Distributed Associative Memory Network with Association Reinforcing Loss

Despite recent progress in memory augmented neural network research, associative memory networks with a single external memory still show limited performance on complex relational reasoning tasks. The main reason for this problem comes from the lossy representation of a content-based addressing memory and its insufficient associating performance for long temporal sequence data. To address these problems, here we introduce a novel Distributed Associative Memory architecture (DAM) with Association Reinforcing Loss (ARL) function which enhances the relation reasoning performance of memory augmented neural network. In this framework, instead of relying on a single large external memory, we form a set of multiple smaller associative memory blocks and update these sub-memory blocks simultaneously and independently with the content-based addressing mechanism. Based on DAM architecture, we can effectively retrieve complex relational information by integrating diverse representations distributed across multiple sub-memory blocks with an attention mechanism. Moreover, to further enhance the relation modeling performance of memory network, we propose ARL which assists a task's target objective while learning relational information exist in data. ARL enables the memory augmented neural network to reinforce an association between input data and task objective by reproducing stochastically sampled input data from stored memory contents. With this content reproducing task, it enriches the representations with relational information. In experiments, we apply our two main approaches to Differential Neural Computer (DNC), which is one of the representative content-based addressing memory model and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both memorization and relational reasoning tasks.