Related papers: When Do Neural Networks Learn World Models?
Understanding how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can efficiently learn high-dimensional functions remains a fundamental challenge. A popular belief is that these models harness the local and hierarchical structure of natural data such…
The ability of humans and animals to quickly adapt to novel tasks is difficult to reconcile with the standard paradigm of learning by slow synaptic weight modification. Here we show that fixed-weight neural networks can learn to generate…
We study the relationship between the frequency of a function and the speed at which a neural network learns it. We build on recent results that show that the dynamics of overparameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent can…
Supervised training of neural networks for classification is typically performed with a global loss function. The loss function provides a gradient for the output layer, and this gradient is back-propagated to hidden layers to dictate an…
Human reasoning involves recognising common underlying principles across many examples. The by-products of such reasoning are invariants that capture patterns such as "if someone went somewhere then they are there", expressed using…
An increasingly popular machine learning paradigm is to pretrain a neural network (NN) on many tasks offline, then adapt it to downstream tasks, often by re-training only the last linear layer of the network. This approach yields strong…
In this paper the problem of learning appropriate bias for an environment of related tasks is examined from a Bayesian perspective. The environment of related tasks is shown to be naturally modelled by the concept of an {\em objective}…
Exploiting data invariances is crucial for efficient learning in both artificial and biological neural circuits. Understanding how neural networks can discover appropriate representations capable of harnessing the underlying symmetries of…
While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have come to match and exceed human performance in many settings, the tasks these models optimize for are largely constrained to the level of individual objects, such as classification and…
When using deep, multi-layered architectures to build generative models of data, it is difficult to train all layers at once. We propose a layer-wise training procedure admitting a performance guarantee compared to the global optimum. It is…
The learning trajectories of linguistic phenomena in humans provide insight into linguistic representation, beyond what can be gleaned from inspecting the behavior of an adult speaker. To apply a similar approach to analyze neural language…
Logic-based problems such as planning, theorem proving, or puzzles, typically involve combinatoric search and structured knowledge representation. Artificial neural networks are very successful statistical learners, however, for many years,…
Bayesian inference promises a framework for principled uncertainty quantification of neural network predictions. Barriers to adoption include the difficulty of fully characterizing posterior distributions on network parameters and the…
Deep learning has received considerable empirical successes in recent years. However, while many ad hoc tricks have been discovered by practitioners, until recently, there has been a lack of theoretical understanding for tricks invented in…
Do neural network models of vision learn brain-aligned representations because they share architectural constraints and task objectives with biological vision or because they learn universal features of natural image processing? We…
The advent of transformer-based architectures and large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models. Since these LLMs are trained on huge corpuses of data from the web and…
Neural processes have recently emerged as a class of powerful neural latent variable models that combine the strengths of neural networks and stochastic processes. As they can encode contextual data in the network's function space, they…
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) currently achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in image classification. With a growing number of classes, the accuracy usually drops as the possibilities of confusion increase. Interestingly, the class…
Neural generative models can be used to learn complex probability distributions from data, to sample from them, and to produce probability density estimates. We propose a computational framework for developing neural generative models…
An important characteristic of neural networks is their ability to learn representations of the input data with effective features for prediction, which is believed to be a key factor to their superior empirical performance. To better…