We introduce a neural network with a recurrent attention model over a possibly large external memory. The architecture is a form of Memory Network (Weston et al., 2015) but unlike the model in that work, it is trained end-to-end, and hence requires significantly less supervision during training, making it more generally applicable in realistic settings. It can also be seen as an extension of RNNsearch to the case where multiple computational steps (hops) are performed per output symbol. The flexibility of the model allows us to apply it to tasks as diverse as (synthetic) question answering and to language modeling. For the former our approach is competitive with Memory Networks, but with less supervision. For the latter, on the Penn TreeBank and Text8 datasets our approach demonstrates comparable performance to RNNs and LSTMs. In both cases we show that the key concept of multiple computational hops yields improved results. Many tasks in AI require the collaboration of multiple agents. Typically, the communication protocol between agents is manually specified and not altered during training. In this paper we explore a simple neural model, called CommNN, that uses continuous communication for fully cooperative tasks. The model consists of multiple agents and the communication between them is learned alongside their policy. We apply this model to a diverse set of tasks, demonstrating the ability of the agents to learn to communicate amongst themselves, yielding improved performance over non-communicative agents and baselines. In some cases, it is possible to interpret the language devised by the agents, revealing simple but effective strategies for solving the task at hand.

Joint work with Sainbayar Sukhbaatar and Arthur Szlam.

Bio: Rob Fergus is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He is also a Research Scientist at Facebook, working in their AI Research Group. He received a Masters in Electrical Engineering with Prof. Pietro Perona at Caltech, before completing a PhD with Prof. Andrew Zisserman at the University of Oxford in 2005. Before coming to NYU, he spent two years as a post-doc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT, working with Prof. William Freeman. He has received several awards including a CVPR best paper prize, a Sloan Fellowship & NSF Career award and the IEEE Longuet-Higgins prize.