Passive Learning of Active Causal Strategies in Agents and Language Models | Andrew Lampinen

ICARL Seminar Series - 2023 Spring

Passive Learning of Active Causal Strategies in Agents and Language Models

Abstract:
What can be learned about causality and experimentation from passive data? This question is salient given recent successes of passively-trained language models in interactive domains such as tool use. Passive learning is inherently limited. However, we show that purely passive learning can in fact allow an agent to learn generalizable strategies for determining and using causal structures, as long as the agent can intervene at test time. In this talk, I will show empirically that agents trained via passive imitation on expert data can indeed generalize at test time to infer and use causal links which are never present in the training data; these agents can also generalize experimentation strategies to novel variable sets never observed in training. This is possible even in a more complex environment with high-dimensional observations, with the support of natural language explanations. Explanations can even allow passive learners to generalize out-of-distribution from perfectly-confounded training data. Finally, I'll show that language models, trained only on passive next-word prediction, can generalize causal intervention strategies from a few-shot prompt containing examples of experimentation, together with explanations and reasoning. These results highlight the surprising power of passive learning of active causal strategies, and may help to understand the behaviors and capabilities of language models. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16183)

About our Speaker:
Andrew Lampinen is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Previously, he completed his PhD at Stanford University, and his BA at UC Berkeley. His work focuses on using methods from cognitive science to analyze AI, and using insights from cognitive science to improve AI, and covers areas ranging from RL agents to language models. He is particularly interested in cognitive flexibility and generalization, and how these abilities are enabled by factors like language, memory, and embodiment.

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Follow our Speaker:
Twitter: twitter.com/AndrewLampinen
Website: lampinen.github.io
Github: github.com/lampinen/


ICARL
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Intro and Outro music courtesy of Bensound.com - Funky Suspense by Benjamin Tissot