Tootfinder

Beyond Shallow Heuristics: Leveraging Human Intuition for Curriculum Learning
Vanessa Toborek, Sebastian M\"uller, Tim Selbach, Tam\'as Horv\'ath, Christian Bauckhage
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19873

Beyond Shallow Heuristics: Leveraging Human Intuition for Curriculum Learning
Curriculum learning (CL) aims to improve training by presenting data from "easy" to "hard", yet defining and measuring linguistic difficulty remains an open challenge. We investigate whether human-curated simple language can serve as an effective signal for CL. Using the article-level labels from the Simple Wikipedia corpus, we compare label-based curricula to competence-based strategies relying on shallow heuristics. Our experiments with a BERT-tiny model show that adding simple data alone yie…