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Title: Simulating Action Dynamics with Neural Process Networks

Paper content:
Understanding procedural language requires anticipating the causal effects of actions, even when they are not explicitly stated.
In this work, we introduce Neural Process Networks to understand procedural text through (neural) simulation of action dynamics.
Our model complements existing memory architectures with dynamic entity tracking by explicitly modeling actions as state transformers.
The model updates the states of the entities by executing learned action operators.
Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed model can reason about the unstated causal effects of actions, allowing it to provide more accurate contextual information for understanding and generating procedural text, all while offering more interpretable internal representations than existing alternatives.
Understanding procedural text such as instructions or stories requires anticipating the implicit causal effects of actions on entities.
For example, given instructions such as "add blueberries to the muffin mix, then bake for one half hour," an intelligent agent must be able to anticipate a number of entailed facts (e.g., the blueberries are now in the oven; their "temperature" will increase).
While this common sense reasoning is trivial for humans, most natural language understanding algorithms do not have the capacity to reason about causal effects not mentioned directly in the surface strings BID12 BID7 BID14 .
The process is a narrative of entity state changes induced by actions.
In each sentence, these state changes are induced by simulated actions and must be remembered.In this paper, we introduce Neural Process Networks, a procedural language understanding system that tracks common sense attributes through neural simulation of action dynamics.
Our network models interpretation of natural language instructions as a process of actions and their cumulative effects on entities.
More concretely, reading one sentence at a time, our model attentively selects what actions to execute on which entities, and remembers the state changes induced with a recurrent memory structure.
In FIG0 , for example, our model indexes the "tomato" embedding, selects the "wash" and "cut" functions and performs a computation that changes the "tomato" embedding so that it can reason about attributes such as its "SHAPE" and "CLEANLINESS".Our
model contributes to a recent line of research that aims to model aspects of world state changes, such as language models and machine readers with explicit entity representations BID4 BID6 , as well as other more general purpose memory network variants BID30 BID26 BID5 BID23 . This
worldcentric modeling of procedural language (i.e., understanding by simulation) abstracts away from the surface strings, complementing text-centric modeling of language, which focuses on syntactic and semantic labeling of surface words (i.e., understanding by labeling).Unlike
previous approaches, however, our model also learns explicit action representations as functional operators (See FIG0 . While
representations of action semantics could be acquired through an embodied agent that can see and interact with the world BID22 , we propose to learn these representations from text. In particular
, we require the model to be able to explain the causal effects of actions by predicting natural language attributes about entities such as "LOCATION" and "TEMPERATURE". The model adjusts
its representations of actions based on errors it makes in predicting the resultant state changes to attributes. This textual simulation
allows us to model aspects of action causality that are not readily available in existing simulation environments. Indeed, most virtual environments
offer limited aspects of the world -with a primary focus on spatial relations BID22 BID1 BID29 . They leave out various other dimensions
of the world states that are implied by diverse everyday actions such as "dissolve" (change of "COMPOSITION") and "wash" (change of "CLEANLINESS").Empirical results demonstrate that parametrizing
explicit action embeddings provides an inductive bias that allows the neural process network to learn more informative context representations for understanding and generating natural language procedural text. In addition, our model offers more interpretable
internal representations and can reason about the unstated causal effects of actions explained through natural language descriptors. Finally, we include a new dataset with fine-grained
annotations on state changes, to be shared publicly, to encourage future research in this direction.
We introduced the Neural Process Network for modeling a process of actions and their causal effects on entities by learning action transformations that change entity state representations.
The model maintains a recurrent memory structure to track entity states and is trained to predict the state changes that entities undergo.
Empirical results demonstrate that our model can learn the causal effects of action semantics in the cooking domain and track the dynamic state changes of entities, showing advantages over competitive baselines.A TRAINING DETAILS OF OUR FULL MODEL AND ABLATIONS

assistant: text: We propose a new recurrent memory architecture that can track common sense state changes of entities by simulating the causal effects of actions.