BZPEERPapers, people, evidence and research paths
Menu

Discover

SearchFind papers, people, topics, institutions and opportunities from one place.GraphSee how papers, authors, topics and evidence connect.

Research tools

HomeContinue from the papers, people and topics that matter now.CollectionsTurn saved papers into reading lists, evidence maps and shareable context.ResearchReconstruct the path that led you from search to paper to question.CollaborationMove from a paper, topic or expert request into a focused thread.PublishCreate full-text research articles with metadata, formulas and versions.

Network

ExpertsFind specialists whose work and reviews explain why they can help.CommunitiesJoin research groups organized around papers, topics and shared evidence.

Opportunities

ListingsBrowse roles, calls and collaborations connected to real research context.

Account

Log inReturn to your saved papers, graph views and active threads.Create accountStart saving papers, building a research trail and joining teams.
Log inCreate account

Source author record

Simon Osindero

Simon Osindero appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

ResearcherUnclaimed source record
Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputation and LanguageComputer VisionNeural and Evolutionary Computing

Catalog footprint

What is connected

14works
5topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Connect this record

Log in to claim
Open graphBrowse works

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent papers, topics, institutions and collaborators without losing the researcher page.

Building this map preview

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

MaD Physics: Evaluating information seeking under constraints in physical environments

Scientific discovery is fundamentally a resource-constrained process that requires navigating complex trade-offs between the quality and quantity of measurements due to physical and cost constraints. Measurements drive the scientific process by revealing novel phenomena to improve our understanding. Existing benchmarks for evaluating agents for scientific discovery focus on either static knowledge-based reasoning or unconstrained experimental design tasks, and do not capture the ability to make measurements and plan under constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose Measuring and Discovering Physics (MaD Physics), a benchmark to evaluate the ability of agents to make informative measurements and conclusions subject to constraints on the quality and quantity of measurements. The benchmark consists of three environments, each based on a distinct physical law. To mitigate contamination from existing knowledge, MaD Physics includes altered physical laws. In each trial, the agent makes measurements of the system until it exhausts an allotted budget and then the agent has to infer the underlying physical law to make predictions about the state of the system in the future. MaD Physics evaluates two fundamental capabilities of scientific agents: inferring models from data and planning under constraints. We also demonstrate how MaD Physics can be used to evaluate other capabilities such as multimodality and in-context learning. We benchmark agents on MaD Physics using four Gemini models (2.5 Flash Lite, 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Pro, and 3 Flash), identifying shortcomings in their structured exploration and data collection capabilities and highlighting directions to improve their scientific reasoning.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens

We enhance auto-regressive language models by conditioning on document chunks retrieved from a large corpus, based on local similarity with preceding tokens. With a $2$ trillion token database, our Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) obtains comparable performance to GPT-3 and Jurassic-1 on the Pile, despite using 25$\times$ fewer parameters. After fine-tuning, RETRO performance translates to downstream knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering. RETRO combines a frozen Bert retriever, a differentiable encoder and a chunked cross-attention mechanism to predict tokens based on an order of magnitude more data than what is typically consumed during training. We typically train RETRO from scratch, yet can also rapidly RETROfit pre-trained transformers with retrieval and still achieve good performance. Our work opens up new avenues for improving language models through explicit memory at unprecedented scale.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Model-Value Inconsistency as a Signal for Epistemic Uncertainty

Using a model of the environment and a value function, an agent can construct many estimates of a state's value, by unrolling the model for different lengths and bootstrapping with its value function. Our key insight is that one can treat this set of value estimates as a type of ensemble, which we call an \emph{implicit value ensemble} (IVE). Consequently, the discrepancy between these estimates can be used as a proxy for the agent's epistemic uncertainty; we term this signal \emph{model-value inconsistency} or \emph{self-inconsistency} for short. Unlike prior work which estimates uncertainty by training an ensemble of many models and/or value functions, this approach requires only the single model and value function which are already being learned in most model-based reinforcement learning algorithms. We provide empirical evidence in both tabular and function approximation settings from pixels that self-inconsistency is useful (i) as a signal for exploration, (ii) for acting safely under distribution shifts, and (iii) for robustifying value-based planning with a learned model.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Retrieval-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms distill experience into parametric behavior policies or value functions via gradient updates. While effective, this approach has several disadvantages: (1) it is computationally expensive, (2) it can take many updates to integrate experiences into the parametric model, (3) experiences that are not fully integrated do not appropriately influence the agent's behavior, and (4) behavior is limited by the capacity of the model. In this paper we explore an alternative paradigm in which we train a network to map a dataset of past experiences to optimal behavior. Specifically, we augment an RL agent with a retrieval process (parameterized as a neural network) that has direct access to a dataset of experiences. This dataset can come from the agent's past experiences, expert demonstrations, or any other relevant source. The retrieval process is trained to retrieve information from the dataset that may be useful in the current context, to help the agent achieve its goal faster and more efficiently. he proposed method facilitates learning agents that at test-time can condition their behavior on the entire dataset and not only the current state, or current trajectory. We integrate our method into two different RL agents: an offline DQN agent and an online R2D2 agent. In offline multi-task problems, we show that the retrieval-augmented DQN agent avoids task interference and learns faster than the baseline DQN agent. On Atari, we show that retrieval-augmented R2D2 learns significantly faster than the baseline R2D2 agent and achieves higher scores. We run extensive ablations to measure the contributions of the components of our proposed method.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher

Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models

We investigate the optimal model size and number of tokens for training a transformer language model under a given compute budget. We find that current large language models are significantly undertrained, a consequence of the recent focus on scaling language models whilst keeping the amount of training data constant. By training over 400 language models ranging from 70 million to over 16 billion parameters on 5 to 500 billion tokens, we find that for compute-optimal training, the model size and the number of training tokens should be scaled equally: for every doubling of model size the number of training tokens should also be doubled. We test this hypothesis by training a predicted compute-optimal model, Chinchilla, that uses the same compute budget as Gopher but with 70B parameters and 4$\times$ more more data. Chinchilla uniformly and significantly outperforms Gopher (280B), GPT-3 (175B), Jurassic-1 (178B), and Megatron-Turing NLG (530B) on a large range of downstream evaluation tasks. This also means that Chinchilla uses substantially less compute for fine-tuning and inference, greatly facilitating downstream usage. As a highlight, Chinchilla reaches a state-of-the-art average accuracy of 67.5% on the MMLU benchmark, greater than a 7% improvement over Gopher.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Unified Scaling Laws for Routed Language Models

The performance of a language model has been shown to be effectively modeled as a power-law in its parameter count. Here we study the scaling behaviors of Routing Networks: architectures that conditionally use only a subset of their parameters while processing an input. For these models, parameter count and computational requirement form two independent axes along which an increase leads to better performance. In this work we derive and justify scaling laws defined on these two variables which generalize those known for standard language models and describe the performance of a wide range of routing architectures trained via three different techniques. Afterwards we provide two applications of these laws: first deriving an Effective Parameter Count along which all models scale at the same rate, and then using the scaling coefficients to give a quantitative comparison of the three routing techniques considered. Our analysis derives from an extensive evaluation of Routing Networks across five orders of magnitude of size, including models with hundreds of experts and hundreds of billions of parameters.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

A Deep Neural Network's Loss Surface Contains Every Low-dimensional Pattern

The work "Loss Landscape Sightseeing with Multi-Point Optimization" (Skorokhodov and Burtsev, 2019) demonstrated that one can empirically find arbitrary 2D binary patterns inside loss surfaces of popular neural networks. In this paper we prove that: (i) this is a general property of deep universal approximators; and (ii) this property holds for arbitrary smooth patterns, for other dimensionalities, for every dataset, and any neural network that is sufficiently deep and wide. Our analysis predicts not only the existence of all such low-dimensional patterns, but also two other properties that were observed empirically: (i) that it is easy to find these patterns; and (ii) that they transfer to other data-sets (e.g. a test-set).

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

A Practical Sparse Approximation for Real Time Recurrent Learning

Current methods for training recurrent neural networks are based on backpropagation through time, which requires storing a complete history of network states, and prohibits updating the weights `online' (after every timestep). Real Time Recurrent Learning (RTRL) eliminates the need for history storage and allows for online weight updates, but does so at the expense of computational costs that are quartic in the state size. This renders RTRL training intractable for all but the smallest networks, even ones that are made highly sparse. We introduce the Sparse n-step Approximation (SnAp) to the RTRL influence matrix, which only keeps entries that are nonzero within n steps of the recurrent core. SnAp with n=1 is no more expensive than backpropagation, and we find that it substantially outperforms other RTRL approximations with comparable costs such as Unbiased Online Recurrent Optimization. For highly sparse networks, SnAp with n=2 remains tractable and can outperform backpropagation through time in terms of learning speed when updates are done online. SnAp becomes equivalent to RTRL when n is large.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

