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Researcher profile

Jürgen Schmidhuber

Jürgen Schmidhuber contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceNeural and Evolutionary ComputingComputer VisionComputation and Language

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Published work

25 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Interestingness as an Inductive Heuristic for Future Compression Progress

One of the bottlenecks on the way towards recursively self-improving systems is the challenge of interestingness: the ability to prospectively identify which tasks or data hold the potential for future progress. We formalize interestingness as an inductive heuristic for future compression progress and investigate its predictability using tools from Kolmogorov Complexity and Algorithmic Statistics. By analyzing complexity-runtime profiles under Length, Algorithmic, and Speed priors, we demonstrate that the inductive property of interestingness -- the capacity for past progress to signal future discovery -- is theoretically viable and empirically supported. We prove that expected future progress depends exponentially on the recency of the last observed breakthrough. Furthermore, we show that the Algorithmic Prior is significantly more optimistic than the Length Prior, yielding a quadratic increase in expected discovery for the same observed profile. These findings are experimentally confirmed across three diverse universal computational paradigms.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Learning to Forget: Continual Learning with Adaptive Weight Decay

Continual learning agents with finite capacity must balance acquiring new knowledge with retaining the old. This requires controlled forgetting of knowledge that is no longer needed, freeing up capacity to learn. Weight decay, viewed as a mechanism for forgetting, can serve this role by gradually discarding information stored in the weights. However, a fixed scalar weight decay drives this forgetting uniformly over time and uniformly across all parameters, even when some encode stable knowledge while others track rapidly changing targets. We introduce Forgetting through Adaptive Decay (FADE), which adapts per-parameter weight decay rates online via approximate meta-gradient descent. We derive FADE for the online linear setting and apply it to the final layer of neural networks. Our empirical analysis shows that FADE automatically discovers distinct decay rates for different parameters, complements step-size adaptation, and consistently improves over fixed weight decay across online tracking and streaming classification problems.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

A Modern Self-Referential Weight Matrix That Learns to Modify Itself

The weight matrix (WM) of a neural network (NN) is its program. The programs of many traditional NNs are learned through gradient descent in some error function, then remain fixed. The WM of a self-referential NN, however, can keep rapidly modifying all of itself during runtime. In principle, such NNs can meta-learn to learn, and meta-meta-learn to meta-learn to learn, and so on, in the sense of recursive self-improvement. While NN architectures potentially capable of implementing such behaviour have been proposed since the '90s, there have been few if any practical studies. Here we revisit such NNs, building upon recent successes of fast weight programmers and closely related linear Transformers. We propose a scalable self-referential WM (SRWM) that learns to use outer products and the delta update rule to modify itself. We evaluate our SRWM in supervised few-shot learning and in multi-task reinforcement learning with procedurally generated game environments. Our experiments demonstrate both practical applicability and competitive performance of the proposed SRWM. Our code is public.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

All You Need Is Supervised Learning: From Imitation Learning to Meta-RL With Upside Down RL

Upside down reinforcement learning (UDRL) flips the conventional use of the return in the objective function in RL upside down, by taking returns as input and predicting actions. UDRL is based purely on supervised learning, and bypasses some prominent issues in RL: bootstrapping, off-policy corrections, and discount factors. While previous work with UDRL demonstrated it in a traditional online RL setting, here we show that this single algorithm can also work in the imitation learning and offline RL settings, be extended to the goal-conditioned RL setting, and even the meta-RL setting. With a general agent architecture, a single UDRL agent can learn across all paradigms.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Eliminating Meta Optimization Through Self-Referential Meta Learning

Meta Learning automates the search for learning algorithms. At the same time, it creates a dependency on human engineering on the meta-level, where meta learning algorithms need to be designed. In this paper, we investigate self-referential meta learning systems that modify themselves without the need for explicit meta optimization. We discuss the relationship of such systems to in-context and memory-based meta learning and show that self-referential neural networks require functionality to be reused in the form of parameter sharing. Finally, we propose fitness monotonic execution (FME), a simple approach to avoid explicit meta optimization. A neural network self-modifies to solve bandit and classic control tasks, improves its self-modifications, and learns how to learn, purely by assigning more computational resources to better performing solutions.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

