Associative Long Short-Term Memory

We investigate a new method to augment recurrent neural networks with extra memory without increasing the number of network parameters. The system has an associative memory based on complex-valued vectors and is closely related to Holographic Reduced Representations and Long Short-Term Memory networks. Holographic Reduced Representations have limited capacity: as they store more information, each retrieval becomes noisier due to interference. Our system in contrast creates redundant copies of stored information, which enables retrieval with reduced noise. Experiments demonstrate faster learning on multiple memorization tasks.

Learning Continuous Control Policies by Stochastic Value Gradients

We present a unified framework for learning continuous control policies using backpropagation. It supports stochastic control by treating stochasticity in the Bellman equation as a deterministic function of exogenous noise. The product is a spectrum of general policy gradient algorithms that range from model-free methods with value functions to model-based methods without value functions. We use learned models but only require observations from the environment in- stead of observations from model-predicted trajectories, minimizing the impact of compounded model errors. We apply these algorithms first to a toy stochastic control problem and then to several physics-based control problems in simulation. One of these variants, SVG(1), shows the effectiveness of learning models, value functions, and policies simultaneously in continuous domains.

Neural Turing Machines

We extend the capabilities of neural networks by coupling them to external memory resources, which they can interact with by attentional processes. The combined system is analogous to a Turing Machine or Von Neumann architecture but is differentiable end-to-end, allowing it to be efficiently trained with gradient descent. Preliminary results demonstrate that Neural Turing Machines can infer simple algorithms such as copying, sorting, and associative recall from input and output examples.