70 accepted papers
While transformer-based language models have driven the AI revolution thus far, their computational complexity has spurred growing interest in viable alternatives, such as structured state space sequence models (SSMs) and Selective SSMs. Among these, Mamba (S6) and its variant Mamba-2 have shown rem…
The success of LLMs has sparked interest in various agentic applications. A key hypothesis is that LLMs, leveraging common sense and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, can effectively explore and efficiently solve complex domains. However, LLM agents have been found to suffer from sub-optimal explor…
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…
In recent years, there has been a trend in the field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) towards large action models trained offline on large-scale datasets via sequence modeling. Existing models are primarily based on the Transformer architecture, which results in powerful agents. However, due to slow i…
Transformers can under some circumstances generalize to novel problem instances whose constituent parts might have been encountered during training, but whose compositions have not. What mechanisms underlie this ability for compositional generalization? By reformulating multi-head attention as a hyp…
One proposed mechanism to improve exploration in reinforcement learning is the use of macro-actions, a form of temporal abstractions over actions. Paradoxically though, in many scenarios the naive addition of macro-actions does not lead to better exploration, but rather the opposite. In this work,…
Agents are minimally entities that are influenced by their past observations and act to influence future observations. This latter capacity is captured by empowerment, which has served as a vital framing concept across artificial intelligence and cognitive science. This former capacity, however, is…
Transformers have become the cornerstone of modern large-scale language models, but their reliance on softmax attention poses a computational bottleneck at both training and inference. Recurrent models offer high efficiency, but compressing the full sequence into a fixed-size and holistic representa…
Positional Encodings (PEs) are a critical component of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs), providing the attention mechanism with important sequence-position information. One of the most popular types of encoding used today in LLMs are Rotary Positional Encodings (RoPE), that rotate the…
A key property of reasoning systems is the ability to make sharp decisions on their input data. For contemporary AI systems, a key carrier of sharp behaviour is the softmax function, with its capability to perform differentiable query-key lookups. It is a common belief that the predictive power of n…
State-of-the-art results in large language models (LLMs) often rely on scale, which becomes computationally expensive. This has sparked a research agenda to reduce these models’ parameter counts and computational costs without significantly impacting their performance. Our study focuses on transform…
Many complex tasks can be decomposed into simpler, independent parts. Discovering such underlying compositional structure has the potential to enable compositional generalization. Despite progress, our most powerful systems struggle to compose flexibly. It therefore seems natural to make models more…
Fine-tuning is a widespread technique that allows practitioners to transfer pre-trained capabilities, as recently showcased by the successful applications of foundation models. However, fine-tuning reinforcement learning (RL) models remains a challenge. This work conceptualizes one specific cause of…
We introduce SPARse fine-grained Contrastive alignment (SPARC), a simple method for pretraining more fine-grained multimodal representations from image-text pairs. Given that multiple image patches often correspond to single words, we propose to learn a grouping of image patches for every token in t…
In Online Continual Learning (OCL) a learning system receives a stream of data and sequentially performs prediction and training steps. Key challenges in OCL include automatic adaptation to the specific non-stationary structure of the data and maintaining appropriate predictive uncertainty. To add…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is inherently rife with non-stationarity since the states and rewards the agent observes during training depend on its changing policy. Therefore, networks in deep RL must be capable of adapting to new observations and fitting new targets. However, previous works have obs…
Neural networks are most often trained under the assumption that data come from a stationary distribution. However, settings in which this assumption is violated are of increasing importance; examples include supervised learning with distributional shifts, reinforcement learning, continual learning…
Normalization layers have recently experienced a renaissance in the deep reinforcement learning and continual learning literature, with several works highlighting diverse benefits such as improving loss landscape conditioning and combatting overestimation bias. However, normalization brings with it…
We study how information propagates in decoder-only Transformers, which are the architectural foundation of most existing frontier large language models (LLMs). We rely on a theoretical signal propagation analysis---specifically, we analyse the representations of the last token in the final layer of…
Deep neural networks based on linear RNNs interleaved with position-wise MLPs are gaining traction as competitive approaches for sequence modeling. Examples of such architectures include state-space models (SSMs) like S4, LRU, and Mamba: recently proposed models that achieve promising performance on…
A growing body of evidence suggests that neural networks employed in deep reinforcement learning (RL) gradually lose their plasticity, the ability to learn from new data; however, the analysis and mitigation of this phenomenon is hampered by the complex relationship between plasticity, exploration,…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in various domains like robotics, game playing, and simulation. While RL agents have shown impressive capabilities in their specific tasks, they insufficiently adapt to new tasks. In supervised learning, this adaptation problem is addressed by large-sc…
Many important problems involving molecular property prediction from 3D structures have limited data, posing a generalization challenge for neural networks. In this paper, we describe a pre-training technique based on denoising that achieves a new state-of-the-art in molecular property prediction by…
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) offer fast inference on long sequences but are hard to optimize and slow to train. Deep state-space models (SSMs) have recently been shown to perform remarkably well on long sequence modeling tasks, and have the added benefits of fast parallelizable training and RNN-…
