Anticipating the Consequences of Curriculum Decisions with Large Language Models

Octavio Pappalardo, Nathan Herr, Tim Rocktäschel

Automatic curriculum learning can improve the effectiveness of reinforcement learning by selecting the training experiences presented to the agent over time. Predicting the consequences of such decisions can, however, be difficult. We analyze automatic curriculum learning as a sequential decision-making problem, highlighting a gap between the quantities that determine the value of curriculum decisions and the information captured by local learning signals commonly used to guide them. We then investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can exploit richer information about the learning problem to better anticipate the consequences of curriculum decisions. We introduce a method that combines online learning-progress estimates with LLM-informed estimates of (i) the potential downstream benefits of learning on each task and (ii) whether direct training on a task is currently likely to produce progress. We evaluate the approach on a custom benchmark of 256 textual goals in Craftax under different curriculum objectives. We observe the strongest gains when optimizing for individual target tasks. When optimizing across the full task set, the benefits vary across learners with…