Humans can learn new concepts from a small number of examples by drawing on their inductive biases. These inductive biases have previously been captured by using Bayesian models defined over symbolic hypothesis spaces. Is it possible to create a neural network that displays the same inductive biases? We show that inductive biases that enable rapid concept learning can be instantiated in artificial neural networks by distilling a prior distribution from a symbolic Bayesian model via meta-learning, an approach for extracting the common structure from a set of tasks. We use this approach to create a neural network with an inductive bias towards concepts expressed as short logical formulas. Analyzing results from previous behavioral experiments in which people learned logical concepts from a few examples, we find that our meta-trained models are highly aligned with human performance.

How do learners acquire languages from the limited data avail-able to them? This process must involve some inductivebiases—factors that affect how a learner generalizes—but it isunclear which inductive biases can explain observed patternsin language acquisition. To facilitate computational model-ing aimed at addressing this question, we introduce a frame-work for giving particular linguistic inductive biases to a neu-ral network model; such a model can then be used to em-pirically explore the effects of those inductive biases. Thisframework disentangles universal inductive biases, which areencoded in the initial values of a neural network’s param-eters, from non-universal factors, which the neural networkmust learn from data in a given language. The initial statethat encodes the inductive biases is found with meta-learning,a technique through which a model discovers how to acquirenew languages more easily via exposure to many possible lan-guages. By controlling the properties of the languages that areused during meta-learning, we can control the inductive biasesthat meta-learning imparts. We demonstrate this frameworkwith a case study based on syllable structure. First, we specifythe inductive biases that we intend to give our model, and thenwe translate those inductive biases into a space of languagesfrom which a model can meta-learn. Finally, using existinganalysis techniques, we verify that our approach has impartedthe linguistic inductive biases that it was intended to impart.