Learning from large amounts of unsupervised data and a small amount of supervision is an important open problem in computer vision. We propose a new semi-supervised learning method, Semantic Positives via Pseudo-Labels (SEMPPL), that combines labelled and unlabelled data to learn informative represe…
Deep neural networks are widely known for their remarkable effectiveness across various tasks, with the consensus that deeper networks implicitly learn more complex data representations. This paper shows that sufficiently deep networks trained for supervised image classification split into two disti…
Plasticity, the ability of a neural network to quickly change its predictions in response to new information, is essential for the adaptability and robustness of deep reinforcement learning systems. Deep neural networks are known to lose plasticity over the course of training even in relatively simp…
The ability of continual learning systems to transfer knowledge from previously seen tasks in order to maximize performance on new tasks is a significant challenge for the field, limiting the applicability of continual learning solutions to realistic scenarios. Consequently, this study aims to broad…
Learning representations of algorithms is an emerging area of machine learning, seeking to bridge concepts from neural networks with classical algorithms. Several important works have investigated whether neural networks can effectively reason like algorithms, typically by learning to execute them.…
A primary focus area in continual learning research is alleviating the "catastrophic forgetting" problem in neural networks by designing new algorithms that are more robust to the distribution shifts. While the recent progress in continual learning literature is encouraging, our understanding of wha…
Continual learning (CL) --- the ability to continuously learn, building on previously acquired knowledge --- is a natural requirement for long-lived autonomous reinforcement learning (RL) agents. While building such agents, one needs to balance opposing desiderata, such as constraints on capacity an…
Recent advances in NLP have been sustained by the availability of large amounts of data and standardized benchmarks, which are not available for many languages. As a small step towards addressing this we propose LiRo, a platform for benchmarking models on the Romanian language on nine standard tasks…
Continual (sequential) training and multitask (simultaneous) training are often attempting to solve the same overall objective: to find a solution that performs well on all considered tasks. The main difference is in the training regimes, where continual learning can only have access to one task at…
Empirically it has been observed that the performance of deep neural networks steadily improves with increased model size, contradicting the classical view on overfitting and generalization. Recently, the double descent phenomenon has been proposed to reconcile this observation with theory, suggesti…
The training of sparse neural networks is becoming an increasingly important tool for reducing the computational footprint of models at training and evaluation, as well enabling the effective scaling up of models. Whereas much work over the years has been dedicated to specialised pruning techniques,…
Most of the recent deep reinforcement learning advances take an RL-centric perspective and focus on refinements of the training objective. We diverge from this view and show we can recover the performance of these developments not by changing the objective, but by regularising the value-function est…
We introduce a framework for Continual Learning (CL) based on Bayesian inference over the function space rather than the parameters of a deep neural network. This method, referred to as functional regularisation for Continual Learning, avoids forgetting a previous task by constructing and memorising…
Gating mechanisms are widely used in neural network models, where they allow gradients to backpropagate easily through depth or time. However, their saturation property introduces problems of its own. For example, in recurrent models these gates need to have outputs near 1 to propagate information o…
Learning an efficient update rule from data that promotes rapid learning of new tasks from the same distribution remains an open problem in meta-learning. Typically, previous works have approached this issue either by attempting to train a neural network that directly produces updates or by attempti…
We explore the role of multiplicative interaction as a unifying framework to describe a range of classical and modern neural network architectural motifs, such as gating, attention layers, hypernetworks, and dynamic convolutions amongst others. Multiplicative interaction layers as primitive operatio…
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are typically applied to static graphs that are assumed to be known upfront. This static input structure is often informed purely by insight of the machine learning practitioner, and might not be optimal for the actual task the GNN is solving. In absence of reliable doma…
Owing to their ability to both effectively integrate information over long time horizons and scale to massive amounts of data, self-attention architectures have recently shown breakthrough success in natural language processing (NLP). Harnessing the transformer’s ability to process long time horizon…
Sparse neural networks are becoming increasingly important as the field seeks to improve the performance of existing models by scaling them up, while simultaneously trying to reduce power consumption and computational footprint. Unfortunately, most existing methods for inducing performant sparse mod…
Catastrophic forgetting affects the training of neural networks, limiting their ability to learn multiple tasks sequentially. From the perspective of the well established plasticity-stability dilemma, neural networks tend to be overly plastic, lacking the stability necessary to prevent the forgettin…
Continual learning aims to improve the ability of modern learning systems to deal with non-stationary distributions, typically by attempting to learn a series of tasks sequentially. Prior art in the field has largely considered supervised or reinforcement learning tasks, and often assumes full knowl…
We introduce an approach for augmenting model-free deep reinforcement learning agents with a mechanism for relational reasoning over structured representations, which improves performance, learning efficiency, generalization, and interpretability. Our architecture encodes an image as a set of vector…
The transfer of knowledge from one policy to another is an important tool in Deep Reinforcement Learning. This process, referred to as distillation, has been used to great success, for example, by enhancing the optimisation of agents, leading to stronger performance faster, on harder domains. Despit…
