{"pk":28528,"title":"Human few-shot learning of compositional instructions","subtitle":null,"abstract":"People learn in fast and flexible ways that have not been emu-lated by machines. Once a person learns a new verb “dax,” heor she can effortlessly understand how to “dax twice,” “walkand dax,” or “dax vigorously.” There have been striking recentimprovements in machine learning for natural language pro-cessing, yet the best algorithms require vast amounts of experi-ence and struggle to generalize new concepts in compositionalways. To better understand these distinctively human abilities,we study the compositional skills of people through language-like instruction learning tasks. Our results show that peoplecan learn and use novel functional concepts from very fewexamples (few-shot learning), successfully applying familiarfunctions to novel inputs. People can also compose conceptsin complex ways that go beyond the provided demonstrations.Two additional experiments examined the assumptions and in-ductive biases that people make when solving these tasks, re-vealing three biases: mutual exclusivity, one-to-one mappings,and iconic concatenation. We discuss the implications for cog-nitive modeling and the potential for building machines withmore human-like language learning capabilities.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"concept learning; compositionality; word learn-ing; neural networks"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5vr9p4ks","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Brenden","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Lake","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""},{"first_name":"Tal","middle_name":"","last_name":"Linzen","name_suffix":"","institution":"John Hopkins University","department":""},{"first_name":"Marco","middle_name":"","last_name":"Baroni","name_suffix":"","institution":"Facebook AI Research","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28528/galley/18399/download/"}]}