Predictive Bandit Curriculum Reinforcement Learning via Gradient-Based Sample Group Discovery

Liang Xu, Shufan Shen, Zhongni Hou, Chao Bi, Yufei Zhang +3

Curriculum learning, which organizes training samples according to their learning priority, has been widely adopted in reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency. However, existing methods commonly construct curriculum units using predefined data properties and estimate their utility by simply aggregating a single proxy signal from recent training history.Such designs may group samples with different optimization effects and fail to anticipate how their utility evolves in relation to the policy. We propose Predictive Gradient-based Bandit (PGB) Curriculum, which first discovers optimization-aware learning units by clustering projected sample-level gradients. PGB then employs a lightweight temporal predictor to forecast the future utility of each unit and converts the predictions into a Boltzmann sampling distribution for adaptive data allocation. Experiments across multiple model scales and reasoning benchmarks show that PGB consistently outperforms standard GRPO, difficulty-based curricula, and history-based scheduling strategies, demonstrating improved data utilization and training efficiency.