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Anirudh Goyal

Alumni

Publications

Episodes Meta Sequence S 2 Fast Update Slow Update Fast Update Slow Update
Kanika Madan
Nan Rosemary Ke
Anirudh Goyal
Bernhard Schölkopf
Yoshua Bengio
Decomposing knowledge into interchangeable pieces promises a generalization advantage when there are changes in distribution. A learning age… (see more)nt interacting with its environment is likely to be faced with situations requiring novel combinations of existing pieces of knowledge. We hypothesize that such a decomposition of knowledge is particularly relevant for being able to generalize in a systematic manner to out-of-distribution changes. To study these ideas, we propose a particular training framework in which we assume that the pieces of knowledge an agent needs and its reward function are stationary and can be re-used across tasks. An attention mechanism dynamically selects which modules can be adapted to the current task, and the parameters of the selected modules are allowed to change quickly as the learner is confronted with variations in what it experiences, while the parameters of the attention mechanisms act as stable, slowly changing, metaparameters.We focus on pieces of knowledge captured by an ensemble of modules sparsely communicating with each other via a bottleneck of attention. We find that meta-learning the modular aspects of the proposed system greatly helps in achieving faster adaptation in a reinforcement learning setup involving navigation in a partially observed grid world with image-level input. We also find that reversing the role of parameters and meta-parameters does not work nearly as well, suggesting a particular role for fast adaptation of the dynamically selected modules.
2020-12-31
(published)
www.semanticscholar.org
Factorizing Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Structured, Dynamical Environments
Anirudh Goyal
Alex Lamb
Phanideep Gampa
Philippe Beaudoin
Charles Blundell
Sergey Levine
Yoshua Bengio
Michael Mozer
2020-12-31
ICLR (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Fast and Slow Learning of Recurrent Independent Mechanisms
Kanika Madan
Rosemary Nan Ke
Anirudh Goyal
Bernhard Schölkopf
Yoshua Bengio
Decomposing knowledge into interchangeable pieces promises a generalization advantage when there are changes in distribution. A learning age… (see more)nt interacting with its environment is likely to be faced with situations requiring novel combinations of existing pieces of knowledge. We hypothesize that such a decomposition of knowledge is particularly relevant for being able to generalize in a systematic manner to out-of-distribution changes. To study these ideas, we propose a particular training framework in which we assume that the pieces of knowledge an agent needs and its reward function are stationary and can be re-used across tasks. An attention mechanism dynamically selects which modules can be adapted to the current task, and the parameters of the selected modules are allowed to change quickly as the learner is confronted with variations in what it experiences, while the parameters of the attention mechanisms act as stable, slowly changing, meta-parameters. We focus on pieces of knowledge captured by an ensemble of modules sparsely communicating with each other via a bottleneck of attention. We find that meta-learning the modular aspects of the proposed system greatly helps in achieving faster adaptation in a reinforcement learning setup involving navigation in a partially observed grid world with image-level input. We also find that reversing the role of parameters and meta-parameters does not work nearly as well, suggesting a particular role for fast adaptation of the dynamically selected modules.
2020-12-31
ICLR (published)
doi.org
openreview.net
Toward Causal Representation Learning
Bernhard Schölkopf
Francesco Locatello
Stefan Bauer
Nan Rosemary Ke
Nal Kalchbrenner
Anirudh Goyal
Yoshua Bengio
The two fields of machine learning and graphical causality arose and are developed separately. However, there is, now, cross-pollination and… (see more) increasing interest in both fields to benefit from the advances of the other. In this article, we review fundamental concepts of causal inference and relate them to crucial open problems of machine learning, including transfer and generalization, thereby assaying how causality can contribute to modern machine learning research. This also applies in the opposite direction: we note that most work in causality starts from the premise that the causal variables are given. A central problem for AI and causality is, thus, causal representation learning, that is, the discovery of high-level causal variables from low-level observations. Finally, we delineate some implications of causality for machine learning and propose key research areas at the intersection of both communities.
2020-12-31
Proceedings of the IEEE (published)
doi.org
S2RMs: Spatially Structured Recurrent Modules
Nasim Rahaman
Anirudh Goyal
Muhammad Waleed Gondal
Manuel Wuthrich
Stefan Bauer
Y. Sharma
Yoshua Bengio
Bernhard Schölkopf
2020-07-12
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Object Files and Schemata: Factorizing Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Dynamical Systems
Anirudh Goyal
Alex Lamb
Phanideep Gampa
Philippe Beaudoin
Sergey Levine
Charles Blundell
Yoshua Bengio
Michael Curtis Mozer
2020-06-28
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Untangling tradeoffs between recurrence and self-attention in neural networks
Giancarlo Kerg
Bhargav Kanuparthi
Anirudh Goyal
Kyle Goyette
Yoshua Bengio
Guillaume Lajoie
2020-06-15
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Learning to Combine Top-Down and Bottom-Up Signals in Recurrent Neural Networks with Attention over Modules
Sarthak Mittal
Alex Lamb
Anirudh Goyal
Vikram Voleti
