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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Enyan, Lepori, Michael A., Pavlick, Ellie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10899
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author Zhang, Enyan
Lepori, Michael A.
Pavlick, Ellie
author_facet Zhang, Enyan
Lepori, Michael A.
Pavlick, Ellie
contents Despite the recent success of artificial neural networks on a variety of tasks, we have little knowledge or control over the exact solutions these models implement. Instilling inductive biases -- preferences for some solutions over others -- into these models is one promising path toward understanding and controlling their behavior. Much work has been done to study the inherent inductive biases of models and instill different inductive biases through hand-designed architectures or carefully curated training regimens. In this work, we explore a more mechanistic approach: Subtask Induction. Our method discovers a functional subnetwork that implements a particular subtask within a trained model and uses it to instill inductive biases towards solutions utilizing that subtask. Subtask Induction is flexible and efficient, and we demonstrate its effectiveness with two experiments. First, we show that Subtask Induction significantly reduces the amount of training data required for a model to adopt a specific, generalizable solution to a modular arithmetic task. Second, we demonstrate that Subtask Induction successfully induces a human-like shape bias while increasing data efficiency for convolutional and transformer-based image classification models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_10899
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Instilling Inductive Biases with Subnetworks
Zhang, Enyan
Lepori, Michael A.
Pavlick, Ellie
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Despite the recent success of artificial neural networks on a variety of tasks, we have little knowledge or control over the exact solutions these models implement. Instilling inductive biases -- preferences for some solutions over others -- into these models is one promising path toward understanding and controlling their behavior. Much work has been done to study the inherent inductive biases of models and instill different inductive biases through hand-designed architectures or carefully curated training regimens. In this work, we explore a more mechanistic approach: Subtask Induction. Our method discovers a functional subnetwork that implements a particular subtask within a trained model and uses it to instill inductive biases towards solutions utilizing that subtask. Subtask Induction is flexible and efficient, and we demonstrate its effectiveness with two experiments. First, we show that Subtask Induction significantly reduces the amount of training data required for a model to adopt a specific, generalizable solution to a modular arithmetic task. Second, we demonstrate that Subtask Induction successfully induces a human-like shape bias while increasing data efficiency for convolutional and transformer-based image classification models.
title Instilling Inductive Biases with Subnetworks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10899