Distinguishing rule- and exemplar-based generalization in learning systems

Ishita Dasgupta, Erin Grant, Thomas L. Griffiths

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Machine learning systems often do not share the same inductive biases as humans and, as a result, extrapolate or generalize in ways that are inconsistent with our expectations. The tradeoff between exemplar- and rule-based generalization has been studied extensively in cognitive psychology; in this work, we present a protocol inspired by these experimental approaches to probe the inductive biases that control this tradeoff in category-learning systems. We isolate two such inductive biases: feature-level bias (differences in which features are more readily learned) and exemplar or rule bias (differences in how these learned features are used for generalization). We find that standard neural network models are feature-biased and exemplar-based, and discuss the implications of these findings for machine learning research on systematic generalization, fairness, and data augmentation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)4816-4830
Number of pages15
JournalProceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume162
StatePublished - 2022
Event39th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2022 - Baltimore, United States
Duration: Jul 17 2022Jul 23 2022

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Statistics and Probability

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