A Short Survey of Systematic Generalization

This survey includes systematic generalization and a history of how machine learning addresses it. We aim to summarize and organize the related information of both conventional and recent improvements. We first look at the definition of systematic generalization, then introduce Classicist and Connectionist. We then discuss different types of Connectionists and how they approach the generalization. Two crucial problems of variable binding and causality are discussed. We look into systematic generalization in language, vision, and VQA fields. Recent improvements from different aspects are discussed. Systematic generalization has a long history in artificial intelligence. We could cover only a small portion of many contributions. We hope this paper provides a background and is beneficial for discoveries in future work.

On a Built-in Conflict between Deep Learning and Systematic Generalization

In this paper, we hypothesize that internal function sharing is one of the reasons to weaken o.o.d. or systematic generalization in deep learning for classification tasks. Under equivalent prediction, a model partitions an input space into multiple parts separated by boundaries. The function sharing prefers to reuse boundaries, leading to fewer parts for new outputs, which conflicts with systematic generalization. We show such phenomena in standard deep learning models, such as fully connected, convolutional, residual networks, LSTMs, and (Vision) Transformers. We hope this study provides novel insights into systematic generalization and forms a basis for new research directions.

Efficiently Disentangle Causal Representations

This paper proposes an efficient approach to learning disentangled representations with causal mechanisms based on the difference of conditional probabilities in original and new distributions. We approximate the difference with models' generalization abilities so that it fits in the standard machine learning framework and can be efficiently computed. In contrast to the state-of-the-art approach, which relies on the learner's adaptation speed to new distribution, the proposed approach only requires evaluating the model's generalization ability. We provide a theoretical explanation for the advantage of the proposed method, and our experiments show that the proposed technique is 1.9--11.0$\times$ more sample efficient and 9.4--32.4 times quicker than the previous method on various tasks. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/yuanpeng16/EDCR}.

Concepts, Properties and an Approach for Compositional Generalization

Compositional generalization is the capacity to recognize and imagine a large amount of novel combinations from known components. It is a key in human intelligence, but current neural networks generally lack such ability. This report connects a series of our work for compositional generalization, and summarizes an approach. The first part contains concepts and properties. The second part looks into a machine learning approach. The approach uses architecture design and regularization to regulate information of representations. This report focuses on basic ideas with intuitive and illustrative explanations. We hope this work would be helpful to clarify fundamentals of compositional generalization and lead to advance artificial intelligence.

Multi-AI competing and winning against humans in iterated Rock-Paper-Scissors game

Predicting and modeling human behavior and finding trends within human decision-making process is a major social sciences'problem. Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) is the fundamental strategic question in many game theory problems and real-world competitions. Finding the right approach to beat a particular human opponent is challenging. Here we use Markov Chains with set chain lengths as the single AIs (artificial intelligences) to compete against humans in iterated RPS game. This is the first time that an AI algorithm is applied in RPS human competition behavior studies. We developed an architecture of multi-AI with changeable parameters to adapt to different competition strategies. We introduce a parameter "focus length" (an integer of e.g. 5 or 10) to control the speed and sensitivity for our multi-AI to adapt to the opponent's strategy change. We experimented with 52 different people, each playing 300 rounds continuously against one specific multi-AI model, and demonstrated that our strategy could win over more than 95% of human opponents.

Compositional Generalization for Primitive Substitutions

Compositional generalization is a basic mechanism in human language learning, but current neural networks lack such ability. In this paper, we conduct fundamental research for encoding compositionality in neural networks. Conventional methods use a single representation for the input sentence, making it hard to apply prior knowledge of compositionality. In contrast, our approach leverages such knowledge with two representations, one generating attention maps, and the other mapping attended input words to output symbols. We reduce the entropy in each representation to improve generalization. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements over the conventional methods in five NLP tasks including instruction learning and machine translation. In the SCAN domain, it boosts accuracies from 14.0% to 98.8% in Jump task, and from 92.0% to 99.7% in TurnLeft task. It also beats human performance on a few-shot learning task. We hope the proposed approach can help ease future research towards human-level compositional language learning.

Zero-Shot Transfer VQA Dataset

Acquiring a large vocabulary is an important aspect of human intelligence. Onecommon approach for human to populating vocabulary is to learn words duringreading or listening, and then use them in writing or speaking. This ability totransfer from input to output is natural for human, but it is difficult for machines.Human spontaneously performs this knowledge transfer in complicated multimodaltasks, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). In order to approach human-levelArtificial Intelligence, we hope to equip machines with such ability. Therefore, toaccelerate this research, we propose a newzero-shot transfer VQA(ZST-VQA)dataset by reorganizing the existing VQA v1.0 dataset in the way that duringtraining, some words appear only in one module (i.e. questions) but not in theother (i.e. answers). In this setting, an intelligent model should understand andlearn the concepts from one module (i.e. questions), and at test time, transfer themto the other (i.e. predict the concepts as answers). We conduct evaluation on thisnew dataset using three existing state-of-the-art VQA neural models. Experimentalresults show a significant drop in performance on this dataset, indicating existingmethods do not address the zero-shot transfer problem. Besides, our analysis findsthat this may be caused by the implicit bias learned during training.