A simple neural network module for relational reasoning

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 tested RN-augmented networks on three tasks: visual question answering using a challenging dataset called CLEVR, on which we achieve state-of-the-art, super-human performance; text-based question answering using the bAbI suite of tasks; and complex reasoning about dynamic physical systems. Then, using a curated dataset called Sort-of-CLEVR we show that powerful convolutional networks do not have a general capacity to solve relational questions, but can gain this capacity when augmented with RNs. Our work shows how a deep learning architecture equipped with an RN module can implicitly discover and learn to reason about entities and their relations.

Generative Temporal Models with Memory

We consider the general problem of modeling temporal data with long-range dependencies, wherein new observations are fully or partially predictable based on temporally-distant, past observations. A sufficiently powerful temporal model should separate predictable elements of the sequence from unpredictable elements, express uncertainty about those unpredictable elements, and rapidly identify novel elements that may help to predict the future. To create such models, we introduce Generative Temporal Models augmented with external memory systems. They are developed within the variational inference framework, which provides both a practical training methodology and methods to gain insight into the models' operation. We show, on a range of problems with sparse, long-term temporal dependencies, that these models store information from early in a sequence, and reuse this stored information efficiently. This allows them to perform substantially better than existing models based on well-known recurrent neural networks, like LSTMs.

Discovering objects and their relations from entangled scene representations

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 their underlying causes and semantics. This gives rise to correlated features, such as position, function and shape. Humans exploit knowledge of objects and their relations for learning a wide spectrum of tasks, and more generally when learning the structure underlying observed data. In this work, we introduce relation networks (RNs) - a general purpose neural network architecture for object-relation reasoning. We show that RNs are capable of learning object relations from scene description data. Furthermore, we show that RNs can act as a bottleneck that induces the factorization of objects from entangled scene description inputs, and from distributed deep representations of scene images provided by a variational autoencoder. The model can also be used in conjunction with differentiable memory mechanisms for implicit relation discovery in one-shot learning tasks. Our results suggest that relation networks are a potentially powerful architecture for solving a variety of problems that require object relation reasoning.

One-shot Learning with Memory-Augmented Neural Networks

Despite recent breakthroughs in the applications of deep neural networks, one setting that presents a persistent challenge is that of "one-shot learning." Traditional gradient-based networks require a lot of data to learn, often through extensive iterative training. When new data is encountered, the models must inefficiently relearn their parameters to adequately incorporate the new information without catastrophic interference. Architectures with augmented memory capacities, such as Neural Turing Machines (NTMs), offer the ability to quickly encode and retrieve new information, and hence can potentially obviate the downsides of conventional models. Here, we demonstrate the ability of a memory-augmented neural network to rapidly assimilate new data, and leverage this data to make accurate predictions after only a few samples. We also introduce a new method for accessing an external memory that focuses on memory content, unlike previous methods that additionally use memory location-based focusing mechanisms.