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In this thesis, we try to build a connection between the two schools by introducing syntactic inductive biases for deep learning models. We propose two families of inductive biases, one for constituency structure and another one for…
As humans, we often rely on language to learn language. For example, when corrected in a conversation, we may learn from that correction, over time improving our language fluency. Inspired by this observation, we propose a learning…
A major problem in machine learning is that of inductive bias: how to choose a learner's hypothesis space so that it is large enough to contain a solution to the problem being learnt, yet small enough to ensure reliable generalization from…
Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…
Beginning with McCarthy's Advice Taker (1959), AI has pursued the goal of providing a system with explicit, general knowledge and having the system reason over that knowledge. However, expressing the knowledge in a formal (logical or…
Algorithms of inference in a computer system oriented to input and semantic processing of text information are presented. Such inference is necessary for logical questions when the direct comparison of objects from a question and database…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning, the ability to use information provided as context to improve prediction of future tokens. Induction heads have been argued to play a crucial role for in-context learning in…
While most research in Gold-style learning focuses on learning formal languages, we consider the identification of computable structures, specifically equivalence structures. In our core model the learner gets more and more information…
Modern language models (LMs) can learn to perform new tasks in different ways: in instruction following, the target task is described explicitly in natural language; in few-shot prompting, the task is specified implicitly with a small…
A major target of linguistics and cognitive science has been to understand what class of learning systems can acquire the key structures of natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue…
Humans can quickly learn new behaviors by leveraging background world knowledge. In contrast, agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) typically learn behaviors from scratch. We thus propose a novel approach that uses the vast…
The Transformer architecture has become prominent in developing large causal language models. However, mechanisms to explain its capabilities are not well understood. Focused on the training process, here we establish a meta-learning view…
Language learners must learn the meanings of many thousands of words, despite those words occurring in complex environments in which infinitely many meanings might be inferred by the learner as a word's true meaning. This problem of…
Humans effortlessly "program" one another by communicating goals and desires in natural language. In contrast, humans program robotic behaviours by indicating desired object locations and poses to be achieved, by providing RGB images of…
The popular frameworks for self-supervised learning of speech representations have largely focused on frame-level masked prediction of speech regions. While this has shown promising downstream task performance for speech recognition and…
The substantial growth of online learning, in particular, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), supports research into the development of better models for effective learning. Learner 'confusion' is among one of the identified aspects…
The definition is a common form of human expert knowledge, a building block of formal science and mathematics, a foundation for database theory and is supported in various forms in many knowledge representation and formal specification…
Imitation learning often assumes that demonstrations are close to optimal according to some fixed, but unknown, cost function. However, according to satisficing theory, humans often choose acceptable behavior based on their personal (and…
Recent multi-modal contrastive learning models have demonstrated the ability to learn an embedding space suitable for building strong vision classifiers, by leveraging the rich information in large-scale image-caption datasets. Our work…
A new account of parameter setting during grammatical acquisition is presented in terms of Generalized Categorial Grammar embedded in a default inheritance hierarchy, providing a natural partial ordering on the setting of parameters.…