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Michael Mozer

8 accepted papers

2026

Decoupling The "What" and "Where" With Polar Coordinate Positional Embedding

ICML 2026spotlight

The attention mechanism in a Transformer architecture matches key to query based on both content—the what—and position in a sequence—the where. We present an analysis indicating that what and where are entangled in the popular rotary position embedding (RoPE). This entanglement can impair performanc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Adaptive Discrete Communication Bottlenecks with Dynamic Vector Quantization for Heterogeneous Representational Coarseness

AAAI 2023technical

Vector Quantization (VQ) is a method for discretizing latent representations and has become a major part of the deep learning toolkit. It has been theoretically and empirically shown that discretization of representations leads to improved generalization, including in reinforcement learning where di…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2021

Neural Function Modules with Sparse Arguments: A Dynamic Approach to Integrating Information across Layers

AISTATS 2021poster

Feed-forward neural networks consist of a sequence of layers, in which each layer performs some processing on the information from the previous layer. A downside to this approach is that each layer (or module, as multiple modules can operate in parallel) is tasked with processing the entire hidden s…

2020

Learning to Combine Top-Down and Bottom-Up Signals in Recurrent Neural Networks with Attention over Modules

ICML 2020poster

Robust perception relies on both bottom-up and top-down signals. Bottom-up signals consist of what’s directly observed through sensation. Top-down signals consist of beliefs and expectations based on past experience and the current reportable short-term memory, such as how the phrase ‘peanut butter…

2019

State-Reification Networks: Improving Generalization by Modeling the Distribution of Hidden Representations

ICML 2019oral

Machine learning promises methods that generalize well from finite labeled data. However, the brittleness of existing neural net approaches is revealed by notable failures, such as the existence of adversarial examples that are misclassified despite being nearly identical to a training example, or t…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2018

Adapted Deep Embeddings: A Synthesis of Methods for k-Shot Inductive Transfer Learning

NeurIPS 2018spotlight

The focus in machine learning has branched beyond training classifiers on a single task to investigating how previously acquired knowledge in a source domain can be leveraged to facilitate learning in a related target domain, known as inductive transfer learning. Three active lines of research have…

2018

Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Temporal Credit Assignment Through Reminding

NeurIPS 2018spotlight

Learning long-term dependencies in extended temporal sequences requires credit assignment to events far back in the past. The most common method for training recurrent neural networks, back-propagation through time (BPTT), requires credit information to be propagated backwards through every single s…

Cited by 113SourcePDFScholar