General Policy Evaluation and Improvement by Learning to Identify Few But Crucial States

Learning to evaluate and improve policies is a core problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Traditional RL algorithms learn a value function defined for a single policy. A recently explored competitive alternative is to learn a single value function for many policies. Here we combine the actor-critic architecture of Parameter-Based Value Functions and the policy embedding of Policy Evaluation Networks to learn a single value function for evaluating (and thus helping to improve) any policy represented by a deep neural network (NN). The method yields competitive experimental results. In continuous control problems with infinitely many states, our value function minimizes its prediction error by simultaneously learning a small set of `probing states' and a mapping from actions produced in probing states to the policy's return. The method extracts crucial abstract knowledge about the environment in form of very few states sufficient to fully specify the behavior of many policies. A policy improves solely by changing actions in probing states, following the gradient of the value function's predictions. Surprisingly, it is possible to clone the behavior of a near-optimal policy in Swimmer-v3 and Hopper-v3 environments only by knowing how to act in 3 and 5 such learned states, respectively. Remarkably, our value function trained to evaluate NN policies is also invariant to changes of the policy architecture: we show that it allows for zero-shot learning of linear policies competitive with the best policy seen during training. Our code is public.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Goal-Conditioned Generators of Deep Policies

Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning optimal policies, given goals encoded in special command inputs. Here we study goal-conditioned neural nets (NNs) that learn to generate deep NN policies in form of context-specific weight matrices, similar to Fast Weight Programmers and other methods from the 1990s. Using context commands of the form "generate a policy that achieves a desired expected return," our NN generators combine powerful exploration of parameter space with generalization across commands to iteratively find better and better policies. A form of weight-sharing HyperNetworks and policy embeddings scales our method to generate deep NNs. Experiments show how a single learned policy generator can produce policies that achieve any return seen during training. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm on a set of continuous control tasks where it exhibits competitive performance. Our code is public.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Improving Differentiable Neural Computers Through Memory Masking, De-allocation, and Link Distribution Sharpness Control

The Differentiable Neural Computer (DNC) can learn algorithmic and question answering tasks. An analysis of its internal activation patterns reveals three problems: Most importantly, the lack of key-value separation makes the address distribution resulting from content-based look-up noisy and flat, since the value influences the score calculation, although only the key should. Second, DNC's de-allocation of memory results in aliasing, which is a problem for content-based look-up. Thirdly, chaining memory reads with the temporal linkage matrix exponentially degrades the quality of the address distribution. Our proposed fixes of these problems yield improved performance on arithmetic tasks, and also improve the mean error rate on the bAbI question answering dataset by 43%.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Learning One Abstract Bit at a Time Through Self-Invented Experiments Encoded as Neural Networks

There are two important things in science: (A) Finding answers to given questions, and (B) Coming up with good questions. Our artificial scientists not only learn to answer given questions, but also continually invent new questions, by proposing hypotheses to be verified or falsified through potentially complex and time-consuming experiments, including thought experiments akin to those of mathematicians. While an artificial scientist expands its knowledge, it remains biased towards the simplest, least costly experiments that still have surprising outcomes, until they become boring. We present an empirical analysis of the automatic generation of interesting experiments. In the first setting, we investigate self-invented experiments in a reinforcement-providing environment and show that they lead to effective exploration. In the second setting, pure thought experiments are implemented as the weights of recurrent neural networks generated by a neural experiment generator. Initially interesting thought experiments may become boring over time.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Learning Relative Return Policies With Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning

Lately, there has been a resurgence of interest in using supervised learning to solve reinforcement learning problems. Recent work in this area has largely focused on learning command-conditioned policies. We investigate the potential of one such method -- upside-down reinforcement learning -- to work with commands that specify a desired relationship between some scalar value and the observed return. We show that upside-down reinforcement learning can learn to carry out such commands online in a tabular bandit setting and in CartPole with non-linear function approximation. By doing so, we demonstrate the power of this family of methods and open the way for their practical use under more complicated command structures.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Learning to Generalize with Object-centric Agents in the Open World Survival Game Crafter

