Curriculum Learning as Transport: Understanding Curricula with Wasserstein Geodesics
Researchers model curriculum learning as Wasserstein transport over difficulty distributions, finding curriculum benefits are strongly task- and budget-dependent with no dominant strategy.
The framework represents curricula as trajectories of training distributions over discrete difficulty levels, decoupling ordering, matched exposure, endpoint smoothness, and pacing. Across a calibrated suite of 12 tasks and 33 difficulty axes under fixed training budgets, no single strategy dominates, though easy-to-hard ordering improves hard-level performance relative to exposure-matched static sampling. Endpoint smoothness and pacing substantially affect where along the difficulty spectrum a curriculum is effective, and the transport view supports extensions to learned pacing and structured difficulty spaces.