# Weight Priors for Learning Identity Relations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03125 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03125/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Relational Weight Priors in Neural Networks for Abstract Pattern Learning and Language Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06198/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning abstract and systematic relations has been an open issue in neural network learning for over 30 years. It has been shown recently that neural networks do not learn relations based on identity and are unable to generalize well to unseen data. The Relation Based Pattern (RBP) approach has been proposed as a solution for this problem. In this work, we extend RBP by realizing it as a Bayesian prior on network weights to model the identity relations. This weight prior leads to a modified regularization term in otherwise standard network learning. In our experiments, we show that the Bayesian weight priors lead to perfect generalization when learning identity based relations and do not impede general neural network learning. We believe that the approach of creating an inductive bias with weight priors can be extended easily to other forms of relations and will be beneficial for many other learning tasks.