Reinforcement learning agents must generalize beyond their training experience. Prior work has focused mostly on identical training and evaluation environments. Starting from the recently introduced Crafter benchmark, a 2D open world survival game, we introduce a new set of environments suitable for evaluating some agent's ability to generalize on previously unseen (numbers of) objects and to adapt quickly (meta-learning). In Crafter, the agents are evaluated by the number of unlocked achievements (such as collecting resources) when trained for 1M steps. We show that current agents struggle to generalize, and introduce novel object-centric agents that improve over strong baselines. We also provide critical insights of general interest for future work on Crafter through several experiments. We show that careful hyper-parameter tuning improves the PPO baseline agent by a large margin and that even feedforward agents can unlock almost all achievements by relying on the inventory display. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the original Crafter environment. Additionally, when trained beyond 1M steps, our tuned agents can unlock almost all achievements. We show that the recurrent PPO agents improve over feedforward ones, even with the inventory information removed. We introduce CrafterOOD, a set of 15 new environments that evaluate OOD generalization. On CrafterOOD, we show that the current agents fail to generalize, whereas our novel object-centric agents achieve state-of-the-art OOD generalization while also being interpretable. Our code is public.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Meta Learning Backpropagation And Improving It

Many concepts have been proposed for meta learning with neural networks (NNs), e.g., NNs that learn to reprogram fast weights, Hebbian plasticity, learned learning rules, and meta recurrent NNs. Our Variable Shared Meta Learning (VSML) unifies the above and demonstrates that simple weight-sharing and sparsity in an NN is sufficient to express powerful learning algorithms (LAs) in a reusable fashion. A simple implementation of VSML where the weights of a neural network are replaced by tiny LSTMs allows for implementing the backpropagation LA solely by running in forward-mode. It can even meta learn new LAs that differ from online backpropagation and generalize to datasets outside of the meta training distribution without explicit gradient calculation. Introspection reveals that our meta learned LAs learn through fast association in a way that is qualitatively different from gradient descent.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Reward-Weighted Regression Converges to a Global Optimum

Reward-Weighted Regression (RWR) belongs to a family of widely known iterative Reinforcement Learning algorithms based on the Expectation-Maximization framework. In this family, learning at each iteration consists of sampling a batch of trajectories using the current policy and fitting a new policy to maximize a return-weighted log-likelihood of actions. Although RWR is known to yield monotonic improvement of the policy under certain circumstances, whether and under which conditions RWR converges to the optimal policy have remained open questions. In this paper, we provide for the first time a proof that RWR converges to a global optimum when no function approximation is used, in a general compact setting. Furthermore, for the simpler case with finite state and action spaces we prove R-linear convergence of the state-value function to the optimum.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

The Devil is in the Detail: Simple Tricks Improve Systematic Generalization of Transformers

Recently, many datasets have been proposed to test the systematic generalization ability of neural networks. The companion baseline Transformers, typically trained with default hyper-parameters from standard tasks, are shown to fail dramatically. Here we demonstrate that by revisiting model configurations as basic as scaling of embeddings, early stopping, relative positional embedding, and Universal Transformer variants, we can drastically improve the performance of Transformers on systematic generalization. We report improvements on five popular datasets: SCAN, CFQ, PCFG, COGS, and Mathematics dataset. Our models improve accuracy from 50% to 85% on the PCFG productivity split, and from 35% to 81% on COGS. On SCAN, relative positional embedding largely mitigates the EOS decision problem (Newman et al., 2020), yielding 100% accuracy on the length split with a cutoff at 26. Importantly, performance differences between these models are typically invisible on the IID data split. This calls for proper generalization validation sets for developing neural networks that generalize systematically. We publicly release the code to reproduce our results.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

The Dual Form of Neural Networks Revisited: Connecting Test Time Predictions to Training Patterns via Spotlights of Attention

