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id="order" name="order"><option selected value="-announced_date_first">Announcement date (newest first)</option><option value="announced_date_first">Announcement date (oldest first)</option><option value="-submitted_date">Submission date (newest first)</option><option value="submitted_date">Submission date (oldest first)</option><option value="">Relevance</option></select> </span> </div> <div class="control"> <button class="button is-small is-link">Go</button> </div> </div> </form> </div> </div> <ol class="breathe-horizontal" start="1"> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06751">arXiv:2502.06751</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06751">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2502.06751">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Artificial Intelligence">cs.AI</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Social and Information Networks">cs.SI</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">stat.ML</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> What makes a good feedforward computational graph? </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Ara%C3%BAjo%2C+J+G+M">Jo茫o G. M. Ara煤jo</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Lackenby%2C+M">Marc Lackenby</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Veli%C4%8Dkovi%C4%87%2C+P">Petar Veli膷kovi膰</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2502.06751v1-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> As implied by the plethora of literature on graph rewiring, the choice of computational graph employed by a neural network can make a significant impact on its downstream performance. Certain effects related to the computational graph, such as under-reaching and over-squashing, may even render the model incapable of learning certain functions. Most of these effects have only been thoroughly studie… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2502.06751v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2502.06751v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2502.06751v1-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> As implied by the plethora of literature on graph rewiring, the choice of computational graph employed by a neural network can make a significant impact on its downstream performance. Certain effects related to the computational graph, such as under-reaching and over-squashing, may even render the model incapable of learning certain functions. Most of these effects have only been thoroughly studied in the domain of undirected graphs; however, recent years have seen a significant rise in interest in feedforward computational graphs: directed graphs without any back edges. In this paper, we study the desirable properties of a feedforward computational graph, discovering two important complementary measures: fidelity and mixing time, and evaluating a few popular choices of graphs through the lens of these measures. Our study is backed by both theoretical analyses of the metrics' asymptotic behaviour for various graphs, as well as correlating these metrics to the performance of trained neural network models using the corresponding graphs. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2502.06751v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2502.06751v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 10 February, 2025; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> February 2025. </p> <p class="comments is-size-7"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Comments:</span> <span class="has-text-grey-dark mathjax">Work in progress -- comments welcome. 16 pages, 7 figures</span> </p> </li> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.19744">arXiv:2411.19744</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.19744">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2411.19744">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Artificial Intelligence">cs.AI</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Neural and Evolutionary Computing">cs.NE</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Programming Languages">cs.PL</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> Amplifying human performance in combinatorial competitive programming </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Veli%C4%8Dkovi%C4%87%2C+P">Petar Veli膷kovi膰</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Markeeva%2C+L">Larisa Markeeva</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Ibarz%2C+B">Borja Ibarz</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Buesing%2C+L">Lars Buesing</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Balog%2C+M">Matej Balog</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Novikov%2C+A">Alexander Novikov</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2411.19744v1-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> Recent years have seen a significant surge in complex AI systems for competitive programming, capable of performing at admirable levels against human competitors. While steady progress has been made, the highest percentiles still remain out of reach for these methods on standard competition platforms such as Codeforces. Here we instead focus on combinatorial competitive programming, where the targ… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2411.19744v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2411.19744v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2411.19744v1-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> Recent years have seen a significant surge in complex AI systems for competitive programming, capable of performing at admirable levels against human competitors. While steady progress has been made, the highest percentiles still remain out of reach for these methods on standard competition platforms such as Codeforces. Here we instead focus on combinatorial competitive programming, where the target is to find as-good-as-possible solutions to otherwise computationally intractable problems, over specific given inputs. We hypothesise that this scenario offers a unique testbed for human-AI synergy, as human programmers can write a backbone of a heuristic solution, after which AI can be used to optimise the scoring function used by the heuristic. We deploy our approach on previous iterations of Hash Code, a global team programming competition inspired by NP-hard software engineering problems at Google, and we leverage FunSearch to evolve our scoring functions. Our evolved solutions significantly improve the attained scores from their baseline, successfully breaking into the top percentile on all previous Hash Code online qualification rounds, and outperforming the top human teams on several. Our method is also performant on an optimisation problem that featured in a recent held-out AtCoder contest. