Compete and Compose: Learning Independent Mechanisms for Modular World Models

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Lei, Anson, Nolte, Frederik, Schölkopf, Bernhard, Posner, Ingmar
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866910419363299328
author Lei, Anson
Nolte, Frederik
Schölkopf, Bernhard
Posner, Ingmar
author_facet Lei, Anson
Nolte, Frederik
Schölkopf, Bernhard
Posner, Ingmar
contents We present COmpetitive Mechanisms for Efficient Transfer (COMET), a modular world model which leverages reusable, independent mechanisms across different environments. COMET is trained on multiple environments with varying dynamics via a two-step process: competition and composition. This enables the model to recognise and learn transferable mechanisms. Specifically, in the competition phase, COMET is trained with a winner-takes-all gradient allocation, encouraging the emergence of independent mechanisms. These are then re-used in the composition phase, where COMET learns to re-compose learnt mechanisms in ways that capture the dynamics of intervened environments. In so doing, COMET explicitly reuses prior knowledge, enabling efficient and interpretable adaptation. We evaluate COMET on environments with image-based observations. In contrast to competitive baselines, we demonstrate that COMET captures recognisable mechanisms without supervision. Moreover, we show that COMET is able to adapt to new environments with varying numbers of objects with improved sample efficiency compared to more conventional finetuning approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_15109
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Compete and Compose: Learning Independent Mechanisms for Modular World Models
Lei, Anson
Nolte, Frederik
Schölkopf, Bernhard
Posner, Ingmar
Machine Learning
We present COmpetitive Mechanisms for Efficient Transfer (COMET), a modular world model which leverages reusable, independent mechanisms across different environments. COMET is trained on multiple environments with varying dynamics via a two-step process: competition and composition. This enables the model to recognise and learn transferable mechanisms. Specifically, in the competition phase, COMET is trained with a winner-takes-all gradient allocation, encouraging the emergence of independent mechanisms. These are then re-used in the composition phase, where COMET learns to re-compose learnt mechanisms in ways that capture the dynamics of intervened environments. In so doing, COMET explicitly reuses prior knowledge, enabling efficient and interpretable adaptation. We evaluate COMET on environments with image-based observations. In contrast to competitive baselines, we demonstrate that COMET captures recognisable mechanisms without supervision. Moreover, we show that COMET is able to adapt to new environments with varying numbers of objects with improved sample efficiency compared to more conventional finetuning approaches.
title Compete and Compose: Learning Independent Mechanisms for Modular World Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15109