Linear layers in neural networks (NNs) trained by gradient descent can be expressed as a key-value memory system which stores all training datapoints and the initial weights, and produces outputs using unnormalised dot attention over the entire training experience. While this has been technically known since the 1960s, no prior work has effectively studied the operations of NNs in such a form, presumably due to prohibitive time and space complexities and impractical model sizes, all of them growing linearly with the number of training patterns which may get very large. However, this dual formulation offers a possibility of directly visualising how an NN makes use of training patterns at test time, by examining the corresponding attention weights. We conduct experiments on small scale supervised image classification tasks in single-task, multi-task, and continual learning settings, as well as language modelling, and discuss potentials and limits of this view for better understanding and interpreting how NNs exploit training patterns. Our code is public.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

The Neural Data Router: Adaptive Control Flow in Transformers Improves Systematic Generalization

Despite progress across a broad range of applications, Transformers have limited success in systematic generalization. The situation is especially frustrating in the case of algorithmic tasks, where they often fail to find intuitive solutions that route relevant information to the right node/operation at the right time in the grid represented by Transformer columns. To facilitate the learning of useful control flow, we propose two modifications to the Transformer architecture, copy gate and geometric attention. Our novel Neural Data Router (NDR) achieves 100% length generalization accuracy on the classic compositional table lookup task, as well as near-perfect accuracy on the simple arithmetic task and a new variant of ListOps testing for generalization across computational depths. NDR's attention and gating patterns tend to be interpretable as an intuitive form of neural routing. Our code is public.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning Can Diverge in Stochastic Environments With Episodic Resets

Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning (UDRL) is an approach for solving RL problems that does not require value functions and uses only supervised learning, where the targets for given inputs in a dataset do not change over time. Ghosh et al. proved that Goal-Conditional Supervised Learning (GCSL) -- which can be viewed as a simplified version of UDRL -- optimizes a lower bound on goal-reaching performance. This raises expectations that such algorithms may enjoy guaranteed convergence to the optimal policy in arbitrary environments, similar to certain well-known traditional RL algorithms. Here we show that for a specific episodic UDRL algorithm (eUDRL, including GCSL), this is not the case, and give the causes of this limitation. To do so, we first introduce a helpful rewrite of eUDRL as a recursive policy update. This formulation helps to disprove its convergence to the optimal policy for a wide class of stochastic environments. Finally, we provide a concrete example of a very simple environment where eUDRL diverges. Since the primary aim of this paper is to present a negative result, and the best counterexamples are the simplest ones, we restrict all discussions to finite (discrete) environments, ignoring issues of function approximation and limited sample size.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Are Neural Nets Modular? Inspecting Functional Modularity Through Differentiable Weight Masks

Neural networks (NNs) whose subnetworks implement reusable functions are expected to offer numerous advantages, including compositionality through efficient recombination of functional building blocks, interpretability, preventing catastrophic interference, etc. Understanding if and how NNs are modular could provide insights into how to improve them. Current inspection methods, however, fail to link modules to their functionality. In this paper, we present a novel method based on learning binary weight masks to identify individual weights and subnets responsible for specific functions. Using this powerful tool, we contribute an extensive study of emerging modularity in NNs that covers several standard architectures and datasets. We demonstrate how common NNs fail to reuse submodules and offer new insights into the related issue of systematic generalization on language tasks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Improving Baselines in the Wild

We share our experience with the recently released WILDS benchmark, a collection of ten datasets dedicated to developing models and training strategies which are robust to domain shifts. Several experiments yield a couple of critical observations which we believe are of general interest for any future work on WILDS. Our study focuses on two datasets: iWildCam and FMoW. We show that (1) Conducting separate cross-validation for each evaluation metric is crucial for both datasets, (2) A weak correlation between validation and test performance might make model development difficult for iWildCam, (3) Minor changes in the training of hyper-parameters improve the baseline by a relatively large margin (mainly on FMoW), (4) There is a strong correlation between certain domains and certain target labels (mainly on iWildCam). To the best of our knowledge, no prior work on these datasets has reported these observations despite their obvious importance. Our code is public.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Learning Associative Inference Using Fast Weight Memory

