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Generalisation of structural knowledge in the hippocampal-entorhinal system

Neural Information Processing Systems

A central problem to understanding intelligence is the concept of generalisation. This allows previously learnt structure to be exploited to solve tasks in novel situations differing in their particularities. We take inspiration from neuroscience, specifically the hippocampal-entorhinal system known to be important for generalisation. We propose that to generalise structural knowledge, the representations of the structure of the world, i.e. how entities in the world relate to each other, need to be separated from representations of the entities themselves. We show, under these principles, artificial neural networks embedded with hierarchy and fast Hebbian memory, can learn the statistics of memories and generalise structural knowledge. Spatial neuronal representations mirroring those found in the brain emerge, suggesting spatial cognition is an instance of more general organising principles. We further unify many entorhinal cell types as basis functions for constructing transition graphs, and show these representations effectively utilise memories. We experimentally support model assumptions, showing a preserved relationship between entorhinal grid and hippocampal place cells across environments.


L4: Practical loss-based stepsize adaptation for deep learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a stepsize adaptation scheme for stochastic gradient descent. It operates directly with the loss function and rescales the gradient in order to make fixed predicted progress on the loss. We demonstrate its capabilities by conclusively improving the performance of Adam and Momentum optimizers. The enhanced optimizers with default hyperparameters consistently outperform their constant stepsize counterparts, even the best ones, without a measurable increase in computational cost. The performance is validated on multiple architectures including dense nets, CNNs, ResNets, and the recurrent Differential Neural Computer on classical datasets MNIST, fashion MNIST, CIFAR10 and others.


See and Think: Disentangling Semantic Scene Completion

Neural Information Processing Systems

Semantic scene completion predicts volumetric occupancy and object category of a 3D scene, which helps intelligent agents to understand and interact with the surroundings. In this work, we propose a disentangled framework, sequentially carrying out 2D semantic segmentation, 2D-3D reprojection and 3D semantic scene completion. This three-stage framework has three advantages: (1) explicit semantic segmentation significantly boosts performance; (2) flexible fusion ways of sensor data bring good extensibility; (3) progress in any subtask will promote the holistic performance. Experimental results show that regardless of inputing a single depth or RGB-D, our framework can generate high-quality semantic scene completion, and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both synthetic and real datasets.



Learning Conditional Deformable Templates with Convolutional Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

In these frameworks, templates are constructed using an iterative process of template estimation and alignment, which is often computationally very expensive. Due in part to this shortcoming, most methods compute asingle template for the entire population of images, or a few templates for specific sub-groups of the data.



Alpine glacier holds history dating back to the Romans. And it's melting--fast.

Popular Science

Alpine glacier holds history dating back to the Romans. Scientists are racing to document 6,000 years of history stored inside the WeiรŸseespitze ice cap. The dark surface shows significant melting. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Deep inside the frozen Eastern Alps, the WeiรŸseespitze ice cap (pronounced VICE-zay-shpitt-suh) sits at almost 11,482 feet (3,500 meters) above sea level.



MacNet: Transferring Knowledge from Machine Comprehension to Sequence-to-Sequence Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Machine comprehension (MC) has gained significant popularity over the past few years and it is a coveted goal in the field of natural language understanding. Its task is to teach the machine to understand thecontent ofagivenpassage andthenanswer arelated question, which requires deep comprehension and accurate information extraction towards the text.