Scalable Modular Network: A Framework for Adaptive Learning via Agreement Routing

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission350 Authors

Keywords: modular neural network; module selection process; adaptive learning

Abstract:

In this paper, we propose a novel modular network framework, called Scalable Modular Network (SMN), which enables adaptive learning capability and supports integration of new modules after pre-training for better adaptation.
This adaptive capability comes from a novel design of router within SMN, named agreement router, which selects and composes different specialist modules through an iterative message passing process.
The agreement router iteratively computes the agreements among a set of input and outputs of all modules to allocate inputs to specific module.
During the iterative routing, messages of modules are passed to each other, which improves the module selection process with consideration of both local interactions (between a single module and input) and global interactions involving multiple other modules.
To validate our contributions, we conduct experiments on two problems: a toy min-max game and few-shot image classification task.
Our experimental results demonstrate that SMN can generalize to new distributions and exhibit sample-efficient adaptation to new tasks.
Furthermore, SMN can achieve a better adaptation capability when new modules are introduced after pre-training.
Our code is available at https://github.com/hu-my/ScalableModularNetwork.

Submission Number: 350