Compositional Generalization in Grounded Language Learning via Induced Model Sparsity

Sam Spilsbury, Alexander Ilin


Abstract
We provide a study of how induced model sparsity can help achieve compositional generalization and better sample efficiency in grounded language learning problems. We consider simple language-conditioned navigation problems in a grid world environment with disentangled observations. We show that standard neural architectures do not always yield compositional generalization. To address this, we design an agent that contains a goal identification module that encourages sparse correlations between words in the instruction and attributes of objects, composing them together to find the goal. The output of the goal identification module is the input to a value iteration network planner. Our agent maintains a high level of performance on goals containing novel combinations of properties even when learning from a handful of demonstrations. We examine the internal representations of our agent and find the correct correspondences between words in its dictionary and attributes in the environment.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-srw.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Student Research Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Hybrid: Seattle, Washington + Online
Editors:
Daphne Ippolito, Liunian Harold Li, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Danqi Chen, Nianwen Xue
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
143–155
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-srw.19
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-srw.19
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sam Spilsbury and Alexander Ilin. 2022. Compositional Generalization in Grounded Language Learning via Induced Model Sparsity. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Student Research Workshop, pages 143–155, Hybrid: Seattle, Washington + Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Compositional Generalization in Grounded Language Learning via Induced Model Sparsity (Spilsbury & Ilin, NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-srw.19.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-srw.19.mp4
Code
 aalto-ai/sparse-compgen