Disentangling Representations through Multi-task Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Vafidis, Pantelis, Bhargava, Aman, Rangel, Antonio
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Vafidis, Pantelis
Bhargava, Aman
Rangel, Antonio
author_facet Vafidis, Pantelis
Bhargava, Aman
Rangel, Antonio
contents Intelligent perception and interaction with the world hinges on internal representations that capture its underlying structure (''disentangled'' or ''abstract'' representations). Disentangled representations serve as world models, isolating latent factors of variation in the world along approximately orthogonal directions, thus facilitating feature-based generalization. We provide experimental and theoretical results guaranteeing the emergence of disentangled representations in agents that optimally solve multi-task evidence accumulation classification tasks, canonical in the neuroscience literature. The key conceptual finding is that, by producing accurate multi-task classification estimates, a system implicitly represents a set of coordinates specifying a disentangled representation of the underlying latent state of the data it receives. The theory provides conditions for the emergence of these representations in terms of noise, number of tasks, and evidence accumulation time. We experimentally validate these predictions in RNNs trained to multi-task, which learn disentangled representations in the form of continuous attractors, leading to zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in predicting latent factors. We demonstrate the robustness of our framework across autoregressive architectures, decision boundary geometries and in tasks requiring classification confidence estimation. We find that transformers are particularly suited for disentangling representations, which might explain their unique world understanding abilities. Overall, our framework establishes a formal link between competence at multiple tasks and the formation of disentangled, interpretable world models in both biological and artificial systems, and helps explain why ANNs often arrive at human-interpretable concepts, and how they both may acquire exceptional zero-shot generalization capabilities.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_11249
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Disentangling Representations through Multi-task Learning
Vafidis, Pantelis
Bhargava, Aman
Rangel, Antonio
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neurons and Cognition
Intelligent perception and interaction with the world hinges on internal representations that capture its underlying structure (''disentangled'' or ''abstract'' representations). Disentangled representations serve as world models, isolating latent factors of variation in the world along approximately orthogonal directions, thus facilitating feature-based generalization. We provide experimental and theoretical results guaranteeing the emergence of disentangled representations in agents that optimally solve multi-task evidence accumulation classification tasks, canonical in the neuroscience literature. The key conceptual finding is that, by producing accurate multi-task classification estimates, a system implicitly represents a set of coordinates specifying a disentangled representation of the underlying latent state of the data it receives. The theory provides conditions for the emergence of these representations in terms of noise, number of tasks, and evidence accumulation time. We experimentally validate these predictions in RNNs trained to multi-task, which learn disentangled representations in the form of continuous attractors, leading to zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in predicting latent factors. We demonstrate the robustness of our framework across autoregressive architectures, decision boundary geometries and in tasks requiring classification confidence estimation. We find that transformers are particularly suited for disentangling representations, which might explain their unique world understanding abilities. Overall, our framework establishes a formal link between competence at multiple tasks and the formation of disentangled, interpretable world models in both biological and artificial systems, and helps explain why ANNs often arrive at human-interpretable concepts, and how they both may acquire exceptional zero-shot generalization capabilities.
title Disentangling Representations through Multi-task Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neurons and Cognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11249