Variational temporal abstraction

Taesup Kim, Sungjin Ahn, Yoshua Bengio

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

We introduce a variational approach to learning and inference of temporally hierarchical structure and representation for sequential data. We propose the Variational Temporal Abstraction (VTA), a hierarchical recurrent state space model that can infer the latent temporal structure and thus perform the stochastic state transition hierarchically. We also propose to apply this model to implement the jumpy imagination ability in imagination-augmented agent-learning in order to improve the efficiency of the imagination. In experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed method can model 2D and 3D visual sequence datasets with interpretable temporal structure discovery and that its application to jumpy imagination enables more efficient agent-learning in a 3D navigation task.

Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume32
StatePublished - 2019
Event33rd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2019 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Dec 8 2019Dec 14 2019

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Variational temporal abstraction'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this