UC Berkeley – RECON: Learning to Explore the Real World with a Ground Robot

An example of our method deployed on a Clearpath Jackal ground robot (left) exploring a suburban environment to find a visual target (inset). (Right) Egocentric observations of the robot. Imagine you’re in an unfamiliar neighborhood with no house numbers and I give you a photo that I took a few days ago of my house,…

UC Berkeley – Why Generalization in RL is Difficult: Epistemic POMDPs and Implicit Partial Observability

Many experimental works have observed that generalization in deep RL appears to be difficult: although RL agents can learn to perform very complex tasks, they don’t seem to generalize over diverse task distributions as well as the excellent generalization of supervised deep nets might lead us to expect. In this blog post, we will aim…

UC Berkeley – A First-Principles Theory of Neural
Network Generalization

Fig 1. Measures of generalization performance for neural networks trained on four different boolean functions (colors) with varying training set size. For both MSE (left) and learnability (right), theoretical predictions (curves) closely match true performance (dots). Deep learning has proven a stunning success for countless problems of interest, but this success belies the fact that,…

UC Berkeley – Making RL Tractable by Learning More Informative Reward Functions: Example-Based Control, Meta-Learning, and Normalized Maximum Likelihood

Diagram of MURAL, our method for learning uncertainty-aware rewards for RL. After the user provides a few examples of desired outcomes, MURAL automatically infers a reward function that takes into account these examples and the agent’s uncertainty for each state. Although reinforcement learning has shown success in domains such as robotics, chip placement and playing…

AI Trends – Startup: AssemblyAI Represents New Generation Speech Recognition 

By AI Trends Staff   Advances in the AI behind speech recognition are driving growth in the market, attracting venture capital and funding startups, posing challenges to established players.   The growing acceptance and use of speech recognition devices are driving the market, which according to an estimate by Meticulous Research is expected to reach $26.8 billion…

AI Trends – Pursuit of Autonomous Cars May Pose Risk of AI Tapping Forbidden Knowledge

By Lance Eliot, the AI Trends Insider     Are there things that we must not know?    This is an age-old question. Some assert that there is the potential for knowledge that ought to not be known. In other words, there are ideas, concepts, or mental formulations that should we become aware of that knowledge it could be…

AI Trends – How Accountability Practices Are Pursued by AI Engineers in the Federal Government  

By John P. Desmond, AI Trends Editor    Two experiences of how AI developers within the federal government are pursuing AI accountability practices were outlined at the AI World Government event held virtually and in-person this week in Alexandria, Va.  Taka Ariga, chief data scientist and director, US Government Accountability Office Taka Ariga, chief data scientist and director at the US Government Accountability…

AI Trends – Best Practices for Building the AI Development Platform in Government 

By John P. Desmond, AI Trends Editor  The AI stack defined by Carnegie Mellon University is fundamental to the approach being taken by the US Army for its AI development platform efforts, according to Isaac Faber, Chief Data Scientist at the US Army AI Integration Center, speaking at the AI World Government event held in-person and virtually…

AI Trends – Advance Trustworthy AI and ML, and Identify Best Practices for Scaling AI 

By John P. Desmond, AI Trends Editor   Advancing trustworthy AI and machine learning to mitigate agency risk is a priority for the US Department of Energy (DOE), and identifying best practices for implementing AI at scale is a priority for the US General Services Administration (GSA).   That’s what attendees learned in two sessions at the AI…

AI Trends – Promise and Perils of Using AI for Hiring: Guard Against Data Bias 

By AI Trends Staff   While AI in hiring is now widely used for writing job descriptions, screening candidates, and automating interviews, it poses a risk of wide discrimination if not implemented carefully.  Keith Sonderling, Commissioner, US Equal Opportunity Commission That was the message from Keith Sonderling, Commissioner with the US Equal Opportunity Commision, speaking at the AI…