Compositional generalization through abstract representations in human and artificial neural networks
Humans have a remarkable ability to rapidly generalize to new tasks that is difficult to reproduce in artificial learning systems. Compositionality has been proposed as a key mechanism supporting generalization in humans, but evidence of its neural implementation and impact on behavior is still scarce. Here we study the computational properties associated with compositional generalization in both humans and artificial neural networks (ANNs) on a highly compositional task. First, we identified behavioral signatures of compositional generalization in humans, along with their neural correlates using whole-cortex functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Next, we designed pretraining paradigms aided by a procedure we term {\em primitives pretraining} to endow compositional task elements into ANNs. We found that ANNs with this prior knowledge had greater correspondence with human behavior and neural compositional signatures. Importantly, primitives pretraining induced abstract internal representations, excellent zero-shot generalization, and sample-efficient learning. Moreover, it gave rise to a hierarchy of abstract representations that matched human fMRI data, where sensory rule abstractions emerged in early sensory areas, and motor rule abstractions emerged in later motor areas. Our findings give empirical support to the role of compositional generalization in human behavior, implicate abstract representations as its neural implementation, and illustrate that these representations can be embedded into ANNs by designing simple and efficient pretraining procedures.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Zero-shot GeneralizationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
A Relational Inductive Bias for Dimensional Abstraction in Neural Networks
The human cognitive system exhibits remarkable flexibility and generalization capabilities, partly due to its ability to form low-dimensional, compositional representations of the environment. In contrast, standard neura…
Inductive BiasZero-Shot Policy Transfer with Disentangled Task Representation of Meta-Reinforcement Learning
Humans are capable of abstracting various tasks as different combinations of multiple attributes. This perspective of compositionality is vital for human rapid learning and adaption since previous experiences from relate…
DisentanglementMeta Reinforcement Learningreinforcement-learningReinforcement Learning (RL)Provable Compositional Generalization for Object-Centric Learning
Learning representations that generalize to novel compositions of known concepts is crucial for bridging the gap between human and machine perception. One prominent effort is learning object-centric representations, whic…
DecoderObjectCompositional Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning
We study structured abstraction-based reasoning for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) and compare its generalization to test-time approaches. Purely neural architectures lack reliable combinatorial generalizatio…
Reinforcement LearningCompositional Generalization Requires More Than Disentangled Representations
Composition-the ability to generate myriad variations from finite means-is believed to underlie powerful generalization. However, compositional generalization remains a key challenge for deep learning. A widely held assu…
Memorization