Learning RNNs with Commutative State Transitions

Many machine learning tasks involve analysis of set valued inputs, and thus the learned functions are expected to be permutation invariant. Recent works (e.g., Deep Sets) have sought to characterize the neural architectures which result in permutation invariance. These typically correspond to applying the same pointwise function to all set components, followed by sum aggregation. Here we take a different approach to such architectures and focus on recursive architectures such as RNNs, which are not permutation invariant in general, but can implement permutation invariant functions in a very compact manner. We first show that commutativity and associativity of the state transition function result in permutation invariance. Next, we derive a regularizer that minimizes the degree of non-commutativity in the transitions. Finally, we demonstrate that the resulting method outperforms other methods for learning permutation invariant models, due to its use of recursive computation.