Title: HOUDINI: Lifelong Learning as Program Synthesis,
Abstract: We present a neurosymbolic framework for the lifelong learning of algorithmic
tasks that mix perception and procedural reasoning. Reusing high-level concepts
across domains and learning complex procedures are key challenges in lifelong
learning. We show that a program synthesis approach that combines gradient
descent with combinatorial search over programs can be a more effective
response to these challenges than purely neural methods. Our framework, called
HOUDINI, represents neural networks as strongly typed, differentiable
functional programs that use symbolic higher-order combinators to compose a
library of neural functions. Our learning algorithm consists of: (1) a symbolic
program synthesizer that performs a type-directed search over parameterized
programs, and decides on the library functions to reuse, and the architectures
to combine them, while learning a sequence of tasks; and (2) a neural module
that trains these programs using stochastic gradient descent. We evaluate
HOUDINI on three benchmarks that combine perception with the algorithmic tasks
of counting, summing, and shortest-path computation. Our experiments show that
HOUDINI transfers high-level concepts more effectively than traditional
transfer learning and progressive neural networks, and that the typed
representation of networks significantly accelerates the search.