Goto

Collaborating Authors

 curriculum design



Improving Environment Novelty Quantification for Effective Unsupervised Environment Design

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) formalizes the problem of autocurricula through interactive training between a teacher agent and a student agent. The teacher generates new training environments with high learning potential, curating an adaptive curriculum that strengthens the student's ability to handle unseen scenarios. Existing UED methods mainly rely on, a metric that measures the difference between the agent's optimal and actual performance, to guide curriculum design. Regret-driven methods generate curricula that progressively increase environment complexity for the student but overlook environment -- a critical element for enhancing an agent's generalizability. Measuring environment novelty is especially challenging due to the underspecified nature of environment parameters in UED, and existing approaches face significant limitations. To address this, this paper introduces the (CENIE) framework. CENIE proposes a scalable, domain-agnostic, and curriculum-aware approach to quantifying environment novelty by leveraging the student's state-action space coverage from previous curriculum experiences. We then propose an implementation of CENIE that models this coverage and measures environment novelty using Gaussian Mixture Models.


Curriculum Design for Teaching via Demonstrations: Theory and Applications

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of teaching via demonstrations in sequential decision-making settings. In particular, we study how to design a personalized curriculum over demonstrations to speed up the learner's convergence. We provide a unified curriculum strategy for two popular learner models: Maximum Causal Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt-IRL) and Cross-Entropy Behavioral Cloning (CrossEnt-BC). Our unified strategy induces a ranking over demonstrations based on a notion of difficulty scores computed w.r.t. the teacher's optimal policy and the learner's current policy. Compared to the state of the art, our strategy doesn't require access to the learner's internal dynamics and still enjoys similar convergence guarantees under mild technical conditions. Furthermore, we adapt our curriculum strategy to the setting where no teacher agent is present using task-specific difficulty scores. Experiments on a synthetic car driving environment and navigation-based environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our curriculum strategy.


DRIVE: Data Curation Best Practices for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward in Competitive Code Generation

Zhu, Speed, Cai, Jianwei, Chen, Guang, Wu, Lulu, Yang, Saiyong, Zhou, Wiggin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent reasoning-first models (e.g., OpenAI o1, DeepSeek R1) have spurred a resurgence of interest in RLVR. Nevertheless, advances are dominated by mathematics (e.g., AIME), with competitive-programming code generation underexplored and data curation receiving less attention than RL algorithm design. We investigate how to construct RLVR datasets (i.e., RL prompts) and present practical training techniques that yield strong performance on competitive-programming code generation. Our pipeline begins with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) distilled from strong open-source models, augmented with general-purpose and reasoning-intensive data. RL then follows a two-stage process with executable, testcase-driven rewards: first, training on a large, uniformly distributed set of competitive-programming problems using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with 8 rollouts per prompt and a relatively short response-generation window (e.g., 32k during SFT and 24k in this stage) to expand entropy and mitigate repetition and truncation; second, we perform \textbf{Pre-GRPO}: updating on a small, high-quality set of challenging problems with a large rollout budget (64 rollouts per prompt) under a hard-focus curriculum that continuously retains the most difficult instances throughout training. We implement our method on Qwen2.5-32B and evaluate on LeetCode and Codeforces weekly contests to avoid data leakage. The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of similar scale and is comparable to leading systems such as DeepSeek v3.1 and Doubao-1.5-Thinking. We also examine scaling trends and observe strong RL scaling on an internal large-scale MoE model. Our study distills concise best practices for data curation, entropy expansion, and curriculum design in RLVR for competitive-programming code generation.


Scale-Aware Curriculum Learning for Ddata-Efficient Lung Nodule Detection with YOLOv11

Luo, Yi, Guo, Yike, Hooshangnejad, Hamed, Ding, Kai

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Lung nodule detection in chest CT is crucial for early lung cancer diagnosis, yet existing deep learning approaches face challenges when deployed in clinical settings with limited annotated data. While curriculum learning has shown promise in improving model training, traditional static curriculum strategies fail in data-scarce scenarios. We propose Scale Adaptive Curriculum Learning (SACL), a novel training strategy that dynamically adjusts curriculum design based on available data scale. SACL introduces three key mechanisms:(1) adaptive epoch scheduling, (2) hard sample injection, and (3) scale-aware optimization. We evaluate SACL on the LUNA25 dataset using YOLOv11 as the base detector. Experimental results demonstrate that while SACL achieves comparable performance to static curriculum learning on the full dataset in mAP50, it shows significant advantages under data-limited conditions with 4.6%, 3.5%, and 2.0% improvements over baseline at 10%, 20%, and 50% of training data respectively. By enabling robust training across varying data scales without architectural modifications, SACL provides a practical solution for healthcare institutions to develop effective lung nodule detection systems despite limited annotation resources.


