This paper presents a neuro-symbolic agent that combines deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with temporal logic (TL), and achieves systematic out-of-distribution generalisation in tasks that involve following a formally specified instruction. Specifically, the agent learns general notions of negation and disjunction, and successfully applies them to previously unseen objects without further training. To this end, we also introduce Task Temporal Logic (TTL), a learning-oriented formal language, whose atoms are designed to help the training of a DRL agent targeting systematic generalisation. To validate this combination of logic-based and neural-network techniques, we provide experimental evidence for the kind of neural-network architecture that most enhances the generalisation performance of the agent. Our findings suggest that the right architecture can significatively improve the ability of the agent to generalise in systematic ways, even with abstract operators, such as negation, which previous research have struggled with.
In this paper, we propose a multi-timescale replay (MTR) buffer for improving continual learning in RL agents faced with environments that are changing continuously over time at timescales that are unknown to the agent. The basic MTR buffer comprises a cascade of sub-buffers that accumulate experiences at different timescales, enabling the agent to improve the trade-off between adaptation to new data and retention of old knowledge. We also combine the MTR framework with invariant risk minimization, with the idea of encouraging the agent to learn a policy that is robust across the various environments it encounters over time. The MTR methods are evaluated in three different continual learning settings on two continuous control tasks and, in many cases, show improvement over the baselines.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been strongly driven by the use of game environments for training and evaluating agents. Games are often accessible and versatile, with well-defined state-transitions and goals allowing for intensive training and experimentation. However, agents trained in a particular environment are usually tested on the same or slightly varied distributions, and solutions do not necessarily imply any understanding. If we want AI systems that can model and understand their environment, we need environments that explicitly test for this. Inspired by the extensive literature on animal cognition, we present an environment that keeps all the positive elements of standard gaming environments, but is explicitly designed for the testing of animal-like artificial cognition.
With a view to bridging the gap between deep learning and symbolic AI, we present a novel end-to-end neural network architecture that learns to form propositional representations with an explicitly relational structure from raw pixel data. In order to evaluate and analyse the architecture, we introduce a family of simple visual relational reasoning tasks of varying complexity. We show that the proposed architecture, when pre-trained on a curriculum of such tasks, learns to generate reusable representations that better facilitate subsequent learning on previously unseen tasks when compared to a number of baseline architectures. The workings of a successfully trained model are visualised to shed some light on how the architecture functions.
We propose a method for tackling catastrophic forgetting in deep reinforcement learning that is \textit{agnostic} to the timescale of changes in the distribution of experiences, does not require knowledge of task boundaries, and can adapt in \textit{continuously} changing environments. In our \textit{policy consolidation} model, the policy network interacts with a cascade of hidden networks that simultaneously remember the agent's policy at a range of timescales and regularise the current policy by its own history, thereby improving its ability to learn without forgetting. We find that the model improves continual learning relative to baselines on a number of continuous control tasks in single-task, alternating two-task, and multi-agent competitive self-play settings.
Stochastic video prediction models take in a sequence of image frames, and generate a sequence of consecutive future image frames. These models typically generate future frames in an autoregressive fashion, which is slow and requires the input and output frames to be consecutive. We introduce a model that overcomes these drawbacks by generating a latent representation from an arbitrary set of frames that can then be used to simultaneously and efficiently sample temporally consistent frames at arbitrary time-points. For example, our model can "jump" and directly sample frames at the end of the video, without sampling intermediate frames. Synthetic video evaluations confirm substantial gains in speed and functionality without loss in fidelity. We also apply our framework to a 3D scene reconstruction dataset. Here, our model is conditioned on camera location and can sample consistent sets of images for what an occluded region of a 3D scene might look like, even if there are multiple possibilities for what that region might contain. Reconstructions and videos are available at https://bit.ly/2O4Pc4R.
Deep neural networks excel at function approximation, yet they are typically trained from scratch for each new function. On the other hand, Bayesian methods, such as Gaussian Processes (GPs), exploit prior knowledge to quickly infer the shape of a new function at test time. Yet GPs are computationally expensive, and it can be hard to design appropriate priors. In this paper we propose a family of neural models, Conditional Neural Processes (CNPs), that combine the benefits of both. CNPs are inspired by the flexibility of stochastic processes such as GPs, but are structured as neural networks and trained via gradient descent. CNPs make accurate predictions after observing only a handful of training data points, yet scale to complex functions and large datasets. We demonstrate the performance and versatility of the approach on a range of canonical machine learning tasks, including regression, classification and image completion.
We introduce an approach for deep reinforcement learning (RL) that improves upon the efficiency, generalization capacity, and interpretability of conventional approaches through structured perception and relational reasoning. It uses self-attention to iteratively reason about the relations between entities in a scene and to guide a model-free policy. Our results show that in a novel navigation and planning task called Box-World, our agent finds interpretable solutions that improve upon baselines in terms of sample complexity, ability to generalize to more complex scenes than experienced during training, and overall performance. In the StarCraft II Learning Environment, our agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on six mini-games -- surpassing human grandmaster performance on four. By considering architectural inductive biases, our work opens new directions for overcoming important, but stubborn, challenges in deep RL.
Unlike humans, who are capable of continual learning over their lifetimes, artificial neural networks have long been known to suffer from a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting, whereby new learning can lead to abrupt erasure of previously acquired knowledge. Whereas in a neural network the parameters are typically modelled as scalar values, an individual synapse in the brain comprises a complex network of interacting biochemical components that evolve at different timescales. In this paper, we show that by equipping tabular and deep reinforcement learning agents with a synaptic model that incorporates this biological complexity (Benna & Fusi, 2016), catastrophic forgetting can be mitigated at multiple timescales. In particular, we find that as well as enabling continual learning across sequential training of two simple tasks, it can also be used to overcome within-task forgetting by reducing the need for an experience replay database.