arXiv Machine Learning By Nived Rajaraman, Audrey Huang, Miro Dudik, Robert Schapire, Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy

Learning to Reason with Curriculum I: Provable Benefits of Autocurriculum

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The paper investigates whether the high costs of training chain-of-thought reasoning models can be reduced through algorithmic design. It introduces an autocurriculum approach that lets the model select which problems to focus on during training, showing that this method provably improves both supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning. For supervised fine‑tuning, autocurriculum requires exponentially fewer reasoning demonstrations by targeting prompts where the model struggles, while for reinforcement learning it decouples computational cost from the quality of the reference model, making the burn‑in cost nearly independent of target accuracy.

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