arXiv:2608.17268cs.LGcs.AI2026-08

通过跨难度迁移分析,揭示课程学习有效性的本质原因。

Understanding Curriculum Learning in Large Language Models via Cross-Difficulty Optimization Dynamics

论文配图:Understanding Curriculum Learning in Large Language Models via Cross-Difficulty Optimization Dynamics
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 提出相对迁移度量,量化不同难度间的知识传递关系。
  • 设计动态采样方法TDCS,显著提升多任务、多规模模型性能。
  • 为课程学习提供统一优化解释,适合研究训练策略的学者。

课程学习在大语言模型后训练中广泛应用,通过从简单到复杂的顺序组织数据。然而其效果在不同推理任务间差异显著,表明不存在普适最优课程。本文通过分析不同课程调度引发的优化动态,发现不同难度间的迁移关系决定了课程学习的有效性,并将该关系形式化为相对迁移度量。基于此,提出转移感知的动态课程采样(TDCS),在训练过程中根据估计的迁移关系动态调整采样分布。大量实验在多个推理基准上证明,TDCS在不同任务、模型规模和训练范式下均优于主流调度策略。更重要的是,本工作从跨难度迁移的优化视角,提供了课程学习的统一解释。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Curriculum learning has been widely adopted in the post-training of large language models by organizing training data from easy to hard. However, its effectiveness varies substantially across reasoning tasks, suggesting that no single curriculum is universally optimal and raising a fundamental question: what determines when curriculum learning works? In this paper, we answer this question by analyzing the optimization dynamics induced by different curriculum schedules. We show that the transfer relationship between different difficulty levels characterizes the optimization dynamics induced by curriculum learning, which in turn explains the effectiveness of different curriculum schedules, and formalize this relationship as Relative Transfer, a principled measure of cross-difficulty knowledge transfer. Based on this measurement, we derive Transfer-aware Dynamic Curriculum Sampling (TDCS), which dynamically adjusts the sampling distribution according to the estimated transfer relationship throughout training. Extensive experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that TDCS consistently outperforms representative scheduling strategies across different tasks, model scales, and training paradigms. More importantly, our work provides a unified optimization-based explanation of curriculum learning through cross-difficulty transfer.

课程学习优化动态迁移分析

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