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Alexander Meulemans

10 accepted papers

2026

MesaNet: Sequence Modeling by Locally Optimal Test-Time Training

ICLR 2026poster

Sequence modeling is currently dominated by causal transformer architectures that use softmax self-attention. Although widely adopted, transformers require scaling memory and compute linearly during inference. A recent stream of work linearized the softmax operation, resulting in powerful recurrent…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Multi-agent cooperation through learning-aware policy gradients

ICLR 2025poster

Self-interested individuals often fail to cooperate, posing a fundamental challenge for multi-agent learning. How can we achieve cooperation among self-interested, independent learning agents? Promising recent work has shown that in certain tasks cooperation can be established between ``learning-awa…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning to Extract Structured Entities Using Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Recent advances in machine learning have significantly impacted the field of information extraction, with Language Models (LMs) playing a pivotal role in extracting structured information from unstructured text. Prior works typically represent information extraction as triplet-centric and use classi…

2023

Would I have gotten that reward? Long-term credit assignment by counterfactual contribution analysis

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

To make reinforcement learning more sample efficient, we need better credit assignment methods that measure an action’s influence on future rewards. Building upon Hindsight Credit Assignment (HCA), we introduce Counterfactual Contribution Analysis (COCOA), a new family of model-based credit assignme…

2022

Minimizing Control for Credit Assignment with Strong Feedback

ICML 2022spotlight

The success of deep learning ignited interest in whether the brain learns hierarchical representations using gradient-based learning. However, current biologically plausible methods for gradient-based credit assignment in deep neural networks need infinitesimally small feedback signals, which is pro…

2022

The least-control principle for local learning at equilibrium

NeurIPS 2022accept

Equilibrium systems are a powerful way to express neural computations. As special cases, they include models of great current interest in both neuroscience and machine learning, such as deep neural networks, equilibrium recurrent neural networks, deep equilibrium models, or meta-learning. Here, we p…

2021

Continual learning in recurrent neural networks

ICLR 2021poster

While a diverse collection of continual learning (CL) methods has been proposed to prevent catastrophic forgetting, a thorough investigation of their effectiveness for processing sequential data with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is lacking. Here, we provide the first comprehensive evaluation of…

2021

Credit Assignment in Neural Networks through Deep Feedback Control

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

The success of deep learning sparked interest in whether the brain learns by using similar techniques for assigning credit to each synaptic weight for its contribution to the network output. However, the majority of current attempts at biologically-plausible learning methods are either non-local in…

2021

Neural networks with late-phase weights

ICLR 2021poster

The largely successful method of training neural networks is to learn their weights using some variant of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Here, we show that the solutions found by SGD can be further improved by ensembling a subset of the weights in late stages of learning. At the end of learning,…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Theoretical Framework for Target Propagation

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

The success of deep learning, a brain-inspired form of AI, has sparked interest in understanding how the brain could similarly learn across multiple layers of neurons. However, the majority of biologically-plausible learning algorithms have not yet reached the performance of backpropagation (BP), no…