Yes! There’s two ways that can be relevant. First, a ton of bits presumably come from unsupervised learning of the general structure of the world. That part also carries over to natural abstractions/minimal latents: the big pile of random variables from which we’re extracting a minimal latent is meant to represent things like all those images the toddler sees over the course of their early life.
Second, sparsity: most of the images/subimages which hit my eyes do not contain apples. Indeed, most images/subimages which hit my eyes do not contain instances of most abstract object types. That fact could either be hard-coded in the toddler’s prior, or learned insofar as it’s already learning all these natural latents in an unsupervised way and can notice the sparsity. So, when a parent says “apple” while there’s an apple in front of the toddler, sparsity dramatically narrows down the space of things they might be referring to.
Yes! There’s two ways that can be relevant. First, a ton of bits presumably come from unsupervised learning of the general structure of the world. That part also carries over to natural abstractions/minimal latents: the big pile of random variables from which we’re extracting a minimal latent is meant to represent things like all those images the toddler sees over the course of their early life.
Second, sparsity: most of the images/subimages which hit my eyes do not contain apples. Indeed, most images/subimages which hit my eyes do not contain instances of most abstract object types. That fact could either be hard-coded in the toddler’s prior, or learned insofar as it’s already learning all these natural latents in an unsupervised way and can notice the sparsity. So, when a parent says “apple” while there’s an apple in front of the toddler, sparsity dramatically narrows down the space of things they might be referring to.