Prayas Agrawal

2papers

2 Papers

65.0LGApr 13Code
UniPROT: Uniform Prototype Selection via Partial Optimal Transport with Submodular Guarantees

Prateek Chanda, Prayas Agrawal, Karthik S. Gurumoorthy et al.

Selecting prototypical examples from a source distribution to represent a target data distribution is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Existing subset selection methods often rely on implicit importance scores, which can be skewed towards majority classes and lead to low-quality prototypes for minority classes. We present $\methodprop$, a novel subset selection framework that minimizes the optimal transport (OT) distance between a uniformly weighted prototypical distribution and the target distribution. While intuitive, this formulation leads to a cardinality-constrained maximization of a \emph{super-additive} objective, which is generally intractable to approximate efficiently. To address this, we propose a principled reformulation of the OT marginal constraints, yielding a partial optimal transport-based submodular objective. We prove that this reformulation enables a greedy algorithm with a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee relative to the original super-additive maximization problem. Empirically, we showcase that enforcing uniform prototype weights in UniPROT consistently improves minority-class representation in imbalanced classification benchmarks without compromising majority-class accuracy. In both finetuning and pretraining regimes for large language models under domain imbalance, UniPROT enforces uniform source contributions, yielding robust performance gains. Our results establish UniPROT as a scalable, theoretically grounded solution for uniform-weighted prototype selection. Our code is publicly available at GitHub\footnote{Code: https://github.com/efficiency-learning/UniPROT}

LGNov 28, 2025
Bandit Guided Submodular Curriculum for Adaptive Subset Selection

Prateek Chanda, Prayas Agrawal, Saral Sureka et al.

Traditional curriculum learning proceeds from easy to hard samples, yet defining a reliable notion of difficulty remains elusive. Prior work has used submodular functions to induce difficulty scores in curriculum learning. We reinterpret adaptive subset selection and formulate it as a multi-armed bandit problem, where each arm corresponds to a submodular function guiding sample selection. We introduce ONLINESUBMOD, a novel online greedy policy that optimizes a utility-driven reward and provably achieves no-regret performance under various sampling regimes. Empirically, ONLINESUBMOD outperforms both traditional curriculum learning and bi-level optimization approaches across vision and language datasets, showing superior accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs. More broadly, we show that validationdriven reward metrics offer a principled way to guide the curriculum schedule.