety-First Design
**Papers:**
- "Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback" (Bai et al., 2022)
- "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback" (Ouyang et al., 2022)
- "Red Teaming Language Models" (Perez et al., 2022)

**Implementation:**
```
User Query: "How do I hack into..."

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  🛡️ SAFETY SYSTEM ACTIVATED             │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  [1] Harmfulness Detection              │
│      ⚠️  Potential harm score: 0.87     │
│      Category: Unauthorized access      │
│                                         │
│  [2] Constitutional Principles          │
│      ✓ Principle 1: Do no harm          │
│      ✓ Principle 2: Respect privacy     │
│      ✓ Principle 3: Follow laws         │
│                                         │
│  [3] Response Correction                │
│      Original: [redacted harmful path]  │
│      Revised: "I can't help with that,  │
│                but I can explain..."    │
│                                         │
│  [4] Educational Redirect               │
│      Suggested: "Cybersecurity ethics"  │
│                 "Penetration testing"   │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

**Features:**
- Real-time safety scoring
- Principle-based reasoning chains
- Adversarial robustness testing
- Red team attack visualization

---

### 7. **Tree-of-Thoughts Reasoning**
*Show deliberate problem-solving strategies*

#### 🌳 Reasoning Tree Visualization
**Papers:**
- "Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving" (Yao et al., 2023)
- "Chain-of-Thought Prompting" (Wei et al., 2022)
- "Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought" (Wang et al., 2022)

**Implementation:**
```
Problem: "How would you explain relativity to a 10-year-old?"

Tree of Thoughts:
                    [Root: Strategy Selection]
                            /    |    \
                           /     |     \
                  [Analogy] [Story] [Demo]
                     /          |         \
             [Train]  [Ball]  [Twin]  [Experiment]
            /    |      |       |         |
       [Fast] [Slow] [Time] [Space]   [Show]
          ↓      ↓      ↓       ↓         ↓
     Eval:0.8  0.9    0.7     0.6       0.5

Selected Path (highest score):
  Strategy: Analogy → Concept: Train → Example: Slow train

Self-Consistency Check:
  ✓ Sampled 5 reasoning paths
  ✓ 4/5 agree on train analogy
  ✓ Confidence: 94%
```

**Features:**
- Interactive tree navigation
- Branch pruning visualization
- Self-evaluation scores at each node
- Comparative reasoning paths

---

### 8. **Cognitive Load Theory**
*Optimize learning based on cognitive science*

#### 🧠 Cognitive Load Estimation
**Papers:**
- "Cognitive Load Theory" (Sweller, 1988)
- "Zone of Proximal Development" (Vygotsky)
- "Measuring Cognitive Load Using Dual-Task Methodology" (Brünken et al., 2003)

**Implementation:**
```python
class CognitiveLoadEstimator:
    """
    Estimates intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load.
    """
    
    def estimate_load(self, response_metrics: Dict) -> CognitiveLoad:
        return CognitiveLoad(
            intrinsic=self.concept_complexity(),  # Topic difficulty
            extraneous=self.presentation_load(),  # UI/format overhead
            germane=self.schema_construction(),   # Productive learning
            
            # Zone of Proximal Development
            zpd_score=self.zpd_alignment(),  # Too easy/hard/just right
            optimal_challenge=self.compute_optimal_difficulty()
        )
```

**Visualization:**
```
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  COGNITIVE LOAD MONITOR                 │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Current Load: 67% (Optimal: 60-80%)    │
│                                         │
│  Intrinsic ████████░░░░ 65%            │
│  (concept complexity)                   │
│                                         │
│  Extraneous ███░░░░░░░░ 25%            │
│  (presentation overhead)                │
│                                         │
│  Germane ████████████ 95%              │
│  (productive learning)                  │
│                                         │
│  📍 Zone of Proximal Development        │
│   Too Easy ←─[You]─────→ Too Hard      │
│                                         │
│  💡 Recommendation: Increase difficulty │
│     from Level 3 → Level 4              │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