Recent approaches have successfully demonstrated the benefits of learning the parameters of shallow networks in hyperbolic space. We extend this line of work by imposing hyperbolic geometry on the embeddings used to compute the ubiquitous attention mechanisms for different neural networks architectu…
Many real world tasks exhibit rich structure that is repeated across different parts of the state space or in time. In this work we study the possibility of leveraging such repeated structure to speed up and regularize learning. We start from the KL regularized expected reward objective which introd…
Gradient-based meta-learning techniques are both widely applicable and proficient at solving challenging few-shot learning and fast adaptation problems. However, they have practical difficulties when operating on high-dimensional parameter spaces in extreme low-data regimes. We show that it is possi…
Meta-learning agents excel at rapidly learning new tasks from open-ended task distributions; yet, they forget what they learn about each task as soon as the next begins. When tasks reoccur {–} as they do in natural environments {–} meta-learning agents must explore again instead of immediately explo…
Graphs are fundamental data structures required to model many important real-world data, from knowledge graphs, physical and social interactions to molecules and proteins. In this paper, we study the problem of learning generative models of graphs from a dataset of graphs of interest. After learning…
Deep neural networks have excelled on a wide range of problems, from vision to language and game playing. Neural networks very gradually incorporate information into weights as they process data, requiring very low learning rates. If the training distribution shifts, the network is slow to adapt, an…
We introduce Mix and match (M&M) – a training framework designed to facilitate rapid and effective learning in RL agents that would be too slow or too challenging to train otherwise.The key innovation is a procedure that allows us to automatically form a curriculum over agents. Through such a curric…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) continue to make significant advances, solving tasks from image classification to translation or reinforcement learning. One aspect of the field receiving considerable attention is efficiently executing deep models in resource-constrained environments, such as mobile or e…
We introduce a conceptually simple and scalable framework for continual learning domains where tasks are learned sequentially. Our method is constant in the number of parameters and is designed to preserve performance on previously encountered tasks while accelerating learning progress on subsequent…
Memory-based neural networks model temporal data by leveraging an ability to remember information for long periods. It is unclear, however, whether they also have an ability to perform complex relational reasoning with the information they remember. Here, we first confirm our intuitions that standar…
Relational reasoning is a central component of generally intelligent behavior, but has proven difficult for neural networks to learn. In this paper we describe how to use Relation Networks (RNs) as a simple plug-and-play module to solve problems that fundamentally hinge on relational reasoning. We t…
Our world can be succinctly and compactly described as structured scenes of objects and relations. A typical room, for example, contains salient objects such as tables, chairs and books, and these objects typically relate to each other by virtue of their correlated features, such as position, functi…
Most deep reinforcement learning algorithms are data inefficient in complex and rich environments, limiting their applicability to many scenarios. One direction for improving data efficiency is multitask learning with shared neural network parameters, where efficiency may be improved through transfe…
We introduce Imagination-Augmented Agents (I2As), a novel architecture for deep reinforcement learning combining model-free and model-based aspects. In contrast to most existing model-based reinforcement learning and planning methods, which prescribe how a model should be used to arrive at a polic…
Learning to navigate in complex environments with dynamic elements is an important milestone in developing AI agents. In this work we formulate the navigation question as a reinforcement learning problem and show that data efficiency and task performance can be dramatically improved by relying on ad…
Many machine learning systems are built to solve the hardest examples of a particular task, which often makes them large and expensive to run---especially with respect to the easier examples, which might require much less computation. For an agent with a limited computational budget, this "one-size-…
Despite their overwhelming capacity to overfit, deep learning architectures tend to generalize relatively well to unseen data, allowing them to be deployed in practice. However, explaining why this is the case is still an open area of research. One standing hypothesis that is gaining popularity, e.g…
Applying end-to-end learning to solve complex, interactive, pixel-driven control tasks on a robot is an unsolved problem. Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms are too slow to achieve performance on a real robot, but their potential has been demonstrated in simulated environments. We propose using
At the heart of deep learning we aim to use neural networks as function approximators - training them to produce outputs from inputs in emulation of a ground truth function or data creation process. In many cases we only have access to input-output pairs from the ground truth, however it is becomin…
From just a glance, humans can make rich predictions about the future of a wide range of physical systems. On the other hand, modern approaches from engineering, robotics, and graphics are often restricted to narrow domains or require information about the underlying state. We introduce the Visual…
Reasoning about objects, relations, and physics is central to human intelligence, and a key goal of artificial intelligence. Here we introduce the interaction network, a model which can reason about how objects in complex systems interact, supporting dynamical predictions, as well as inferences abou…
Attackers often create systems that automatically rewrite and reorder their malware to avoid detection. Typical machine learning approaches, which learn a classifier based on a handcrafted feature vector, are not sufficiently robust to such reorderings. We propose a different approach, which, simila…
We introduce Natural Neural Networks, a novel family of algorithms that speed up convergence by adapting their internal representation during training to improve conditioning of the Fisher matrix. In particular, we show a specific example that employs a simple and efficient reparametrization of the…