July 10, 2018
Humans can understand and produce new utterances effortlessly, thanks to their compositional skills. Once a person learns the meaning of a new verb “dax,” he or she can immediately understand the meaning of “dax twice” or “sing and dax.” In this paper, we introduce the SCAN domain, consisting of a set of simple compositional navigation commands paired with the corresponding action sequences. We then test the zero-shot generalization capabilities of a variety of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on SCAN with sequence-to-sequence methods. We find that RNNs can make successful zero-shot generalizations when the differences between training and test commands are small, so that they can apply “mix-and-match” strategies to solve the task. However, when generalization requires systematic compositional skills (as in the “dax” example above), RNNs fail spectacularly. We conclude with a proof-of-concept experiment in neural machine translation, suggesting that lack of systematicity might be partially responsible for neural networks’ notorious training data thirst.
Written by
Marco Baroni
Brenden Lake
Publisher
ICML
July 23, 2024
Llama team
July 23, 2024
June 25, 2024
Elena Voita, Javier Ferrando Monsonis, Christoforos Nalmpantis
June 25, 2024
June 25, 2024
Min-Jae Hwang, Ilia Kulikov, Benjamin Peloquin, Hongyu Gong, Peng-Jen Chen, Ann Lee
June 25, 2024
June 14, 2024
Sheng-Chieh Lin, Akari Asai, Minghan Li, Barlas Oguz, Jimmy Lin, Scott Yih, Xilun Chen
June 14, 2024
Product experiences
Foundational models
Product experiences
Latest news
Foundational models