Papers › Recurrent Independent Mechanisms

Recurrent Independent Mechanisms

24 Sep 2019ICLR 2021 1arXiv:1909.10893archive 2025-07-28

Anirudh Goyal, Alex Lamb, Jordan Hoffmann, Shagun Sodhani, Sergey Levine, Yoshua Bengio, Bernhard Schölkopf

Learning modular structures which reflect the dynamics of the environment can lead to better generalization and robustness to changes which only affect a few of the underlying causes. We propose Recurrent Independent Mechanisms (RIMs), a new recurrent architecture in which multiple groups of recurrent cells operate with nearly independent transition dynamics, communicate only sparingly through the bottleneck of attention, and are only updated at time steps where they are most relevant. We show that this leads to specialization amongst the RIMs, which in turn allows for dramatically improved generalization on tasks where some factors of variation differ systematically between training and evaluation.

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Code

Syntology Ran 14 of 20 code samples harvested from 3 repositories linked to this paper; 6 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 13 ran with no contract checked.

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anirudh9119/RIMs mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
fuyuan-li/tensorflow-RIMs mentioned on GitHubtf report

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Code Syntology ran Syntology

20 samples harvested; 14 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 6 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · honoured contract
13ran
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BlockGRU anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · 779d2155a1554713 · report
BlockLSTM anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · c4c16932e4104a16 · report
GroupGRUCell dido1998/Recurrent-Independent-Mechanisms/RIM.py community (archive-listed) ran licence not identified · pointer only · 530004f559bbe61b · report
GroupLSTMCell fuyuan-li/tensorflow-RIMs/tfRIM.py community (archive-listed) ran licence not identified · pointer only · 03ed40c46c6366e9 · report
GroupLSTMCell dido1998/Recurrent-Independent-Mechanisms/RIM.py community (archive-listed) ran · metamorphic tier: deterministic licence not identified · pointer only · 70827a6ca3aea643 · report
GroupLinearLayer anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · 80e31c08f502d673 · report
GroupLinearLayer fuyuan-li/tensorflow-RIMs/tfRIM.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · b1f19581fe3bab53 · report
GroupLinearLayer dido1998/Recurrent-Independent-Mechanisms/RIM.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · 3dbce3a83b09b310 · report
RIMCell fuyuan-li/tensorflow-RIMs/tfRIM.py community (archive-listed) ran licence not identified · pointer only · b440016392f1a553 · report
ScaledDotProductAttention anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · cacc4a65e64179c2 · report
Sparse_attention anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) ran fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · cc1a9597719c4ced · report
Sparse_grad_attention anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · af4c47bd3c2432c3 · report
blocked_grad anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · 534a1d4c71e7cd54 · report
repackage_hidden anirudh9119/RIMs/event_based/train_copying.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · a81c5fb0b9535995 · report
BlocksCore anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 74ea1996d4a9ce45 · report
MultiHeadAttention anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 2aaad11d08c7dcef · report
RIMCell dido1998/Recurrent-Independent-Mechanisms/RIM.py community (archive-listed) unverified licence not identified · pointer only · 406669b7f6420d33 · report
repackage_hidden anirudh9119/RIMs/event_based/train_adding.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 70d200be038af543 · report
zero_matrix_elements anirudh9119/RIMs/blocks_atari/a2c_ppo_acktr/blocks_core.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 5b4032d119530f92 · report
none_or_str identical code first harvested elsewhere unverified licence of this copy not recorded · 2fc6fdb85f13dc41 · report

Tasks

Atari Games

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Atari Games Atari 2600 Beam Rider RIMs-PPO Score 5320 #39 of 49 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Up and Down RIMs-PPO Score 390000 #10 of 44 Archive leaderboard report
Atari Games Atari 2600 Zaxxon RIMs-PPO Score 15000 #16 of 41 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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