HuCurl: Human-induced Curriculum Discovery

Mohamed Elgaar, Hadi Amiri

Main: Machine Learning for NLP Main-poster Paper

Poster Session 1: Machine Learning for NLP (Poster)
Conference Room: Frontenac Ballroom and Queen's Quay
Conference Time: July 10, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Poster Session 1 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: optimization methods, meta learning
TLDR: We introduce the problem of curriculum discovery and describe a curriculum learning framework capable of discovering effective curricula in a curriculum space based on prior knowledge about sample difficulty. Using annotation entropy and loss as measures of difficulty, we show that (i): the top-perf...
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Abstract: We introduce the problem of curriculum discovery and describe a curriculum learning framework capable of discovering effective curricula in a curriculum space based on prior knowledge about sample difficulty. Using annotation entropy and loss as measures of difficulty, we show that (i): the top-performing discovered curricula for a given model and dataset are often non-monotonic as apposed to monotonic curricula in existing literature, (ii): the prevailing easy-to-hard or hard-to-easy transition curricula are often at the risk of underperforming, and (iii): the curricula discovered for smaller datasets and models perform well on larger datasets and models respectively. The proposed framework encompasses some of the existing curriculum learning approaches and can discover curricula that outperform them across several NLP tasks.