Difficulty-Aware Learning Curve Extrapolation

Learning Curve Extrapolation (LCE) is a critical technique for accelerating automated machine learning by terminating unpromising training runs early. Recent state-of-the-art methods have improved predictive accuracy by incorporating contextual information, such as neural network architecture. However, these approaches, whether context-agnostic or architecture-aware, still operate under the implicit assumption of a uniform task landscape. They overlook a pivotal, complementary factor: the intrinsic difficulty of the learning task itself. This oversight leads to a significant degradation in performance, especially for tasks whose learning dynamics diverge from the model's priors. In this work, we argue that task difficulty is a crucial yet neglected dimension for robust LCE. We introduce a novel framework, Difficulty-Adaptive Learning Curve Extrapolation (DA-LCE), which explicitly conditions its predictions on task complexity. Our core contributions are threefold: (1) We propose a transparent, {rule-based method} to quantify task difficulty from the early shape of learning curves, eliminating the need for external meta-features. (2) We design a novel data generation pipeline using a {conditional diffusion model} to create a high-fidelity, difficulty-conditioned synthetic prior for training. (3) We introduce a {Conditional Difficulty-aware PFN (CD-PFN)} that leverages this information to achieve superior predictive accuracy. Extensive experiments on a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that our CD-PFN significantly outperforms both difficulty-agnostic baselines and even state-of-the-art architecture-aware models. This result highlights that task difficulty is a powerful, complementary source of information, whose impact can be as significant as, or even greater than, that of the model architecture.