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2411.19744v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2411.19744v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 29 November, 2024; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> November 2024. </p> <p class="comments is-size-7"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Comments:</span> <span class="has-text-grey-dark mathjax">Technical report. 18 pages, 8 figures</span> </p> </li> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06205">arXiv:2410.06205</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06205">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2410.06205">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Computation and Language">cs.CL</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> Round and Round We Go! What makes Rotary Positional Encodings useful? </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Barbero%2C+F">Federico Barbero</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Perivolaropoulos%2C+C">Christos Perivolaropoulos</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Pascanu%2C+R">Razvan Pascanu</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Veli%C4%8Dkovi%C4%87%2C+P">Petar Veli膷kovi膰</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2410.06205v2-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> Positional Encodings (PEs) are a critical component of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs), providing the attention mechanism with important sequence-position information. One of the most popular types of encoding used today in LLMs are Rotary Positional Encodings (RoPE), that rotate the queries and keys based on their relative distance. A common belief is that RoPE is useful because it… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2410.06205v2-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2410.06205v2-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2410.06205v2-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> Positional Encodings (PEs) are a critical component of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs), providing the attention mechanism with important sequence-position information. One of the most popular types of encoding used today in LLMs are Rotary Positional Encodings (RoPE), that rotate the queries and keys based on their relative distance. A common belief is that RoPE is useful because it helps to decay token dependency as relative distance increases. In this work, we argue that this is unlikely to be the core reason. We study the internals of a trained Gemma 7B model to understand how RoPE is being used at a mechanical level. We find that Gemma learns to use RoPE to construct robust "positional" attention patterns by exploiting the highest frequencies. We also find that, in general, Gemma greatly prefers to use the lowest frequencies of RoPE, which we suspect are used to carry semantic information. We mathematically prove interesting behaviours of RoPE and conduct experiments to verify our findings, proposing a modification of RoPE that fixes some highlighted issues and improves performance. We believe that this work represents an interesting step in better understanding PEs in LLMs, which we believe holds crucial value for scaling LLMs to large sizes and context lengths. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2410.06205v2-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2410.06205v2-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 26 February, 2025; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">v1</span> submitted 8 October, 2024; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> October 2024. </p> </li> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09308">arXiv:2406.09308</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.09308">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2406.09308">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Computation and Language">cs.CL</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> Transformers meet Neural Algorithmic Reasoners </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Bounsi%2C+W">Wilfried Bounsi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Ibarz%2C+B">Borja Ibarz</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Dudzik%2C+A">Andrew Dudzik</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Hamrick%2C+J+B">Jessica B. Hamrick</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Markeeva%2C+L">Larisa Markeeva</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Pascanu%2C+R">Razvan Pascanu</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Veli%C4%8Dkovi%C4%87%2C+P">Petar Veli膷kovi膰</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2406.09308v1-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> Transformers have revolutionized machine learning with their simple yet effective architecture. Pre-training Transformers on massive text datasets from the Internet has led to unmatched generalization for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. However, such language models remain fragile when tasked with algorithmic forms of reasoning, where computations must be precise and robust. To address… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2406.09308v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2406.09308v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2406.09308v1-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> Transformers have revolutionized machine learning with their simple yet effective architecture. Pre-training Transformers on massive text datasets from the Internet has led to unmatched generalization for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. However, such language models remain fragile when tasked with algorithmic forms of reasoning, where computations must be precise and robust. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach that combines the Transformer's language understanding with the robustness of graph neural network (GNN)-based neural algorithmic reasoners (NARs). Such NARs proved effective as generic solvers for algorithmic tasks, when specified in graph form. To make their embeddings accessible to a Transformer, we propose a hybrid architecture with a two-phase training procedure, allowing the tokens in the language model to cross-attend to the node embeddings from the NAR. We evaluate our resulting TransNAR model on CLRS-Text, the text-based version of the CLRS-30 benchmark, and demonstrate significant gains over Transformer-only models for algorithmic reasoning, both in and out of distribution. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2406.09308v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2406.09308v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 13 June, 2024; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> June 2024. </p> <p class="comments is-size-7"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Comments:</span> <span class="has-text-grey-dark mathjax">To appear at CVPR 2024 Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) Workshop. 10 pages, 5 figures</span> </p> </li> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04267">arXiv:2406.04267</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.04267">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2406.04267">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Computation and Language">cs.CL</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> Transformers need glasses! Information over-squashing in language tasks </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Barbero%2C+F">Federico Barbero</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Banino%2C+A">Andrea Banino</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Kapturowski%2C+S">Steven Kapturowski</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Kumaran%2C+D">Dharshan Kumaran</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Ara%C3%BAjo%2C+J+G+M">Jo茫o G. M. Ara煤jo</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Pascanu%2C+R">Razvan Pascanu</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Veli%C4%8Dkovi%C4%87%2C+P">Petar Veli膷kovi膰</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2406.04267v2-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> We study how information propagates in decoder-only Transformers, which are the architectural backbone of most existing frontier large language models (LLMs). We rely on a theoretical signal propagation analysis -- specifically, we analyse the representations of the last token in the final layer of the Transformer, as this is the representation used for next-token prediction. Our analysis reveals… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2406.04267v2-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2406.04267v2-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2406.04267v2-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> We study how information propagates in decoder-only Transformers, which are the architectural backbone of most existing frontier large language models (LLMs). We rely on a theoretical signal propagation analysis -- specifically, we analyse the representations of the last token in the final layer of the Transformer, as this is the representation used for next-token prediction. Our analysis reveals a representational collapse phenomenon: we prove that certain distinct sequences of inputs to the Transformer can yield arbitrarily close representations in the final token. This effect is exacerbated by the low-precision floating-point formats frequently used in modern LLMs. As a result, the model is provably unable to respond to these sequences in different ways -- leading to errors in, e.g., tasks involving counting or copying. Further, we show that decoder-only Transformer language models can lose sensitivity to specific tokens in the input, which relates to the well-known phenomenon of over-squashing in graph neural networks. We provide empirical evidence supporting our claims on contemporary LLMs. Our theory also points to simple solutions towards ameliorating these issues. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2406.04267v2-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2406.04267v2-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 24 October, 2024; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">v1</span> submitted 6 June, 2024; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> June 2024. </p> </li> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04229">arXiv:2406.04229</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.04229">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2406.04229">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Artificial Intelligence">cs.AI</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Computation and Language">cs.CL</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Data Structures and Algorithms">cs.DS</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">stat.ML</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> The CLRS-Text Algorithmic Reasoning Language Benchmark </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Markeeva%2C+L">Larisa Markeeva</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=McLeish%2C+S">Sean McLeish</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Ibarz%2C+B">Borja Ibarz</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Bounsi%2C+W">Wilfried Bounsi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Kozlova%2C+O">Olga Kozlova</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Blundell%2C+C">Charles Blundell</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Goldstein%2C+T">Tom Goldstein</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Schwarzschild%2C+A">Avi Schwarzschild</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Veli%C4%8Dkovi%C4%87%2C+P">Petar Veli膷kovi膰</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2406.04229v1-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> Eliciting reasoning capabilities from language models (LMs) is a critical direction on the path towards building intelligent systems. Most recent studies dedicated to reasoning focus on out-of-distribution performance on procedurally-generated synthetic benchmarks, bespoke-built to evaluate specific skills only. This trend makes results hard to transfer across publications, slowing down progress.… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2406.04229v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2406.04229v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2406.04229v1-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> Eliciting reasoning capabilities from language models (LMs) is a critical direction on the path towards building intelligent systems. Most recent studies dedicated to reasoning focus on out-of-distribution performance on procedurally-generated synthetic benchmarks, bespoke-built to evaluate specific skills only. This trend makes results hard to transfer across publications, slowing down progress. Three years ago, a similar issue was identified and rectified in the field of neural algorithmic reasoning, with the advent of the CLRS benchmark. CLRS is a dataset generator comprising graph execution traces of classical algorithms from the Introduction to Algorithms textbook. Inspired by this, we propose CLRS-Text -- a textual version of these algorithmic traces. Out of the box, CLRS-Text is capable of procedurally generating trace data for thirty diverse, challenging algorithmic tasks across any desirable input distribution, while offering a standard pipeline in which any additional algorithmic tasks may be created in the benchmark. We fine-tune and evaluate various LMs as generalist executors on this benchmark, validating prior work and revealing a novel, interesting challenge for the LM reasoning community. Our code is available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/clrs/tree/master/clrs/_src/clrs_text. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2406.04229v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2406.04229v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 6 June, 2024; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> June 2024. </p> <p class="comments is-size-7"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Comments:</span> <span class="has-text-grey-dark mathjax">Preprint, under review. Comments welcome</span> </p> </li> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11142">arXiv:2209.11142</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.11142">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2209.11142">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Artificial Intelligence">cs.AI</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">stat.ML</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> A Generalist Neural Algorithmic Learner </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Ibarz%2C+B">Borja Ibarz</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Kurin%2C+V">Vitaly Kurin</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Papamakarios%2C+G">George Papamakarios</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Nikiforou%2C+K">Kyriacos Nikiforou</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Bennani%2C+M">Mehdi Bennani</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Csord%C3%A1s%2C+R">R贸bert Csord谩s</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Dudzik%2C+A">Andrew Dudzik</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Bo%C5%A1njak%2C+M">Matko Bo拧njak</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Rubanova%2C+Y">Yulia Rubanova</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Deac%2C+A">Andreea Deac</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Bevilacqua%2C+B">Beatrice Bevilacqua</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Ganin%2C+Y">Yaroslav Ganin</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Blundell%2C+C">Charles Blundell</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Veli%C4%8Dkovi%C4%87%2C+P">Petar Veli膷kovi膰</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2209.11142v2-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> The cornerstone of neural algorithmic reasoning is the ability to solve algorithmic tasks, especially in a way that generalises out of distribution. While recent years have seen a surge in methodological improvements in this area, they mostly focused on building specialist models. Specialist models are capable of learning to neurally execute either only one algorithm or a collection of algorithms… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2209.11142v2-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2209.11142v2-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2209.11142v2-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> The cornerstone of neural algorithmic reasoning is the ability to solve algorithmic tasks, especially in a way that generalises out of distribution. While recent years have seen a surge in methodological improvements in this area, they mostly focused on building specialist models. Specialist models are capable of learning to neurally execute either only one algorithm or a collection of algorithms with identical control-flow backbone. Here, instead, we focus on constructing a generalist neural algorithmic learner -- a single graph neural network processor capable of learning to execute a wide range of algorithms, such as sorting, searching, dynamic programming, path-finding and geometry. We leverage the CLRS benchmark to empirically show that, much like recent successes in the domain of perception, generalist algorithmic learners can be built by "incorporating" knowledge. That is, it is possible to effectively learn algorithms in a multi-task manner, so long as we can learn to execute them well in a single-task regime. Motivated by this, we present a series of improvements to the input representation, training regime and processor architecture over CLRS, improving average single-task performance by over 20% from prior art. We then conduct a thorough ablation of multi-task learners leveraging these improvements. Our results demonstrate a generalist learner that effectively incorporates knowledge captured by specialist models. