Machine learning systems perform well on pattern matching tasks, but their ability to perform algorithmic or logical reasoning is not well understood. One important reasoning capability is logical extrapolation, in which models trained only on small/simple reasoning problems can synthesize complex algorithms that scale up to large/complex problems at test time. Logical extrapolation can be achieved through recurrent systems, which can be iterated many times to solve difficult reasoning problems. We observe that this approach fails to scale to highly complex problems because behavior degenerates when many iterations are applied -- an issue we refer to as "overthinking." We propose a recall architecture that keeps an explicit copy of the problem instance in memory so that it cannot be forgotten. We also employ a progressive training routine that prevents the model from learning behaviors that are specific to iteration number and instead pushes it to learn behaviors that can be repeated indefinitely. These innovations prevent the overthinking problem, and enable recurrent systems to solve extremely hard logical extrapolation tasks, some requiring over 100K convolutional layers, without overthinking.

本研究提出了一种记忆回溯网络算法，采用保留问题实例的显式副本以及渐进式训练方法，解决了循环系统复杂问题迭代次数过多导致退化行为的问题，从而使循环系统能够解决极难的算法推理问题。

使用循环神经网络进行端到端算法合成：逻辑推断而不过度思考