arXiv subjects

Stephanie C. Y. Chan

Publications and source records attributed to Stephanie C. Y. Chan.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Can language models learn from explanations in context?

Language Models (LMs) can perform new tasks by adapting to a few in-context examples. For humans, explanations that connect examples to task principles can improve learning. We therefore investigate whether explanations of few-shot examples can help LMs. We annotate questions from 40 challenging tasks with answer explanations, and various matched control explanations. We evaluate how different types of explanations, instructions, and controls affect zero- and few-shot performance. We analyze these results using statistical multilevel modeling techniques that account for the nested dependencies among conditions, tasks, prompts, and models. We find that explanations can improve performance -- even without tuning. Furthermore, explanations hand-tuned for performance on a small validation set offer substantially larger benefits, and building a prompt by selecting examples and explanations together substantially improves performance over selecting examples alone. Finally, even untuned explanations outperform carefully matched controls, suggesting that the benefits are due to the link between an example and its explanation, rather than lower-level features. However, only large models benefit. In summary, explanations can support the in-context learning of large LMs on challenging tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Zipfian environments for Reinforcement Learning

As humans and animals learn in the natural world, they encounter distributions of entities, situations and events that are far from uniform. Typically, a relatively small set of experiences are encountered frequently, while many important experiences occur only rarely. The highly-skewed, heavy-tailed nature of reality poses particular learning challenges that humans and animals have met by evolving specialised memory systems. By contrast, most popular RL environments and benchmarks involve approximately uniform variation of properties, objects, situations or tasks. How will RL algorithms perform in worlds (like ours) where the distribution of environment features is far less uniform? To explore this question, we develop three complementary RL environments where the agent's experience varies according to a Zipfian (discrete power law) distribution. On these benchmarks, we find that standard Deep RL architectures and algorithms acquire useful knowledge of common situations and tasks, but fail to adequately learn about rarer ones. To understand this failure better, we explore how different aspects of current approaches may be adjusted to help improve performance on rare events, and show that the RL objective function, the agent's memory system and self-supervised learning objectives can all influence an agent's ability to learn from uncommon experiences. Together, these results show that learning robustly from skewed experience is a critical challenge for applying Deep RL methods beyond simulations or laboratories, and our Zipfian environments provide a basis for measuring future progress towards this goal.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Tell me why! Explanations support learning relational and causal structure

Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans, language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role in overcoming this challenge. Here, we show that language can play a similar role for deep RL agents in complex environments. While agents typically struggle to acquire relational and causal knowledge, augmenting their experience by training them to predict language descriptions and explanations can overcome these limitations. We show that language can help agents learn challenging relational tasks, and examine which aspects of language contribute to its benefits. We then show that explanations can help agents to infer not only relational but also causal structure. Language can shape the way that agents to generalize out-of-distribution from ambiguous, causally-confounded training, and explanations even allow agents to learn to perform experimental interventions to identify causal relationships. Our results suggest that language description and explanation may be powerful tools for improving agent learning and generalization.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Towards mental time travel: a hierarchical memory for reinforcement learning agents

Reinforcement learning agents often forget details of the past, especially after delays or distractor tasks. Agents with common memory architectures struggle to recall and integrate across multiple timesteps of a past event, or even to recall the details of a single timestep that is followed by distractor tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical Chunk Attention Memory (HCAM), which helps agents to remember the past in detail. HCAM stores memories by dividing the past into chunks, and recalls by first performing high-level attention over coarse summaries of the chunks, and then performing detailed attention within only the most relevant chunks. An agent with HCAM can therefore "mentally time-travel" -- remember past events in detail without attending to all intervening events. We show that agents with HCAM substantially outperform agents with other memory architectures at tasks requiring long-term recall, retention, or reasoning over memory. These include recalling where an object is hidden in a 3D environment, rapidly learning to navigate efficiently in a new neighborhood, and rapidly learning and retaining new object names. Agents with HCAM can extrapolate to task sequences much longer than they were trained on, and can even generalize zero-shot from a meta-learning setting to maintaining knowledge across episodes. HCAM improves agent sample efficiency, generalization, and generality (by solving tasks that previously required specialized architectures). Our work is a step towards agents that can learn, interact, and adapt in complex and temporally-extended environments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Measuring the Reliability of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

Lack of reliability is a well-known issue for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. This problem has gained increasing attention in recent years, and efforts to improve it have grown substantially. To aid RL researchers and production users with the evaluation and improvement of reliability, we propose a set of metrics that quantitatively measure different aspects of reliability. In this work, we focus on variability and risk, both during training and after learning (on a fixed policy). We designed these metrics to be general-purpose, and we also designed complementary statistical tests to enable rigorous comparisons on these metrics. In this paper, we first describe the desired properties of the metrics and their design, the aspects of reliability that they measure, and their applicability to different scenarios. We then describe the statistical tests and make additional practical recommendations for reporting results. The metrics and accompanying statistical tools have been made available as an open-source library at https://github.com/google-research/rl-reliability-metrics. We apply our metrics to a set of common RL algorithms and environments, compare them, and analyze the results.

stat.ML↗