During the first weeks of February, we asked recipients of our Data and AI Newsletters to participate in a survey on AI adoption in the enterprise. We were interested in answering two questions. First, we wanted to understand how the use of AI grew in the past year. We were also interested in the practice…
It seems harder than ever to agree with others on basic facts, let alone to develop shared values and goals: we even claim to live in a post-truth era1. With anti-vaxxers, QAnon, Bernie Bros, flat earthers, the intellectual dark web, and disagreement worldwide as to the seriousness of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of masks, have…
Programs like AlphaZero and GPT-3 are massive accomplishments: they represent years of sustained work solving a difficult problem. But these problems are squarely within the domain of traditional AI. Playing Chess and Go or building ever-better language models have been AI projects for decades. The following projects have a different flavor: In February, PLOS Genetics…
A couple of years ago, Pete Skomoroch, Roger Magoulas, and I talked about the problems of being a product manager for an AI product. We decided that would be a good topic for an article, and possibly more. After Pete and I wrote the first article for O’Reilly Radar, it was clear that there was…
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,…
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…
Sequence Modeling Solutions for Reinforcement Learning Problems Long-horizon predictions of (top) the Trajectory Transformer compared to those of (bottom) a single-step dynamics model. Modern machine learning success stories often have one thing in common: they use methods that scale gracefully with ever-increasing amounts of data. This is particularly clear from recent advances in sequence modeling,…
Processing raw sensory inputs is crucial for applying deep RL algorithms to real-world problems. For example, autonomous vehicles must make decisions about how to drive safely given information flowing from cameras, radar, and microphones about the conditions of the road, traffic signals, and other cars and pedestrians. However, direct “end-to-end” RL that maps sensor data…
Fig. 1: The BRIDGE dataset contains 7200 demonstrations of kitchen-themed manipulation tasks across 71 tasks in 10 domains. Note that any GIF compression artifacts in this animation are not present in the dataset itself. When we apply robot learning methods to real-world systems, we must usually collect new datasets for every task, every robot, and…
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…