Neural Language of Thought Models
Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics.
Keywords: unsupervised object-centric learning, discrete representations
Submission Guidelines: I certify that this submission complies with the submission instructions as described on https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2024/AuthorGuide.
TL;DR: We introduce a model that can obtain semantic discrete representations of a visual scene.
Abstract: The Language of Thought Hypothesis suggests that human cognition operates on a structured, language-like system of mental representations. While neural language models can naturally benefit from the compositional structure inherently and explicitly expressed in language data, learning such representations from non-linguistic general observations, like images, remains a challenge. In this work, we introduce the Neural Language of Thought Model (NLoTM), a novel approach for unsupervised learning of LoTH-inspired representation and generation. NLoTM comprises two key components: (1) the Semantic Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoder, which learns hierarchical, composable discrete representations aligned with objects and their properties, and (2) the Autoregressive LoT Prior, an autoregressive transformer that learns to generate semantic concept tokens compositionally, capturing the underlying data distribution. We evaluate NLoTM on several 2D and 3D image datasets, demonstrating superior performance in downstream tasks, out-of-distribution generalization, and image generation quality compared to patch-based VQ-VAE and continuous object-centric representations. Our work presents a significant step towards creating neural networks exhibiting more human-like understanding by developing LoT-like representations and offers insights into the intersection of cognitive science and machine learning.
Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors' identity.
No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.
Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning
Submission Number: 7823
Loading