Ordered Memory

Stack-augmented recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been of interest to the deep learning community for some time. However, the difficulty of training memory models remains a problem obstructing the widespread use of such models. In this paper, we propose the Ordered Memory architecture. Inspired by Ordered Neurons (Shen et al., 2018), we introduce a new attention-based mechanism and use its cumulative probability to control the writing and erasing operation of the memory. We also introduce a new Gated Recursive Cell to compose lower-level representations into higher-level representation. We demonstrate that our model achieves strong performance on the logical inference task (Bowman et al., 2015)and the ListOps (Nangia and Bowman, 2018) task. We can also interpret the model to retrieve the induced tree structure, and find that these induced structures align with the ground truth. Finally, we evaluate our model on the Stanford SentimentTreebank tasks (Socher et al., 2013), and find that it performs comparatively with the state-of-the-art methods in the literature.

Metalearned Neural Memory

We augment recurrent neural networks with an external memory mechanism that builds upon recent progress in metalearning. We conceptualize this memory as a rapidly adaptable function that we parameterize as a deep neural network. Reading from the neural memory function amounts to pushing an input (the key vector) through the function to produce an output (the value vector). Writing to memory means changing the function; specifically, updating the parameters of the neural network to encode desired information. We leverage training and algorithmic techniques from metalearning to update the neural memory function in one shot. The proposed memory-augmented model achieves strong performance on a variety of learning problems, from supervised question answering to reinforcement learning.

An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning

Inspired by the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting, we investigate the learning dynamics of neural networks as they train on single classification tasks. Our goal is to understand whether a related phenomenon occurs when data does not undergo a clear distributional shift. We define a `forgetting event' to have occurred when an individual training example transitions from being classified correctly to incorrectly over the course of learning. Across several benchmark data sets, we find that: (i) certain examples are forgotten with high frequency, and some not at all; (ii) a data set's (un)forgettable examples generalize across neural architectures; and (iii) based on forgetting dynamics, a significant fraction of examples can be omitted from the training data set while still maintaining state-of-the-art generalization performance.

Ordered Neurons: Integrating Tree Structures into Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent neural network (RNN) models are widely used for processing sequential data governed by a latent tree structure. Previous work shows that RNN models (especially Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based models) could learn to exploit the underlying tree structure. However, its performance consistently lags behind that of tree-based models. This work proposes a new inductive bias Ordered Neurons, which enforces an order of updating frequencies between hidden state neurons. We show that the ordered neurons could explicitly integrate the latent tree structure into recurrent models. To this end, we propose a new RNN unit: ON-LSTM, which achieve good performances on four different tasks: language modeling, unsupervised parsing, targeted syntactic evaluation, and logical inference.

VFunc: a Deep Generative Model for Functions

We introduce a deep generative model for functions. Our model provides a joint distribution p(f, z) over functions f and latent variables z which lets us efficiently sample from the marginal p(f) and maximize a variational lower bound on the entropy H(f). We can thus maximize objectives of the form E_{f~p(f)}[R(f)] + c*H(f), where R(f) denotes, e.g., a data log-likelihood term or an expected reward. Such objectives encompass Bayesian deep learning in function space, rather than parameter space, and Bayesian deep RL with representations of uncertainty that offer benefits over bootstrapping and parameter noise. In this short paper we describe our model, situate it in the context of prior work, and present proof-of-concept experiments for regression and RL.

Counting to Explore and Generalize in Text-based Games

We propose a recurrent RL agent with an episodic exploration mechanism that helps discovering good policies in text-based game environments. We show promising results on a set of generated text-based games of varying difficulty where the goal is to collect a coin located at the end of a chain of rooms. In contrast to previous text-based RL approaches, we observe that our agent learns policies that generalize to unseen games of greater difficulty.

Augmented CycleGAN: Learning Many-to-Many Mappings from Unpaired Data

Learning inter-domain mappings from unpaired data can improve performance in structured prediction tasks, such as image segmentation, by reducing the need for paired data. CycleGAN was recently proposed for this problem, but critically assumes the underlying inter-domain mapping is approximately deterministic and one-to-one. This assumption renders the model ineffective for tasks requiring flexible, many-to-many mappings. We propose a new model, called Augmented CycleGAN, which learns many-to-many mappings between domains. We examine Augmented CycleGAN qualitatively and quantitatively on several image datasets.

Focused Hierarchical RNNs for Conditional Sequence Processing

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with attention mechanisms have obtained state-of-the-art results for many sequence processing tasks. Most of these models use a simple form of encoder with attention that looks over the entire sequence and assigns a weight to each token independently. We present a mechanism for focusing RNN encoders for sequence modelling tasks which allows them to attend to key parts of the input as needed. We formulate this using a multi-layer conditional sequence encoder that reads in one token at a time and makes a discrete decision on whether the token is relevant to the context or question being asked. The discrete gating mechanism takes in the context embedding and the current hidden state as inputs and controls information flow into the layer above. We train it using policy gradient methods. We evaluate this method on several types of tasks with different attributes. First, we evaluate the method on synthetic tasks which allow us to evaluate the model for its generalization ability and probe the behavior of the gates in more controlled settings. We then evaluate this approach on large scale Question Answering tasks including the challenging MS MARCO and SearchQA tasks. Our models shows consistent improvements for both tasks over prior work and our baselines. It has also shown to generalize significantly better on synthetic tasks as compared to the baselines.

Straight to the Tree: Constituency Parsing with Neural Syntactic Distance

In this work, we propose a novel constituency parsing scheme. The model predicts a vector of real-valued scalars, named syntactic distances, for each split position in the input sentence. The syntactic distances specify the order in which the split points will be selected, recursively partitioning the input, in a top-down fashion. Compared to traditional shift-reduce parsing schemes, our approach is free from the potential problem of compounding errors, while being faster and easier to parallelize. Our model achieves competitive performance amongst single model, discriminative parsers in the PTB dataset and outperforms previous models in the CTB dataset.