In plain words: A teacher picks the learner's next tasks by how quickly it fully masters them, rather than by how fast its scores are climbing. This mastering-rate rule learns more efficiently and clearly beats the learning-progress approach.
Abstract · Mastering Rate based Curriculum Learning
Recent automatic curriculum learning algorithms, and in particular Teacher-Student algorithms, rely on the notion of learning progress, making the assumption that the good next tasks are the ones on which the learner is making the fastest progress or digress. In this work, we first propose a simpler and improved version of these algorithms. We then argue that the notion of learning progress itself has several shortcomings that lead to a low sample efficiency for the learner. We finally propose a new algorithm, based on the notion of mastering rate, that significantly outperforms learning progress-based algorithms.
Lucas Willems, Salem Lahlou, Yoshua Bengio
arXiv:2008.06456 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Aug 14, 2020
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