Self-Attentive Associative Memory
Hung Le, Truyen Tran, Svetha Venkatesh
Abstract
Heretofore, neural networks with external memory are restricted to single memory with lossy representations of memory interactions. A rich representation of relationships between memory pieces urges a high-order and segregated relational memory. In this paper, we propose to separate the storage of individual experiences (item memory) and their occurring relationships (relational memory). The idea is implemented through a novel Self-attentive Associative Memory (SAM) operator. Found upon outer product, SAM forms a set of associative memories that represent the hypothetical high-order relationships between arbitrary pairs of memory elements, through which a relational memory is constructed from an item memory. The two memories are wired into a single sequential model capable of both memorization and relational reasoning. We achieve competitive results with our proposed two-memory model in a diversity of machine learning tasks, from challenging synthetic problems to practical testbeds such as geometry, graph, reinforcement learning, and question answering.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v119-le20b,
title = {Self-Attentive Associative Memory},
author = {Le, Hung and Tran, Truyen and Venkatesh, Svetha},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {5682--5691},
year = {2020},
editor = {III, Hal Daumé and Singh, Aarti},
volume = {119},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {13--18 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/le20b/le20b.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/le20b.html},
abstract = {Heretofore, neural networks with external memory are restricted to single memory with lossy representations of memory interactions. A rich representation of relationships between memory pieces urges a high-order and segregated relational memory. In this paper, we propose to separate the storage of individual experiences (item memory) and their occurring relationships (relational memory). The idea is implemented through a novel Self-attentive Associative Memory (SAM) operator. Found upon outer product, SAM forms a set of associative memories that represent the hypothetical high-order relationships between arbitrary pairs of memory elements, through which a relational memory is constructed from an item memory. The two memories are wired into a single sequential model capable of both memorization and relational reasoning. We achieve competitive results with our proposed two-memory model in a diversity of machine learning tasks, from challenging synthetic problems to practical testbeds such as geometry, graph, reinforcement learning, and question answering.}
}