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Deep neural networks drive the success of natural language processing. A fundamental property of language is its compositional structure, allowing humans to systematically produce forms for new meanings. For humans, languages with more…
Neural networks are nowadays highly successful despite strong hardness results. The existing hardness results focus on the network architecture, and assume that the network's weights are arbitrary. A natural approach to settle the…
Controlled generation refers to the problem of creating text that contains stylistic or semantic attributes of interest. Many approaches reduce this problem to training a predictor of the desired attribute. For example, researchers hoping…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly being studied as models of human language learners. Due to the nascency of the field, it is not well-established whether LMs exhibit similar learning dynamics to humans, and there are few direct…
The probing methodology allows one to obtain a partial representation of linguistic phenomena stored in the inner layers of the neural network, using external classifiers and statistical analysis. Pre-trained transformer-based language…
People use rich prior knowledge about the world in order to efficiently learn new concepts. These priors - also known as "inductive biases" - pertain to the space of internal models considered by a learner, and they help the learner make…
Continual learning is the problem of learning and retaining knowledge through time over multiple tasks and environments. Research has primarily focused on the incremental classification setting, where new tasks/classes are added at discrete…
How can we learn a classifier that is "fair" for a protected or sensitive group, when we do not know if the input to the classifier belongs to the protected group? How can we train such a classifier when data on the protected group is…
One hypothesis for the success of deep neural networks (DNNs) is that they are highly expressive, which enables them to be applied to many problems, and they have a strong inductive bias towards solutions that are simple, known as…
How do learners acquire languages from the limited data available to them? This process must involve some inductive biases - factors that affect how a learner generalizes - but it is unclear which inductive biases can explain observed…
Neural networks trained on visual data are well-known to be vulnerable to often imperceptible adversarial perturbations. The reasons for this vulnerability are still being debated in the literature. Recently Ilyas et al. (2019) showed that…
Regularization occurs when the output a learner produces is less variable than the linguistic data they observed. In an artificial language learning experiment, we show that there exist at least two independent sources of regularization…
The problem of designing learners that provide guarantees that their predictions are provably correct is of increasing importance in machine learning. However, learning theoretic guarantees have only been considered in very specific…
Speakers' referential expressions often depart from communicative ideals in ways that help illuminate the nature of pragmatic language use. Patterns of overmodification, in which a speaker uses a modifier that is redundant given their…
Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…
Neural networks are not learning optimal decision boundaries. We show that decision boundaries are situated in areas of low training data density. They are impacted by few training samples which can easily lead to overfitting. We provide a…
Recent research has seen many behavioral comparisons between humans and deep neural networks (DNNs) in the domain of image classification. Often, comparison studies focus on the end-result of the learning process by measuring and comparing…
Recent empirical work has shown that human children are adept at learning and reasoning with probabilities. Here, we model a recent experiment investigating the development of school-age children's non-symbolic probability reasoning ability…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have gained considerable attention in the past decades due to their astounding performance in different applications, such as natural language modeling, self-driving assistance, and source code understanding.…
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…