Thomas X. Sheppard, Alon Albalak, Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley
原文摘要
Implicit in much research in deep learning is the assumption that if a network achieves low loss, then it must have learned a good representation of its training data. Recent work by Kumar et al. (2025, arXiv:2505.11581) questions this assumption, arguing that networks trained with conventional gradient descent achieve low loss despite learning fractured entangled representations (FER), leaving related concepts disconnected and unrelated concepts entangled inappropriately. Kumar et al. further show that dramatically better representations are possible: a network evolved through an open-ended, human-in-the-loop process learned unified factored representations (UFR) that capture the regularities of the domain far better than a counterpart with nearly identical outputs trained with conventional gradient descent. Inspired by UFR, this paper introduces unified factored organizers (UFOs), networks trained to model regularities in the representations of other networks. A network can then be trained both to achieve low loss on its task objective and to align its representations with the model learned by the UFO. Networks trained with UFOs are shown to learn qualitatively superior representations in an image-regression domain where representations are easily interpretable. To provide quantitative evidence for the impact of UFOs on representation learning, a transformer is trained with and without UFO regularization to grok a modular arithmetic problem set. When combined with weight decay, UFOs can reduce the number of transformer training steps needed to grok by more than 10x relative to weight decay alone. Without weight decay, UFOs can reduce the number of transformer training steps needed to grok by more than 100x relative to an unregularized baseline. If UFOs are real, they suggest a new paradigm where loss functions themselves are trained to learn an effective model of good representation.
Alon Albalak, Sebastian Gabriel, David B. D'Ambrosio, Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley
原文摘要
Many of the most consequential advances promised by AI, from curing diseases and inventing new technologies to formulating new scientific theories, are fundamentally creative acts. Yet creativity is uniquely difficult to learn because it faces a creative paradox: learning to repeat past examples of creative success makes those specific examples more likely to recur, inhibiting the very creativity desired. This work argues that creativity is better modeled as an explicit process rather than as a property of individual artifacts, and proposes to learn the underlying generative principles behind the creative process. In particular, to escape the paradox, we introduce creative priming (CP), wherein a trained priming model generates a prompt-specific primer that assists a response model in being creative, explicitly decoupling the creative process from response generation. The priming model learns through GRPO, rewarding primers that lead to responses that are novel, high-quality, and diverse, thereby reinforcing the process that yields creative responses without reinforcing any specific response.
David B. D'Ambrosio, Alon Albalak, Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley
原文摘要
Many major scientific advances come from approaching a problem with a new or novel perspective. While large language models (LLMs) with internet-scale knowledge seem poised to take such perspectives, their consistent generation remains elusive. Instead, models are drawn to dominant views and preexisting, in-field bias. To explore the potential of fresh eyes to increase creativity, this paper proposes naive LLMs, models that are made intentionally ignorant of a specific topic. Through deprivation in training or intentional forgetting, naive models are unburdened by existing dogma, allowing them to be free to make new associations and conjectures. These naive models can then be paired with a stronger mentor model that can refine their unique perspectives into concrete proposals. For the 1B and 7B models tested in this paper, naive models consistently produce seed ideas that are more novel and useful than baseline counterparts, and mentor refinement improves the ideas even further. Thus, contrary to the prevailing tradition of scaling up training data, we demonstrate a case where less information is actually more powerful, in particular when the aim is to discover genuinely outside-the-box solutions.
This paper explores an unexpected connection between the quality of a neural network's (NN's) internal representation and its vulnerability to catastrophic forgetting. The representational forgetting hypothesis is that networks with unified, factored representation (UFR) can resist catastrophic forgetting without any modification to the underlying fine-tuning algorithm or network architecture. The key insight is that catastrophic forgetting may largely result from fractured entangled representation (FER): fine-tuning on only part of the input domain results in disruptive changes for other input patterns, because of how individual features are globally entangled. In contrast, if a gradient update is compatible with how a UFR network factors its representation, such an update may result in coordinated change across the input domain, alleviating catastrophic forgetting. Experiments in two domains provide evidence for this hypothesis: (1) an illustrative 1D regression task, in which UFR networks constructed by hand are compared against networks trained from scratch with SGD, and (2) an image-regression task with NNs previously shown to exhibit UFR. In both settings, UFR networks forget substantially less than their FER counterparts when repeatedly fine-tuned on UFR-compatible variations. Further experiments show that a training loss that distills UFR representations into fresh NNs reduces forgetting; along with several additional controls, these results help isolate representation as the critical factor. Together these results suggest that representational quality is an underappreciated contributor to catastrophic forgetting, and that the encouragement and maintenance of such quality may require attending to what patterns a particular NN is ready to learn.