Author name cluster

Philippe Beaudoin

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

2 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Factorizing Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Structured, Dynamical Environments

Anirudh Goyal
Alex Lamb
Phanideep Gampa
Philippe Beaudoin
Charles Blundell
Sergey Levine
Yoshua Bengio
Michael Mozer

Modeling a structured, dynamic environment like a video game requires keeping track of the objects and their states (declarative knowledge) as well as predicting how objects behave (procedural knowledge). Black-box models with a monolithic hidden state often fail to apply procedural knowledge consistently and uniformly, i.e., they lack systematicity. For example, in a video game, correct prediction of one enemy's trajectory does not ensure correct prediction of another's. We address this issue via an architecture that factorizes declarative and procedural knowledge and that imposes modularity within each form of knowledge. The architecture consists of active modules called object files that maintain the state of a single object and invoke passive external knowledge sources called schemata that prescribe state updates. To use a video game as an illustration, two enemies of the same type will share schemata but will have separate object files to encode their distinct state (e.g., health, position). We propose to use attention to determine which object files to update, the selection of schemata, and the propagation of information between object files. The resulting architecture is a drop-in replacement conforming to the same input-output interface as normal recurrent networks (e.g., LSTM, GRU) yet achieves substantially better generalization on environments that have multiple object tokens of the same type, including a challenging intuitive physics benchmark.

Details

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Neural Production Systems

Anirudh Goyal ALIAS PARTH GOYAL
Aniket Didolkar
Nan Rosemary Ke
Charles Blundell
Philippe Beaudoin
Nicolas Heess
Michael C. Mozer
Yoshua Bengio

Visual environments are structured, consisting of distinct objects or entities. These entities have properties---visible or 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.

PDF Details