Multi-task learning (MTL) with neural networks leverages commonalities in tasks to improve performance, but often suffers from task interference which reduces the benefits of transfer. To address this issue we introduce the routing network paradigm, a novel neural network and training algorithm. A routing network is a kind of self-organizing neural network consisting of two components: a router and a set of one or more function blocks. A function block may be any neural network -for example a fully-connected or a convolutional layer. Given an input the router makes a routing decision, choosing a function block to apply and passing the output back to the router recursively, terminating when a fixed recursion depth is reached. In this way the routing network dynamically composes different function blocks for each input. We employ a collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to jointly train the router and function blocks. We evaluate our model against cross-stitch networks and shared-layer baselines on multi-task settings of the MNIST, mini-imagenet, and CIFAR-100 datasets. Our experiments demonstrate a significant improvement in accuracy, with sharper convergence. In addition, routing networks have nearly constant per-task training cost while cross-stitch networks scale linearly with the number of tasks. On CIFAR-100 (20 tasks) we obtain cross-stitch performance levels with an 85% reduction in training time.

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In recent years researchers have achieved considerable success applying neural network methods to question answering (QA). These approaches have achieved state of the art results in simplified closed-domain settings such as the SQuAD (Rajpurkar et al. 2016) dataset, which provides a pre-selected passage, from which the answer to a given question may be extracted. More recently, researchers have begun to tackle open-domain QA, in which the model is given a question and access to a large corpus (e.g., wikipedia) instead of a pre-selected passage (Chen et al. 2017a). This setting is more complex as it requires large-scale search for relevant passages by an information retrieval component, combined with a reading comprehension model that “reads” the passages to generate an answer to the question. Performance in this setting lags well behind closed-domain performance. In this paper, we present a novel open-domain QA system called Reinforced Ranker-Reader (R3), based on two algorithmic innovations. First, we propose a new pipeline for open-domain QA with a Ranker component, which learns to rank retrieved passages in terms of likelihood of extracting the ground-truth answer to a given question. Second, we propose a novel method that jointly trains the Ranker along with an answer-extraction Reader model, based on reinforcement learning. We report extensive experimental results showing that our method significantly improves on the state of the art for multiple open-domain QA datasets.

Given the recent success of Deep Learning applied to a variety of single tasks, it is natural to consider more human-realistic settings. Perhaps the most difficult of these settings is that of continual lifelong learning, where the model must learn online over a continuous stream of non-stationary data. A successful continual lifelong learning system must have three key capabilities: it must learn and adapt over time, it must not forget what it has learned, and it must be efficient in both training time and memory. Recent techniques have focused their efforts primarily on the first two capabilities while questions of efficiency remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we consider the problem of efficient and effective storage of experiences over very large time-frames. In particular we consider the case where typical experiences are O(n) bits and memories are limited to O(k) bits for k << n. We present a novel scalable architecture and training algorithm in this challenging domain and provide an extensive evaluation of its performance. Our results show that we can achieve considerable gains on top of state-of-the-art methods such as GEM.

We introduce Recursive Routing Networks (RRNs), which are modular, adaptable models that learn effectively in diverse environments. RRNs consist of a set of functions, typically organized into a grid, and a meta-learner decision-making component called the router. The model jointly optimizes the parameters of the functions and the meta-learner's policy for routing inputs through those functions. RRNs can be incorporated into existing architectures in a number of ways; we explore adding them to word representation layers, recurrent network hidden layers, and classifier layers. Our evaluation task is natural language inference (NLI). Using the MULTINLI corpus, we show that an RRN's routing decisions reflect the high-level genre structure of that corpus. To show that RRNs can learn to specialize to more fine-grained semantic distinctions, we introduce a new corpus of NLI examples involving implicative predicates, and show that the model components become fine-tuned to the inferential signatures that are characteristic of these predicates. x Routing across examples Weight sharing Possible distribution Orthogonalized Knowledge