Bandit Guided Submodular Curriculum for Adaptive Subset Selection
Abstract
Traditional curriculum learning proceeds from easy to hard samples, yet defining a reliable notion of difficulty remains elusive. Prior work has used submodular functions to induce difficulty scores in curriculum learning. We reinterpret adaptive subset selection and formulate it as a multi-armed bandit problem, where each arm corresponds to a submodular function guiding sample selection. We introduce ONLINESUBMOD, a novel online greedy policy that optimizes a utility-driven reward and provably achieves no-regret performance under various sampling regimes. Empirically, ONLINESUBMOD outperforms both traditional curriculum learning and bi-level optimization approaches across vision and language datasets, showing superior accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs. More broadly, we show that validationdriven reward metrics offer a principled way to guide the curriculum schedule.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.22944,
title = {Bandit Guided Submodular Curriculum for Adaptive Subset Selection},
author = {Prateek Chanda and Prayas Agrawal and Saral Sureka and Lokesh Reddy Polu and Atharv Kshirsagar and Ganesh Ramakrishnan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.22944},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
10 pages main, 21 pages Appendix, 8 figures