Murray Shanahan
Guillaume Lajoie
Michael Mozer
Yoshua Bengio
Robust perception relies on both bottom-up and top-down signals. Bottom-up signals consist of what's directly observed through sensation. To… (see more)p-down signals consist of beliefs and expectations based on past experience and short-term memory, such as how the phrase `peanut butter and~...' will be completed. The optimal combination of bottom-up and top-down information remains an open question, but the manner of combination must be dynamic and both context and task dependent. To effectively utilize the wealth of potential top-down information available, and to prevent the cacophony of intermixed signals in a bidirectional architecture, mechanisms are needed to restrict information flow. We explore deep recurrent neural net architectures in which bottom-up and top-down signals are dynamically combined using attention. Modularity of the architecture further restricts the sharing and communication of information. Together, attention and modularity direct information flow, which leads to reliable performance improvements in perceptual and language tasks, and in particular improves robustness to distractions and noisy data. We demonstrate on a variety of benchmarks in language modeling, sequential image classification, video prediction and reinforcement learning that the \emph{bidirectional} information flow can improve results over strong baselines.
2019-12-31
ICML (published)
doi.org
proceedings.mlr.press
Learning Long-term Dependencies Using Cognitive Inductive Biases in Self-attention RNNs
Giancarlo Kerg
Bhargav Kanuparthi
Anirudh Goyal
Kyle Goyette
Yoshua Bengio
Guillaume Lajoie
Attention and self-attention mechanisms, inspired by cognitive processes, are now central to state-of-the-art deep learning on sequential ta… (see more)sks. However, most recent progress hinges on heuristic approaches that rely on considerable memory and computational resources that scale poorly. In this work, we propose a relevancy screening mechanism, inspired by the cognitive process of memory consolidation, that allows for a scalable use of sparse self-attention with recurrence. We use simple numerical experiments to demonstrate that this mechanism helps enable recurrent systems on generalization and transfer learning tasks. Based on our results, we propose a concrete direction of research to improve scalability and generalization of attentive recurrent networks.
2019-12-31
(published)
www.semanticscholar.org
Learning the Arrow of Time for Problems in Reinforcement Learning
Nasim Rahaman
Steffen Wolf
Anirudh Goyal
Roman Remme
Yoshua Bengio
2019-12-31
ICLR (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Meta Attention Networks: Meta Learning Attention To Modulate Information Between Sparsely Interacting Recurrent Modules
Kanika Madan
Nan Rosemary Ke
Anirudh Goyal
Yoshua Bengio
Decomposing knowledge into interchangeable pieces promises a generalization advantage when, at some level of representation, the learner is … (see more)likely to be faced with situations requiring novel combinations of existing pieces of knowledge or computation. We hypothesize that such a decomposition of knowledge is particularly relevant for higher levels of representation as we see this at work in human cognition and natural language in the form of systematicity or systematic generalization. To study these ideas, we propose a particular training framework in which we assume that the pieces of knowledge an agent needs, as well as its reward function are stationary and can be re-used across tasks and changes in distribution. As the learner is confronted with variations in experiences, the attention selects which modules should be adapted and the parameters of those selected modules are adapted fast, while the parameters of attention mechanisms are updated slowly as meta-parameters. We find that both the meta-learning and the modular aspects of the proposed system greatly help achieve faster learning in experiments with reinforcement learning setup involving navigation in a partially observed grid world.
2019-12-31
(published)
www.semanticscholar.org
A Meta-Transfer Objective for Learning to Disentangle Causal Mechanisms
Yoshua Bengio
Tristan Deleu
Nasim Rahaman
Nan Rosemary Ke
Sébastien Lachapelle
Olexa Bilaniuk
Anirudh Goyal
Christopher Pal
We propose to meta-learn causal structures based on how fast a learner adapts to new distributions arising from sparse distributional change… (see more)s, e.g. due to interventions, actions of agents and other sources of non-stationarities. We show that under this assumption, the correct causal structural choices lead to faster adaptation to modified distributions because the changes are concentrated in one or just a few mechanisms when the learned knowledge is modularized appropriately. This leads to sparse expected gradients and a lower effective number of degrees of freedom needing to be relearned while adapting to the change. It motivates using the speed of adaptation to a modified distribution as a meta-learning objective. We demonstrate how this can be used to determine the cause-effect relationship between two observed variables. The distributional changes do not need to correspond to standard interventions (clamping a variable), and the learner has no direct knowledge of these interventions. We show that causal structures can be parameterized via continuous variables and learned end-to-end. We then explore how these ideas could be used to also learn an encoder that would map low-level observed variables to unobserved causal variables leading to faster adaptation out-of-distribution, learning a representation space where one can satisfy the assumptions of independent mechanisms and of small and sparse changes in these mechanisms due to actions and non-stationarities.
2019-12-31
ICLR (published)
doi.org
openreview.net