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2209.11142v2-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2209.11142v2-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 3 December, 2022; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">v1</span> submitted 22 September, 2022; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> September 2022. </p> <p class="comments is-size-7"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Comments:</span> <span class="has-text-grey-dark mathjax">To appear at LoG 2022 (Spotlight talk). 23 pages, 11 figures</span> </p> </li> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.13515">arXiv:2102.13515</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.13515">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2102.13515">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Artificial Intelligence">cs.AI</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">stat.ML</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> Beyond Fine-Tuning: Transferring Behavior in Reinforcement Learning </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Campos%2C+V">V铆ctor Campos</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Sprechmann%2C+P">Pablo Sprechmann</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Hansen%2C+S">Steven Hansen</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Barreto%2C+A">Andre Barreto</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Kapturowski%2C+S">Steven Kapturowski</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Badia%2C+A+P">Adri脿 Puigdom猫nech Badia</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Blundell%2C+C">Charles Blundell</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2102.13515v3-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> Designing agents that acquire knowledge autonomously and use it to solve new tasks efficiently is an important challenge in reinforcement learning. Knowledge acquired during an unsupervised pre-training phase is often transferred by fine-tuning neural network weights once rewards are exposed, as is common practice in supervised domains. Given the nature of the reinforcement learning problem, we ar… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2102.13515v3-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2102.13515v3-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2102.13515v3-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> Designing agents that acquire knowledge autonomously and use it to solve new tasks efficiently is an important challenge in reinforcement learning. Knowledge acquired during an unsupervised pre-training phase is often transferred by fine-tuning neural network weights once rewards are exposed, as is common practice in supervised domains. Given the nature of the reinforcement learning problem, we argue that standard fine-tuning strategies alone are not enough for efficient transfer in challenging domains. We introduce Behavior Transfer (BT), a technique that leverages pre-trained policies for exploration and that is complementary to transferring neural network weights. Our experiments show that, when combined with large-scale pre-training in the absence of rewards, existing intrinsic motivation objectives can lead to the emergence of complex behaviors. These pre-trained policies can then be leveraged by BT to discover better solutions than without pre-training, and combining BT with standard fine-tuning strategies results in additional benefits. The largest gains are generally observed in domains requiring structured exploration, including settings where the behavior of the pre-trained policies is misaligned with the downstream task. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2102.13515v3-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2102.13515v3-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 8 June, 2021; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">v1</span> submitted 24 February, 2021; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> February 2021. </p> </li> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13350">arXiv:2003.13350</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.13350">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2003.13350">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">stat.ML</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> Agent57: Outperforming the Atari Human Benchmark </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Badia%2C+A+P">Adri脿 Puigdom猫nech Badia</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Piot%2C+B">Bilal Piot</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Kapturowski%2C+S">Steven Kapturowski</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Sprechmann%2C+P">Pablo Sprechmann</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Guo%2C+D">Daniel Guo</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Blundell%2C+C">Charles Blundell</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2003.13350v1-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> Atari games have been a long-standing benchmark in the reinforcement learning (RL) community for the past decade. This benchmark was proposed to test general competency of RL algorithms. Previous work has achieved good average performance by doing outstandingly well on many games of the set, but very poorly in several of the most challenging games. We propose Agent57, the first deep RL agent that… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2003.13350v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2003.13350v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2003.13350v1-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> Atari games have been a long-standing benchmark in the reinforcement learning (RL) community for the past decade. This benchmark was proposed to test general competency of RL algorithms. Previous work has achieved good average performance by doing outstandingly well on many games of the set, but very poorly in several of the most challenging games. We propose Agent57, the first deep RL agent that outperforms the standard human benchmark on all 57 Atari games. To achieve this result, we train a neural network which parameterizes a family of policies ranging from very exploratory to purely exploitative. We propose an adaptive mechanism to choose which policy to prioritize throughout the training process. Additionally, we utilize a novel parameterization of the architecture that allows for more consistent and stable learning. