Detecting when a neural sequence model does "interesting" computation is an open problem. The next token prediction loss is a poor indicator: Low loss can stem from trivially predictable sequences that are uninteresting, while high loss may reflect unpredictable but also irrelevant information that can be ignored by the model. We propose a better metric: measuring the model’s ability to predict its own future hidden states. We show empirically that this metric–in contrast to the next token prediction loss–correlates with the intuitive interestingness of the task. To measure predictability, we introduce the architecture-agnostic "prediction of hidden states" (PHi) layer that serves as an information bottleneck on the main pathway of the network (e.g., the residual stream in Transformers). We propose a novel learned predictive prior that enables us to measure the novel information gained in each computation step, which serves as our metric. We show empirically that our metric predicts the description length of formal languages learned in-context, the complexity of mathematical reasoning problems, and the correctness of self-generated reasoning chains.

Inspired by Minsky's Society of Mind, Schmidhuber's Learning to Think, and other more recent works, this paper proposes and advocates for the concept of natural language-based societies of mind (NLSOMs). We imagine these societies as consisting of a collection of multimodal neural networks, including large language models, which engage in a “mindstorm” to solve problems using a shared natural language interface. Here, we work to identify and discuss key questions about the social structure, governance, and economic principles for NLSOMs, emphasizing their impact on the future of AI. Our demonstrations with NLSOMs-which feature up to 129 agents-show their effectiveness in various tasks, including visual question answering, image captioning, and prompt generation for text-to-image synthesis.

The act of telling stories is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. This work introduces the concept of narrative information, which we define as the overlap in information space between a story and the items that compose the story. Using contrastive learning methods, we show how modern artificial neural networks can be leveraged to distill stories and extract a representation of the narrative information. We then demonstrate how evolutionary algorithms can leverage this to extract a set of narrative template curves and how these-in tandem with a novel curve-fitting algorithm we introduce-can reorder music albums to automatically induce stories in them. In doing so, we give statistically significant evidence that (1) these narrative information template curves are present in existing albums and that (2) people prefer an album ordered through one of these learned template curves over a random one. The premises of our work extend to any form of (largely) independent media, and as evidence, we also show that our method works with image data.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are general-purpose parallel-sequential computers. The program of an RNN is its weight matrix. How to learn useful representations of RNN weights that facilitate RNN analysis as well as downstream tasks? While the _mechanistic approach_ directly looks at some RNN's weights to predict its behavior, the _functionalist approach_ analyzes its overall functionality–specifically, its input-output mapping. We consider several mechanistic approaches for RNN weights and adapt the permutation equivariant Deep Weight Space layer for RNNs. Our two novel functionalist approaches extract information from RNN weights by 'interrogating' the RNN through probing inputs. We develop a theoretical framework that demonstrates conditions under which the functionalist approach can generate rich representations that help determine RNN behavior. We create and release the first two 'model zoo' datasets for RNN weight representation learning. One consists of generative models of a class of formal languages, and the other one of classifiers of sequentially processed MNIST digits. With the help of an emulation-based self-supervised learning technique we compare and evaluate the different RNN weight encoding techniques on multiple downstream applications. On the most challenging one, namely predicting which exact task the RNN was trained on, functionalist approaches show clear superiority.

Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning optimal policies, given goals encoded in special command inputs. Here we study goal-conditioned neural nets (NNs) that learn to generate deep NN policies in form of context-specific weight matrices, similar to Fast Weight Programmers and other methods from the 1990s. Using context commands of the form ``generate a policy that achieves a desired expected return,'' our NN generators combine powerful exploration of parameter space with generalization across commands to iteratively find better and better policies. A form of weight-sharing HyperNetworks and policy embeddings scales our method to generate deep NNs. Experiments show how a single learned policy generator can produce policies that achieve any return seen during training. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm on a set of continuous control tasks where it exhibits competitive performance. Our code is public.