  Across machine learning, the use of curricula has shown strong empirical
potential to improve learning from data by avoiding local optima of training
objectives. For reinforcement learning (RL), curricula are especially
interesting, as the underlying optimization has a strong tendency to get stuck
in local optima due to the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Recently, a
number of approaches for an automatic generation of curricula for RL have been
shown to increase performance while requiring less expert knowledge compared to
manually designed curricula. However, these approaches are seldomly
investigated from a theoretical perspective, preventing a deeper understanding
of their mechanics. In this paper, we present an approach for automated
curriculum generation in RL with a clear theoretical underpinning. More
precisely, we formalize the well-known self-paced learning paradigm as inducing
a distribution over training tasks, which trades off between task complexity
and the objective to match a desired task distribution. Experiments show that
training on this induced distribution helps to avoid poor local optima across
RL algorithms in different tasks with uninformative rewards and challenging
exploration requirements.
