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arXiv · 2511.22944

Bandit Guided Submodular Curriculum for Adaptive Subset Selection

Prateek Chanda·Prayas Agrawal·Saral Sureka·Lokesh Reddy Polu·Atharv Kshirsagar·Ganesh Ramakrishnan
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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.

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Prateek Chanda, Prayas Agrawal, Saral Sureka, Lokesh Reddy Polu, Atharv Kshirsagar, Ganesh Ramakrishnan. 2025-11-28. Bandit Guided Submodular Curriculum for Adaptive Subset Selection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22944

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