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Kanika Madan

Alumni

Publications

Fast and Slow Learning of Recurrent Independent Mechanisms
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, 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.
2021-01-01
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.