Using natural language and program abstractions to instill human inductive biases in machinesDownload PDF

Published: 31 Oct 2022, Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023NeurIPS 2022 AcceptReaders: Everyone
Keywords: meta-learning, program induction, natural language, reinforcement learning, human intelligence, cognitive science
TL;DR: We show how meta-learning agents can learn human inductive biases through co-training with representations from language descriptions and program induction.
Abstract: Strong inductive biases give humans the ability to quickly learn to perform a variety of tasks. Although meta-learning is a method to endow neural networks with useful inductive biases, agents trained by meta-learning may sometimes acquire very different strategies from humans. We show that co-training these agents on predicting representations from natural language task descriptions and programs induced to generate such tasks guides them toward more human-like inductive biases. Human-generated language descriptions and program induction models that add new learned primitives both contain abstract concepts that can compress description length. Co-training on these representations result in more human-like behavior in downstream meta-reinforcement learning agents than less abstract controls (synthetic language descriptions, program induction without learned primitives), suggesting that the abstraction supported by these representations is key.
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