Learning What Matters: Prioritized Concept Learning via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection

Abstract

Instruction tuning has been central to the success of recent vision-language models (VLMs), but it remains expensive-requiring large-scale datasets, high-quality annotations, and large compute budgets. We propose PRioritized cOncept learninG via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection (PROGRESS), a data- and compute-efficient framework that enables VLMs to dynamically select what to learn next based on their evolving needs during training. At each stage, the model tracks its learning progress across skills and selects the most informative samples-those it has not already mastered and that are not too difficult to learn at the current stage of training. This strategy effectively controls skill acquisition and the order in which skills are learned. Specifically, we sample from skills showing the highest learning progress, prioritizing those with the most rapid improvement. Unlike prior methods, PROGRESS requires no upfront answer annotations, queries answers only on a need basis, avoids reliance on additional supervision from auxiliary VLMs, and does not require compute-heavy gradient computations for data selection. Experiments across multiple instruction-tuning datasets of varying scales demonstrate that PROGRESS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with much less data and supervision. Additionally, we show strong cross-architecture generalization and transferability to larger models, validating PROGRESS as a scalable solution for efficient learning.