MIT News November 10, 2022 To address the challenge of exploration, incentivizing the agent to visit novel states using an exploration bonus can lead to excellent results on hard exploration tasks but can suffer from intrinsic reward bias and underperform when compared to an agent trained using only task rewards. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, Finland) has proposed a principled constrained policy optimization procedure that automatically tunes the importance of the intrinsic reward: it suppresses the intrinsic reward when exploration is unnecessary and increases it when exploration is required. According to the researchers this resulted in superior […]
Category Archives: AI
Researchers Say It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI
Science Alert September 18, 2022 Considering recent advances in machine intelligence, several scientists, philosophers, and technologists have revived the discussion about the potentially catastrophic risks entailed by such an entity. An international team of researchers (Spain, Germany, USA – UC San Diego, Chile) traced the origins and development of the neo-fear of superintelligence, and some of the major proposals for its containment. They argue that total containment is, in principle, impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent to computing itself. Turing’s halting program centers on knowing whether a computer program will reach a conclusion and answer (so it halts), or simply […]
An AI Just Independently Discovered Alternate Physics
Science Alert July 29, 2022 Despite the prevalence of computing power and artificial intelligence, the process of identifying the hidden state variables themselves has resisted automation. Most data-driven methods for modelling physical phenomena still rely on the assumption that the relevant state variables are already known. A longstanding question is whether it is possible to identify state variables from only high-dimensional observational data. Researchers at Columbia University proposed a principle for determining how many state variables an observed system is likely to have, and what these variables might be. They demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach using video recordings of […]
Scientists Have Created an AI That Can Think Like a Human Baby
Science Alert July 11, 2022 Current artificial intelligence systems pale in their understanding of intuitive physics, in comparison to even very young children. An international team of researchers (USA – Princeton University, UK) addressed this gap between humans and machines by drawing on the field of developmental psychology. They introduced and open-sourced a machine-learning dataset designed to evaluate conceptual understanding of intuitive physics, adopting the violation-of-expectation (VoE) paradigm from developmental psychology. Then they built a deep-learning system that learns intuitive physics directly from visual data, inspired by studies of visual cognition in children. They demonstrated that their model could learn […]
AI Improves Robotic Performance in DARPA’s Machine Common Sense Program
DARPA News June 22, 2022 A team of researchers in the US(UC Berkeley, Oregon State University, University of Utah, University of Washington) working on DARPA’s Machine Common Sense (MCS) program demonstrated a series of improvements to robotic system performance over the course of multiple experiments. Just as infants must learn from experience, MCS seeks to construct computational models that mimic the core domains of child cognition for objects (intuitive physics), agents (intentional actors), and places (spatial navigation). Using only simulated training, recent MCS experiments demonstrated advancements in systems’ abilities – ranging from understanding how to grasp objects and adapting to […]
The promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence explored at TEDxMIT event
MIT News January 11, 2022 MIT scientists discuss the future of AI with applications across many sectors, as a tool that can be both beneficial and harmful. They said some new capabilities that could be enabled by AI: an automated personal assistant that could monitor your sleep phases and wake you at the optimal time, as well as on-body sensors that monitor everything from your posture to your digestive system. Intelligent assistance can help empower and augment our lives. But these intriguing possibilities should only be pursued if we can simultaneously resolve the challenges that these technologies bring…read more.
2021’s Top Stories About AI Spoiler: A lot of them talked about what’s wrong with machine learning today
IEEE Spectrum December 27, 2021 Many of this year’s top articles grappled with the limits of deep learning and spotlighted researchers seeking new paths. Here are the 10 most popular AI articles that Spectrum published in 2021. Several came from Spectrum’s October 2021 special issue on AI, The Great AI Reckoning … read more.
Artificial networks learn to smell like the brain
MIT News October 18, 2021 A team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, MIT) constructed a network of artificial neurons comprising an input layer, a compression layer, and an expansion layer — just like the fruit fly olfactory system. They gave it the same number of neurons as the fruit fly system, but no inherent structure: connections between neurons would be rewired as the model learned to classify odors. The scientists asked the network to assign data representing different odors to categories, and to correctly categorize not just single odors, but also mixtures of […]
Artificial intelligence and algorithmic irresponsibility: The devil in the machine?
TechXplore March 17, 2021 According to researchers in France AI tempts people to abandon judgment and moral responsibility by removing a range of decisions from our conscious minds, it crowds out judgment from a bewildering array of human activities. Without a proper understanding of how it does this we cannot circumvent its negative effects. With widespread access to granular data on human behavior harvested from social media, AI has permeated the key sectors of most developed economies. For tractable problems such as analyzing documents, it usually compares favorably with human alternatives that are slower and more error-prone, leading to enormous […]
Calculations Show It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI
Science Alert January 14, 2021 Superintelligence is a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. Considering recent advances in machine intelligence, several scientists, philosophers, and technologists predict potentially catastrophic risks entailed by such an entity. An international team of researchers (Spain, Germany, USA – UC San Diego, Chile) trace the origins and development of the neo-fear of superintelligence, and some of the major proposals for its containment. They argue that total containment is, in principle, impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent to computing itself. Assuming that superintelligence will contain a program […]