Recurrent Independent Mechanisms

Anirudh Goyal, Alex Lamb, Shagun Sodhani, Jordan Hoffmann, Sergey Levine, Yoshua Bengio, Bernhard Scholkopf

TL;DR: Learning recurrent mechanisms which operate independently, and sparingly interact can lead to better generalization to out of distribution samples.

Abstract: Learning modular structures which reflect the dynamics of the environment can lead to better generalization and robustness to changes which only affect a few of the underlying causes. We propose Recurrent Independent Mechanisms (RIMs), a new recurrent architecture in which multiple groups of recurrent cells operate with nearly independent transition dynamics, communicate only sparingly through the bottleneck of attention, and are only updated at time steps where they are most relevant. We show that this leads to specialization amongst the RIMs, which in turn allows for dramatically improved generalization on tasks where some factors of variation differ systematically between training and evaluation.

Keywords: modular representations, better generalization, learning mechanisms

Community Implementations: [ 4 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1909.10893/code)