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Spotlight
Pointer Networks
Oriol Vinyals · Meire Fortunato · Navdeep Jaitly

Wed Dec 09 02:40 PM -- 03:00 PM (PST) @ Room 210 A
in Spotlight Session 8 »

We introduce a new neural architecture to learn the conditional probability of an output sequence with elements that arediscrete tokens corresponding to positions in an input sequence.Such problems cannot be trivially addressed by existent approaches such as sequence-to-sequence and Neural Turing Machines,because the number of target classes in eachstep of the output depends on the length of the input, which is variable.Problems such as sorting variable sized sequences, and various combinatorialoptimization problems belong to this class. Our model solvesthe problem of variable size output dictionaries using a recently proposedmechanism of neural attention. It differs from the previous attentionattempts in that, instead of using attention to blend hidden units of anencoder to a context vector at each decoder step, it uses attention asa pointer to select a member of the input sequence as the output. We call this architecture a Pointer Net (Ptr-Net).We show Ptr-Nets can be used to learn approximate solutions to threechallenging geometric problems -- finding planar convex hulls, computingDelaunay triangulations, and the planar Travelling Salesman Problem-- using training examples alone. Ptr-Nets not only improve oversequence-to-sequence with input attention, butalso allow us to generalize to variable size output dictionaries.We show that the learnt models generalize beyond the maximum lengthsthey were trained on. We hope our results on these taskswill encourage a broader exploration of neural learning for discreteproblems.

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Author Information

Oriol Vinyals (Google)

Oriol Vinyals is a Research Scientist at Google. He works in deep learning with the Google Brain team. Oriol holds a Ph.D. in EECS from University of California, Berkeley, and a Masters degree from University of California, San Diego. He is a recipient of the 2011 Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship. He was an early adopter of the new deep learning wave at Berkeley, and in his thesis he focused on non-convex optimization and recurrent neural networks. At Google Brain he continues working on his areas of interest, which include artificial intelligence, with particular emphasis on machine learning, language, and vision.

Meire Fortunato (University of California Berkeley)
Navdeep Jaitly (Google)

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