YRI Fellowship | Fatigue-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Personalized Learning

A 9th-grade YRI Fellow presents her research on a fatigue-aware reinforcement learning framework for personalized curriculum optimization, accepted at IEEE IIPEM 2026. She built an RL agent that adapts difficulty, pacing and breaks to simulated neurodivergent learner profiles, tracking cognitive fatigue, sensory overload and attention. The RL framework reached 86.6% adaptation accuracy, 24.5 points above a linear baseline and 26.7 above a heuristic one, and an ablation showed accuracy fell to 75% without the fatigue variable. The YRI Fellowship pairs high school students 1:1 with a PhD mentor to take an original research question to a finished paper in 10 weeks. 87% of Fellows publish. Apply: https://yriscience.com #HighSchoolResearch #IEEE #ReinforcementLearning #EdTech #YRIFellowship