SDMTR: A Brain-inspired Transformer for Relation Inference

Deep learning has seen a movement towards the concepts of modularity, module coordination and sparse interactions to fit the working principles of biological systems. Inspired by Global Workspace Theory and long-term memory system in human brain, both are instrumental in constructing biologically plausible artificial intelligence systems, we introduce the shared dual-memory Transformers (SDMTR)— a model that builds upon Transformers. The proposed approach includes the shared long-term memory and workspace with finite capacity in which different specialized modules compete to write information. Later, crucial information from shared workspace is inscribed into long-term memory through outer product attention mechanism to reduce information conflict and build a knowledge reservoir, thereby facilitating subsequent inference, learning and problem-solving. We apply SDMTR to multi-modality question-answering and reasoning challenges, including text-based bAbI-20k, visual Sort-of-CLEVR and triangle relations detection tasks. The results demonstrate that our SDMTR significantly outperforms the vanilla Transformer and its recent improvements. Additionally, visualization analyses indicate that the presence of memory positively correlates with model effectiveness on inference tasks. This research provides novel insights and empirical support to advance biologically plausible deep learning frameworks.