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2003.13350v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2003.13350v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 30 March, 2020; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> March 2020. </p> </li> <li class="arxiv-result"> <div class="is-marginless"> <p class="list-title is-inline-block"><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06038">arXiv:2002.06038</a> <span> [<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.06038">pdf</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/format/2002.06038">other</a>] </span> </p> <div class="tags is-inline-block"> <span class="tag is-small is-link tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">cs.LG</span> <span class="tag is-small is-grey tooltip is-tooltip-top" data-tooltip="Machine Learning">stat.ML</span> </div> </div> <p class="title is-5 mathjax"> Never Give Up: Learning Directed Exploration Strategies </p> <p class="authors"> <span class="search-hit">Authors:</span> <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Badia%2C+A+P">Adri脿 Puigdom猫nech Badia</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Sprechmann%2C+P">Pablo Sprechmann</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Vitvitskyi%2C+A">Alex Vitvitskyi</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Guo%2C+D">Daniel Guo</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Piot%2C+B">Bilal Piot</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Kapturowski%2C+S">Steven Kapturowski</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Tieleman%2C+O">Olivier Tieleman</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Arjovsky%2C+M">Mart铆n Arjovsky</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Pritzel%2C+A">Alexander Pritzel</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Bolt%2C+A">Andew Bolt</a>, <a href="/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Blundell%2C+C">Charles Blundell</a> </p> <p class="abstract mathjax"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Abstract</span>: <span class="abstract-short has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2002.06038v1-abstract-short" style="display: inline;"> We propose a reinforcement learning agent to solve hard exploration games by learning a range of directed exploratory policies. We construct an episodic memory-based intrinsic reward using k-nearest neighbors over the agent's recent experience to train the directed exploratory policies, thereby encouraging the agent to repeatedly revisit all states in its environment. A self-supervised inverse dyn… <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2002.06038v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'inline'; document.getElementById('2002.06038v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'none';">▽ More</a> </span> <span class="abstract-full has-text-grey-dark mathjax" id="2002.06038v1-abstract-full" style="display: none;"> We propose a reinforcement learning agent to solve hard exploration games by learning a range of directed exploratory policies. We construct an episodic memory-based intrinsic reward using k-nearest neighbors over the agent's recent experience to train the directed exploratory policies, thereby encouraging the agent to repeatedly revisit all states in its environment. A self-supervised inverse dynamics model is used to train the embeddings of the nearest neighbour lookup, biasing the novelty signal towards what the agent can control. We employ the framework of Universal Value Function Approximators (UVFA) to simultaneously learn many directed exploration policies with the same neural network, with different trade-offs between exploration and exploitation. By using the same neural network for different degrees of exploration/exploitation, transfer is demonstrated from predominantly exploratory policies yielding effective exploitative policies. The proposed method can be incorporated to run with modern distributed RL agents that collect large amounts of experience from many actors running in parallel on separate environment instances. Our method doubles the performance of the base agent in all hard exploration in the Atari-57 suite while maintaining a very high score across the remaining games, obtaining a median human normalised score of 1344.0%. Notably, the proposed method is the first algorithm to achieve non-zero rewards (with a mean score of 8,400) in the game of Pitfall! without using demonstrations or hand-crafted features. <a class="is-size-7" style="white-space: nowrap;" onclick="document.getElementById('2002.06038v1-abstract-full').style.display = 'none'; document.getElementById('2002.06038v1-abstract-short').style.display = 'inline';">△ Less</a> </span> </p> <p class="is-size-7"><span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Submitted</span> 14 February, 2020; <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">originally announced</span> February 2020. </p> <p class="comments is-size-7"> <span class="has-text-black-bis has-text-weight-semibold">Comments:</span> <span class="has-text-grey-dark mathjax">Published as a conference paper in ICLR 2020</span> </p> </li> </ol> <div class="is-hidden-tablet"> <!-- feedback for mobile only --> <span class="help" style="display: inline-block;"><a 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