The most common/commercial application of AI is to gain insights or make predictions on a dataset. Even though I think that this is interesting, these techniques have been widely covered by others. This article covers a more experimental application of machine learning: this is allowing machine learning to manipulate a physics simulation. There is a lot of different possibilities of putting an AI into a physics environment, but all of them involve manipulating and controlling objects and forces in the environment. To get good results from this project, we need to add limitations to the AI's control in the environment.

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in machine learning. Most work in causality starts from the premise that the causal variables themselves are observed. However, for AI agents such as robots trying to make sense of their environment, the only observables are low-level variables like pixels in images. To generalize well, an agent must induce high-level variables, particularly those which are causal or are affected by causal variables. A central goal for AI and causality is thus the joint discovery of abstract representations and causal structure. However, we note that existing environments for studying causal induction are poorly suited for this objective because they have complicated task-specific causal graphs which are impossible to manipulate parametrically (e.g., number of nodes, sparsity, causal chain length, etc.). In this work, our goal is to facilitate research in learning representations of high-level variables as well as causal structures among them. In order to systematically probe the ability of methods to identify these variables and structures, we design a suite of benchmarking RL environments. We evaluate various representation learning algorithms from the literature and find that explicitly incorporating structure and modularity in models can help causal induction in model-based reinforcement learning.

Visual environments are structured, consisting of distinct objects or entities. These entities have properties -- both visible and latent -- that determine the manner in which they interact with one another. To partition images into entities, deep-learning researchers have proposed structural inductive biases such as slot-based architectures. To model interactions among entities, equivariant graph neural nets (GNNs) are used, but these are not particularly well suited to the task for two reasons. First, GNNs do not predispose interactions to be sparse, as relationships among independent entities are likely to be. Second, GNNs do not factorize knowledge about interactions in an entity-conditional manner. As an alternative, we take inspiration from cognitive science and resurrect a classic approach, production systems, which consist of a set of rule templates that are applied by binding placeholder variables in the rules to specific entities. Rules are scored on their match to entities, and the best fitting rules are applied to update entity properties. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that this architecture achieves a flexible, dynamic flow of control and serves to factorize entity-specific and rule-based information. This disentangling of knowledge achieves robust future-state prediction in rich visual environments, outperforming state-of-the-art methods using GNNs, and allows for the extrapolation from simple (few object) environments to more complex environments.

How can we enable machines to make sense of the world, and become better at learning? To approach this goal, I believe viewing intelligence in terms of many integral aspects, and also a universal two-term tradeoff between task performance and complexity, provides two feasible perspectives. In this thesis, I address several key questions in some aspects of intelligence, and study the phase transitions in the two-term tradeoff, using strategies and tools from physics and information. Firstly, how can we make the learning models more flexible and efficient, so that agents can learn quickly with fewer examples? Inspired by how physicists model the world, we introduce a paradigm and an AI Physicist agent for simultaneously learning many small specialized models (theories) and the domain they are accurate, which can then be simplified, unified and stored, facilitating few-shot learning in a continual way. Secondly, for representation learning, when can we learn a good representation, and how does learning depend on the structure of the dataset? We approach this question by studying phase transitions when tuning the tradeoff hyperparameter. In the information bottleneck, we theoretically show that these phase transitions are predictable and reveal structure in the relationships between the data, the model, the learned representation and the loss landscape. Thirdly, how can agents discover causality from observations? We address part of this question by introducing an algorithm that combines prediction and minimizing information from the input, for exploratory causal discovery from observational time series. Fourthly, to make models more robust to label noise, we introduce Rank Pruning, a robust algorithm for classification with noisy labels. I believe that building on the work of my thesis we will be one step closer to enable more intelligent machines that can make sense of the world.

A structured understanding of our world in terms of objects, relations, and hierarchies is an important component of human cognition. Learning such a structured world model from raw sensory data remains a challenge. As a step towards this goal, we introduce Contrastively-trained Structured World Models (C-SWMs). C-SWMs utilize a contrastive approach for representation learning in environments with compositional structure. We structure each state embedding as a set of object representations and their relations, modeled by a graph neural network. This allows objects to be discovered from raw pixel observations without direct supervision as part of the learning process. We evaluate C-SWMs on compositional environments involving multiple interacting objects that can be manipulated independently by an agent, simple Atari games, and a multi-object physics simulation. Our experiments demonstrate that C-SWMs can overcome limitations of models based on pixel reconstruction and outperform typical representatives of this model class in highly structured environments, while learning interpretable object-based representations.