Adaptive Curriculum Learning

Yajing Kong, Liu Liu, Jun Wang, Dacheng Tao

Abstract: Inspired by the human learning principle that learning easier concepts first and then gradually paying more attention to harder ones, curriculum learning uses the nonuniform sampling of mini-batches according to the order of examples’ difficulty. Just as a teacher adjusts the curriculum according to the learning progress of each student, a proper curriculum should be adapted to the current state of the model. Therefore, in contrast to recent works using a fixed curriculum, we devise a new curriculum learning method, Adaptive Curriculum Learning (Adaptive CL), adapting the difficulty of examples to the current state of the model. Specifically, we make use of the loss of the current model to adjust the difficulty score while retaining previous useful learned knowledge by KL divergence. Moreover, under a non-linear model and binary classification, we theoretically prove that the expected convergence rate of curriculum learning monotonically decreases with respect to the loss of a point regarding the optimal hypothesis, and monotonically increases with respect to the loss of a point regarding the current hypothesis. The analyses indicate that Adaptive CL could improve the convergence properties during the early stages of learning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over existing competitive curriculum learning methods.