AlgebraNets

Neural networks have historically been built layerwise from the set of functions in ${f: \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^m }$, i.e. with activations and weights/parameters represented by real numbers, $\mathbb{R}$. Our work considers a richer set of objects for activations and weights, and undertakes a comprehensive study of alternative algebras as number representations by studying their performance on two challenging problems: large-scale image classification using the ImageNet dataset and language modeling using the enwiki8 and WikiText-103 datasets. We denote this broader class of models as AlgebraNets. Our findings indicate that the conclusions of prior work, which explored neural networks constructed from $\mathbb{C}$ (complex numbers) and $\mathbb{H}$ (quaternions) on smaller datasets, do not always transfer to these challenging settings. However, our results demonstrate that there are alternative algebras which deliver better parameter and computational efficiency compared with $\mathbb{R}$. We consider $\mathbb{C}$, $\mathbb{H}$, $M_{2}(\mathbb{R})$ (the set of $2\times2$ real-valued matrices), $M_{2}(\mathbb{C})$, $M_{3}(\mathbb{R})$ and $M_{4}(\mathbb{R})$. Additionally, we note that multiplication in these algebras has higher compute density than real multiplication, a useful property in situations with inherently limited parameter reuse such as auto-regressive inference and sparse neural networks. We therefore investigate how to induce sparsity within AlgebraNets. We hope that our strong results on large-scale, practical benchmarks will spur further exploration of these unconventional architectures which challenge the default choice of using real numbers for neural network weights and activations.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Cross-dimensional Weighting for Aggregated Deep Convolutional Features

We propose a simple and straightforward way of creating powerful image representations via cross-dimensional weighting and aggregation of deep convolutional neural network layer outputs. We first present a generalized framework that encompasses a broad family of approaches and includes cross-dimensional pooling and weighting steps. We then propose specific non-parametric schemes for both spatial- and channel-wise weighting that boost the effect of highly active spatial responses and at the same time regulate burstiness effects. We experiment on different public datasets for image search and show that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art for approaches based on pre-trained networks. We also provide an easy-to-use, open source implementation that reproduces our results.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Recursive Recurrent Nets with Attention Modeling for OCR in the Wild

We present recursive recurrent neural networks with attention modeling (R$^2$AM) for lexicon-free optical character recognition in natural scene images. The primary advantages of the proposed method are: (1) use of recursive convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which allow for parametrically efficient and effective image feature extraction; (2) an implicitly learned character-level language model, embodied in a recurrent neural network which avoids the need to use N-grams; and (3) the use of a soft-attention mechanism, allowing the model to selectively exploit image features in a coordinated way, and allowing for end-to-end training within a standard backpropagation framework. We validate our method with state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmark datasets: Street View Text, IIIT5k, ICDAR and Synth90k.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Strategic Attentive Writer for Learning Macro-Actions

We present a novel deep recurrent neural network architecture that learns to build implicit plans in an end-to-end manner by purely interacting with an environment in reinforcement learning setting. The network builds an internal plan, which is continuously updated upon observation of the next input from the environment. It can also partition this internal representation into contiguous sub- sequences by learning for how long the plan can be committed to - i.e. followed without re-planing. Combining these properties, the proposed model, dubbed STRategic Attentive Writer (STRAW) can learn high-level, temporally abstracted macro- actions of varying lengths that are solely learnt from data without any prior information. These macro-actions enable both structured exploration and economic computation. We experimentally demonstrate that STRAW delivers strong improvements on several ATARI games by employing temporally extended planning strategies (e.g. Ms. Pacman and Frostbite). It is at the same time a general algorithm that can be applied on any sequence data. To that end, we also show that when trained on text prediction task, STRAW naturally predicts frequent n-grams (instead of macro-actions), demonstrating the generality of the approach.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets

Generative Adversarial Nets [8] were recently introduced as a novel way to train generative models. In this work we introduce the conditional version of generative adversarial nets, which can be constructed by simply feeding the data, y, we wish to condition on to both the generator and discriminator. We show that this model can generate MNIST digits conditioned on class labels. We also illustrate how this model could be used to learn a multi-modal model, and provide preliminary examples of an application to image tagging in which we demonstrate how this approach can generate descriptive tags which are not part of training labels.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access