---

### 9. **Multimodal Learning**
*Integrate vision, language, code, and more*

#### 🎨 Cross-Modal Reasoning
**Papers:**
- "CLIP: Learning Transferable Visual Models" (Radford et al., 2021)
- "Flamingo: Visual Language Models" (Alayrac et al., 2022)
- "GPT-4 Technical Report" (OpenAI, 2023) - multimodal capabilities

**Implementation:**
```
Query: "Explain binary search with a diagram"

Response:
  [Text] "Binary search repeatedly divides..."
     ↓
  [Code] def binary_search(arr, target): ...
     ↓
  [Diagram] 
     [1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15]
          ↓
        [9,11,13,15]
          ↓
        [9,11]
     ↓
  [Animation] Step-by-step execution
     ↓
  [Interactive] Try your own example!

Cross-Modal Attention:
  Text ←──0.87──→ Code
  Code ←──0.92──→ Diagram
  Diagram ←─0.78─→ Animation
```

**Features:**
- LaTeX equation rendering
- Mermaid diagram generation
- Code execution sandbox
- Interactive visualizations

---

### 10. **Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)**
*Show alignment without reward models*

#### 🎯 Preference Learning Visualization
**Papers:**
- "Direct Preference Optimization" (Rafailov et al., 2023)
- "RLHF: Training language models to follow instructions" (Ouyang et al., 2022)

**Implementation:**
```
User Feedback: 👍 or 👎 on responses

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  PREFERENCE LEARNING DASHBOARD          │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Response A: "Quantum mechanics is..."  │
│  Response B: "Let me explain quantum.." │
│                                         │
│  User Preferred: B (more engaging)      │
│                                         │
│  Policy Update:                         │
│    Engagement ↑ +15%                    │
│    Technical detail ↓ -5%              │
│    Simplicity ↑ +20%                    │
│                                         │
│  Implicit Reward Model:                 │
│    r(B) - r(A) = +2.3                   │
│                                         │
│  Learning Progress:                     │
│    Epoch 0 ████████████████░░ 85%      │
│    Converged after 142 preferences      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

---

## 🏗️ Architecture Overview

```
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    USER INTERFACE                      │
│  ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐              │
│  │ Chat UI  │ │ Viz Panel│ │ Controls │              │
│  └────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘              │
└───────┼────────────┼────────────┼────────────────────┘
        │            │            │
┌───────▼────────────▼────────────▼────────────────────┐
│              COGNITIVE ORCHESTRATOR                   │
│  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────┐  │
│  │  • Query Understanding                          │  │
│  │  • Reasoning Strategy Selection                 │  │
│  │  • Multi-System Coordination                    │  │
│  └────────────────────────────────────────────────┘  │
└──────────┬──────────────┬──────────────┬────────────┘
           │              │              │
    ┌──────▼───┐   ┌──────▼───┐   ┌────▼──────┐
    │   RAG    │   │Knowledge │   │Uncertainty│
    │ Pipeline │   │  Graph   │   │Quantifier │
    └──────────┘   └──────────┘   └───────────┘
           │              │              │
    ┌──────▼──────────────▼──────────────▼───────┐
    │        LLM with Instrumentation             │
    │  • Attention tracking                        │
    │  • Activation logging                        │
    │  • Token probability capture                 │
    └─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

---

## 🎨 UI/UX Design Principles

### Research Lab Aesthetic
- **Dark theme** with syntax highlighting (like Jupyter/VSCode)
- **Monospace fonts** for code and data
- **Live metrics** updating in real-time
- **Interactive plots** (Plotly/D3.js)
- **Collapsible panels** for technical details
- **Export options** (save visualizations, data, configs)

