Dreaming Learning

Alessandro Londei, Matteo Benati, Denise Lanzieri, Vittorio Loreto

Track: Full track

Keywords: Adjacent Possible, exploration-exploitation, regime shift, space of novelties, data augmentation

TL;DR: Exploring the adjacent possible facilitates neural networks to include regime shift in non-stationary data.

Abstract: Incorporating novelties into deep learning systems remains a challenging problem. Introducing new information to a machine learning system can interfere with previously stored data and potentially alter the global model paradigm, especially when dealing with non-stationary sources. In such cases, traditional approaches based on validation error minimization offer limited advantages. To address this, we propose a training algorithm inspired by Stuart Kauffman’s notion of the Adjacent Possible. This novel training methodology explores new data spaces during the learning phase. It predisposes the neural network to smoothly accept and integrate data sequences with different statistical characteristics than expected. The maximum distance compatible with such inclusion depends on a specific parameter: the sampling temperature used in the explorative phase of the present method. This algorithm, called Dreaming Learning, anticipates potential paradigm shifts over time, enhancing the neural network’s responsiveness to non-stationary events that alter statistical properties. To assess the advantages of this approach, we apply this methodology to paradigm shift events in Markov chains and non-stationary textual sequences. We demonstrated its ability to improve the auto-correlation of generated textual sequences by $\sim$ 29\% and enhance the velocity of loss convergence by $\sim$ 100\% in the case of a paradigm shift in Markov chains.

Submission Number: 20