143 research outputs found
The Fast and the Flexible: training neural networks to learn to follow instructions from small data
Learning to follow human instructions is a long-pursued goal in artificial
intelligence. The task becomes particularly challenging if no prior knowledge
of the employed language is assumed while relying only on a handful of examples
to learn from. Work in the past has relied on hand-coded components or manually
engineered features to provide strong inductive biases that make learning in
such situations possible. In contrast, here we seek to establish whether this
knowledge can be acquired automatically by a neural network system through a
two phase training procedure: A (slow) offline learning stage where the network
learns about the general structure of the task and a (fast) online adaptation
phase where the network learns the language of a new given speaker. Controlled
experiments show that when the network is exposed to familiar instructions but
containing novel words, the model adapts very efficiently to the new
vocabulary. Moreover, even for human speakers whose language usage can depart
significantly from our artificial training language, our network can still make
use of its automatically acquired inductive bias to learn to follow
instructions more effectively
Transcoding compositionally: using attention to find more generalizable solutions
While sequence-to-sequence models have shown remarkable generalization power
across several natural language tasks, their construct of solutions are argued
to be less compositional than human-like generalization. In this paper, we
present seq2attn, a new architecture that is specifically designed to exploit
attention to find compositional patterns in the input. In seq2attn, the two
standard components of an encoder-decoder model are connected via a transcoder,
that modulates the information flow between them. We show that seq2attn can
successfully generalize, without requiring any additional supervision, on two
tasks which are specifically constructed to challenge the compositional skills
of neural networks. The solutions found by the model are highly interpretable,
allowing easy analysis of both the types of solutions that are found and
potential causes for mistakes. We exploit this opportunity to introduce a new
paradigm to test compositionality that studies the extent to which a model
overgeneralizes when confronted with exceptions. We show that seq2attn exhibits
such overgeneralization to a larger degree than a standard sequence-to-sequence
model.Comment: to appear at BlackboxNLP 2019, AC
Beyond task success: A closer look at jointly learning to see, ask, and GuessWhat
We propose a grounded dialogue state encoder which addresses a foundational
issue on how to integrate visual grounding with dialogue system components. As
a test-bed, we focus on the GuessWhat?! game, a two-player game where the goal
is to identify an object in a complex visual scene by asking a sequence of
yes/no questions. Our visually-grounded encoder leverages synergies between
guessing and asking questions, as it is trained jointly using multi-task
learning. We further enrich our model via a cooperative learning regime. We
show that the introduction of both the joint architecture and cooperative
learning lead to accuracy improvements over the baseline system. We compare our
approach to an alternative system which extends the baseline with reinforcement
learning. Our in-depth analysis shows that the linguistic skills of the two
models differ dramatically, despite approaching comparable performance levels.
This points at the importance of analyzing the linguistic output of competing
systems beyond numeric comparison solely based on task success.Comment: Accepted to NAACL 201
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