Curriculum Design for Teaching via Demonstrations: Theory and Applications

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of teaching via demonstrations in sequential decision-making settings. In particular, we study how to design a personalized curriculum over demonstrations to speed up the learner's convergence. We provide a unified curriculum strategy for two popular learner models: Maximum Causal Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt-IRL) and Cross-Entropy Behavioral Cloning (CrossEnt-BC). Our unified strategy induces a ranking over demonstrations based on a notion of difficulty scores computed w.r.t. the teacher's optimal policy and the learner's current policy. Compared to the state of the art, our strategy doesn't require access to the learner's internal dynamics and still enjoys similar convergence guarantees under mild technical conditions. Furthermore, we adapt our curriculum strategy to the setting where no teacher agent is present using task-specific difficulty scores. Experiments on a synthetic car driving environment and navigation-based environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our curriculum strategy.


Adaptive Learning Systems: Personalized Curriculum Design Using LLM-Powered Analytics

Li, Yongjie, Nong, Ruilin, Liu, Jianan, Evans, Lucas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the field of education by enabling personalized learning experiences tailored to individual student needs. For example, the curriculum reinforcement learning approach tailored for quantum architecture search effectively enhances computational efficiency in noisy environments by leveraging an optimized simulator [16]. The expectations and attitudes of students and teachers towards learning analytics are pivotal for effective implementation in higher education, as highlighted by recent assessments [22]. The framework's efficacy was confirmed through thorough Consequently, the personalized curriculum dynamically evolves to reflect each learner's progress, ensuring optimal The system continuously evaluates the learner's engagement Let us denote the student's performance metrics as We focus on leveraging the embeddings generated by the LLMs to classify learning materials and identify optimal pathways for students. Additionally, we assess model performance using metrics such as Learner Engagement Scores (LES) and Knowledge Retention Rates (KRR) across the implemented curriculum.


Distinct Computations Emerge From Compositional Curricula in In-Context Learning

Lee, Jin Hwa, Lampinen, Andrew K., Singh, Aaditya K., Saxe, Andrew M.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In-context learning (ICL) research often considers learning a function in-context through a uniform sample of input-output pairs. Here, we investigate how presenting a compositional subtask curriculum in context may alter the computations a transformer learns. We design a compositional algorithmic task based on the modular exponential-a double exponential task composed of two single exponential subtasks and train transformer models to learn the task in-context. We compare (a) models trained using an in-context curriculum consisting of single exponential subtasks and, (b) models trained directly on the double exponential task without such a curriculum. We show that models trained with a subtask curriculum can perform zero-shot inference on unseen compositional tasks and are more robust given the same context length. We study how the task and subtasks are represented across the two training regimes. We find that the models employ diverse strategies modulated by the specific curriculum design.


Improving Environment Novelty Quantification for Effective Unsupervised Environment Design

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) formalizes the problem of autocurricula through interactive training between a teacher agent and a student agent. The teacher generates new training environments with high learning potential, curating an adaptive curriculum that strengthens the student's ability to handle unseen scenarios. Existing UED methods mainly rely on regret, a metric that measures the difference between the agent's optimal and actual performance, to guide curriculum design. Regret-driven methods generate curricula that progressively increase environment complexity for the student but overlook environment novelty -- a critical element for enhancing an agent's generalizability. Measuring environment novelty is especially challenging due to the underspecified nature of environment parameters in UED, and existing approaches face significant limitations.


Curriculum-RLAIF: Curriculum Alignment with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback

Li, Mengdi, Lin, Jiaye, Zhao, Xufeng, Lu, Wenhao, Zhao, Peilin, Wermter, Stefan, Wang, Di

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reward models trained with conventional Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) methods suffer from limited generalizability, which hinders the alignment performance of the policy model during reinforcement learning (RL). This challenge stems from various issues, including distribution shift, preference label noise, and mismatches between overly challenging samples and model capacity. In this paper, we attempt to enhance the generalizability of reward models through a data-centric approach, driven by the insight that these issues are inherently intertwined from the perspective of data difficulty. To address this, we propose a novel framework, $\textit{Curriculum-RLAIF}$, which constructs preference pairs with varying difficulty levels and produces a curriculum that progressively incorporates preference pairs of increasing difficulty for reward model training. Our experimental results suggest that reward models trained with Curriculum-RLAIF achieve improved generalizability, significantly increasing the alignment performance of the policy model by a large margin without incurring additional inference costs compared to various non-curriculum baselines. Detailed analysis and comparisons with alternative approaches, including data selection via external pretrained reward models or internal self-selection mechanisms, as well as other curriculum strategies, further demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness.