The Fast and the Flexible: training neural networks to learn to follow instructions from small data

Learning to follow human instructions is a challenging task because while interpreting instructions requires discovering arbitrary algorithms, humans typically provide very few examples to learn from. For learning from this data to be possible, strong inductive biases are necessary. Work in the past has relied on hand-coded components or manually engineered features to provide such biases. In contrast, here we seek to establish whether this knowledge can be acquired automatically by a neural network system through a two phase training procedure: A (slow) offline learning stage where the network learns about the general structure of the task and a (fast) online adaptation phase where the network learns the language of a new given speaker. Controlled experiments show that when the network is exposed to familiar instructions but containing novel words, the model adapts very efficiently to the new vocabulary. Moreover, even for human speakers whose language usage can depart significantly from our artificial training language, our network can still make use of its automatically acquired inductive bias to learn to follow instructions more effectively.