Humans can quickly associate stimuli to solve problems in novel contexts. Our novel neural network model learns state representations of facts that can be composed to perform such associative inference. To this end, we augment the LSTM model with an associative memory, dubbed Fast Weight Memory (FWM). Through differentiable operations at every step of a given input sequence, the LSTM updates and maintains compositional associations stored in the rapidly changing FWM weights. Our model is trained end-to-end by gradient descent and yields excellent performance on compositional language reasoning problems, meta-reinforcement-learning for POMDPs, and small-scale word-level language modelling.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Training and Generating Neural Networks in Compressed Weight Space

The inputs and/or outputs of some neural nets are weight matrices of other neural nets. Indirect encodings or end-to-end compression of weight matrices could help to scale such approaches. Our goal is to open a discussion on this topic, starting with recurrent neural networks for character-level language modelling whose weight matrices are encoded by the discrete cosine transform. Our fast weight version thereof uses a recurrent neural network to parameterise the compressed weights. We present experimental results on the enwik8 dataset.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Unsupervised Object Keypoint Learning using Local Spatial Predictability

We propose PermaKey, a novel approach to representation learning based on object keypoints. It leverages the predictability of local image regions from spatial neighborhoods to identify salient regions that correspond to object parts, which are then converted to keypoints. Unlike prior approaches, it utilizes predictability to discover object keypoints, an intrinsic property of objects. This ensures that it does not overly bias keypoints to focus on characteristics that are not unique to objects, such as movement, shape, colour etc. We demonstrate the efficacy of PermaKey on Atari where it learns keypoints corresponding to the most salient object parts and is robust to certain visual distractors. Further, on downstream RL tasks in the Atari domain we demonstrate how agents equipped with our keypoints outperform those using competing alternatives, even on challenging environments with moving backgrounds or distractor objects.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Are Disentangled Representations Helpful for Abstract Visual Reasoning?

A disentangled representation encodes information about the salient factors of variation in the data independently. Although it is often argued that this representational format is useful in learning to solve many real-world down-stream tasks, there is little empirical evidence that supports this claim. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale study that investigates whether disentangled representations are more suitable for abstract reasoning tasks. Using two new tasks similar to Raven's Progressive Matrices, we evaluate the usefulness of the representations learned by 360 state-of-the-art unsupervised disentanglement models. Based on these representations, we train 3600 abstract reasoning models and observe that disentangled representations do in fact lead to better down-stream performance. In particular, they enable quicker learning using fewer samples.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Improving Generalization in Meta Reinforcement Learning using Learned Objectives

Biological evolution has distilled the experiences of many learners into the general learning algorithms of humans. Our novel meta reinforcement learning algorithm MetaGenRL is inspired by this process. MetaGenRL distills the experiences of many complex agents to meta-learn a low-complexity neural objective function that decides how future individuals will learn. Unlike recent meta-RL algorithms, MetaGenRL can generalize to new environments that are entirely different from those used for meta-training. In some cases, it even outperforms human-engineered RL algorithms. MetaGenRL uses off-policy second-order gradients during meta-training that greatly increase its sample efficiency.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Investigating Object Compositionality in Generative Adversarial Networks

Deep generative models seek to recover the process with which the observed data was generated. They may be used to synthesize new samples or to subsequently extract representations. Successful approaches in the domain of images are driven by several core inductive biases. However, a bias to account for the compositional way in which humans structure a visual scene in terms of objects has frequently been overlooked. In this work, we investigate object compositionality as an inductive bias for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We present a minimal modification of a standard generator to incorporate this inductive bias and find that it reliably learns to generate images as compositions of objects. Using this general design as a backbone, we then propose two useful extensions to incorporate dependencies among objects and background. We extensively evaluate our approach on several multi-object image datasets and highlight the merits of incorporating structure for representation learning purposes. In particular, we find that our structured GANs are better at generating multi-object images that are more faithful to the reference distribution. More so, we demonstrate how, by leveraging the structure of the learned generative process, one can `invert' the learned generative model to perform unsupervised instance segmentation. On the challenging CLEVR dataset, it is shown how our approach is able to improve over other recent purely unsupervised object-centric approaches to image generation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access