Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Temporal CreditAssignment Through Reminding

09/11/2018
by   Nan Rosemary Ke, et al.
0

Learning long-term dependencies in extended temporal sequences requires credit assignment to events far back in the past. The most common method for training recurrent neural networks, back-propagation through time (BPTT), requires credit information to be propagated backwards through every single step of the forward computation, potentially over thousands or millions of time steps. This becomes computationally expensive or even infeasible when used with long sequences. Importantly, biological brains are unlikely to perform such detailed reverse replay over very long sequences of internal states (consider days, months, or years.) However, humans are often reminded of past memories or mental states which are associated with the current mental state. We consider the hypothesis that such memory associations between past and present could be used for credit assignment through arbitrarily long sequences, propagating the credit assigned to the current state to the associated past state. Based on this principle, we study a novel algorithm which only back-propagates through a few of these temporal skip connections, realized by a learned attention mechanism that associates current states with relevant past states. We demonstrate in experiments that our method matches or outperforms regular BPTT and truncated BPTT in tasks involving particularly long-term dependencies, but without requiring the biologically implausible backward replay through the whole history of states. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed method transfers to longer sequences significantly better than LSTMs trained with BPTT and LSTMs trained with full self-attention.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
11/07/2017

Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Long-Range Credit Assignment in Recurrent Networks

A major drawback of backpropagation through time (BPTT) is the difficult...
research
02/24/2021

Synthetic Returns for Long-Term Credit Assignment

Since the earliest days of reinforcement learning, the workhorse method ...
research
07/27/2022

Explain My Surprise: Learning Efficient Long-Term Memory by Predicting Uncertain Outcomes

In many sequential tasks, a model needs to remember relevant events from...
research
05/14/2023

Theta sequences as eligibility traces: a biological solution to credit assignment

Credit assignment problems, for example policy evaluation in RL, often r...
research
07/07/2023

When Do Transformers Shine in RL? Decoupling Memory from Credit Assignment

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms face two distinct challenges: lea...
research
10/15/2018

Optimizing Agent Behavior over Long Time Scales by Transporting Value

Humans spend a remarkable fraction of waking life engaged in acts of "me...
research
03/09/2021

Scalable Online Recurrent Learning Using Columnar Neural Networks

Structural credit assignment for recurrent learning is challenging. An a...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset