Keywords: abstract rules, out-of-distribution generalization, external memory, indirection, variable binding
Abstract: A key aspect of human intelligence is the ability to infer abstract rules directly from high-dimensional sensory data, and to do so given only a limited amount of training experience. Deep neural network algorithms have proven to be a powerful tool for learning directly from high-dimensional data, but currently lack this capacity for data-efficient induction of abstract rules, leading some to argue that symbol-processing mechanisms will be necessary to account for this capacity. In this work, we take a step toward bridging this gap by introducing the Emergent Symbol Binding Network (ESBN), a recurrent network augmented with an external memory that enables a form of variable-binding and indirection. This binding mechanism allows symbol-like representations to emerge through the learning process without the need to explicitly incorporate symbol-processing machinery, enabling the ESBN to learn rules in a manner that is abstracted away from the particular entities to which those rules apply. Across a series of tasks, we show that this architecture displays nearly perfect generalization of learned rules to novel entities given only a limited number of training examples, and outperforms a number of other competitive neural network architectures.
One-sentence Summary: We introduce a new architecture, the Emergent Symbol Binding Network, that enables rapid learning of abstract rules and strong generalization of those rules to novel entities.
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Code: [![github](/images/github_icon.svg) taylorwwebb/emergent_symbols](https://github.com/taylorwwebb/emergent_symbols) + [![Papers with Code](/images/pwc_icon.svg) 1 community implementation](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/?openreview=LSFCEb3GYU7)
Data: [RAVEN](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/raven)
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2012.14601/code)
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