Naive Few-Shot Learning: Sequence Consistency Evaluation

Cognitive psychologists often use the term $\textit{fluid intelligence}$ to describe the ability of humans to solve novel tasks without any prior training. In contrast to humans, deep neural networks can perform cognitive tasks only after extensive (pre-)training with a large number of relevant examples. Motivated by fluid intelligence research in the cognitive sciences, we built a benchmark task which we call sequence consistency evaluation (SCE) that can be used to address this gap. Solving the SCE task requires the ability to extract simple rules from sequences, a basic computation that in humans, is required for solving various intelligence tests. We tested $\textit{untrained}$ (naive) deep learning models in the SCE task. Specifically, we tested two networks that can learn latent relations, Relation Networks (RN) and Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC). We found that the latter, which imposes a causal structure on the latent relations performs better. We then show that naive few-shot learning of sequences can be successfully used for anomaly detection in two different tasks, visual and auditory, without any prior training.