### Information Hierarchy
```
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  [Main Response]  ← Primary focus       │
│   Clear, readable, large                │
│                                         │
│  [Reasoning Visualization]              │
│   ↳ Expandable details                  │
│   ↳ Interactive elements                │
│                                         │
│  [Technical Metrics]                    │
│   ↳ Confidence, uncertainty             │
│   ↳ Performance stats                   │
│                                         │
│  [Research Context]                     │
│   ↳ Paper references                    │
│   ↳ Related concepts                    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

---

## 📊 Data & Metrics to Track

### Learning Analytics
- **Mastery progression** per concept
- **Difficulty calibration** accuracy
- **Engagement metrics** (time, interactions)
- **Confusion signals** (repeated questions, clarifications)

### AI Performance Metrics
- **Inference latency** (p50, p95, p99)
- **Token usage** per query
- **Cache hit rates**
- **Retrieval precision/recall**
- **Calibration error** (Expected Calibration Error)
- **Hallucination rate**

### A/B Testing Framework
- **Reasoning strategies** (ToT vs CoT vs ReAct)
- **Explanation styles** (technical vs analogical)
- **Interaction patterns** (Socratic vs direct)

---

## 🔬 Experimental Features

### 1. **Research Playground**
- **Compare models** side-by-side (GPT-4 vs Claude vs Llama)
- **Ablation studies** (remove RAG, change prompts)
- **Hyperparameter tuning** interface

### 2. **Dataset Explorer**
- Browse training data examples
- Show nearest neighbors in embedding space
- Visualize data distribution

### 3. **Live Fine-Tuning**
- User corrections improve model in real-time
- Show gradient updates
- Track loss curves

---

## 📚 Paper References Dashboard

Every feature should link to relevant papers:

```
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  📄 RESEARCH FOUNDATIONS                │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  This feature implements concepts from: │
│                                         │
│  [1] "Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate      │
│       Problem Solving with Large        │
│       Language Models"                  │
│       Yao et al., 2023                  │
│       [PDF] [Code] [Cite]               │
│                                         │
│  [2] "Self-Consistency Improves Chain   │
│       of Thought Reasoning"             │
│       Wang et al., 2022                 │
│       [PDF] [Code] [Cite]               │
│                                         │
│  📊 Implementation Faithfulness: 87%    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

---

## 🚀 Implementation Priority

### Phase 1: Core Research Infrastructure (Week 1-2)
1. ✅ Attention visualization
2. ✅ RAG pipeline inspector
3. ✅ Uncertainty quantification
4. ✅ Paper reference system

### Phase 2: Advanced Reasoning (Week 3-4)
5. ✅ Tree-of-Thoughts
6. ✅ Knowledge graph
7. ✅ Meta-learning adaptation
8. ✅ Cognitive load estimation

### Phase 3: Safety & Alignment (Week 5)
9. ✅ Constitutional AI
10. ✅ Preference learning (DPO)
11. ✅ Hallucination detection

### Phase 4: Polish & Deploy (Week 6)
12. ✅ Multimodal support
13. ✅ Research playground
14. ✅ Documentation & demos

---

## 🎯 Success Metrics

### For Research Positioning
- ✓ Cite 15+ recent papers (2020-2024)
- ✓ Implement 3+ state-of-the-art techniques
- ✓ Provide interactive visualizations for each
- ✓ Show rigorous evaluation metrics

### For User Engagement
- ✓ 10+ interactive research features
- ✓ Export-quality visualizations
- ✓ Developer-friendly API
- ✓ Reproducible experiments

---

## 💡 Unique Value Proposition

**"The only AI tutor that shows its work at the research level"**

- See actual attention patterns (not just outputs)
- Understand retrieval and reasoning (not black box)
- Track learning with cognitive science (not just analytics)
- Reference cutting-edge papers (academic credibility)
- Experiment with AI techniques (interactive research)

This positions you as a **research lab** that:
1. Understands the latest AI/ML advances
2. Implements them rigorously
3. Makes them accessible and educational
4. Contributes to interpretability research

---

**Next Steps:** Pick 2-3 features from Phase 1 to prototype first?