Machine Learning Research
Finding Useful Points in Space: Keypoint3D Helps Robots Locate Spatial Coordinates
A new machine learning method aims to improve a machine’s ability to determine and locate points of interest.
Reinforcement Learning
Machine Learning Research
Different Strokes for Robot Folks: Transformer-Based Image Generator Imitates Painters
A neural network can make a photo resemble a painting via neural style transfer, but it can also learn to reproduce an image by applying brush strokes. A new method taught a system this painterly skill without any training data.
Tech & Society
Who Needs a Covid Test? AI Decides: Greek Border Patrol Used AI to Screen for Covid
Greece’s border agents last year had enough Covid tests to swab only 17 percent of people who sought to enter the country. They managed the shortage by using an AI system to flag high-risk visitors.
Machine Learning Research
Team Players: Football-Playing AI Blends Individual and Group Skills
Playing a team sport involves a fluid blend of individual and group skills. Researchers integrated both types of action into realistic humanoid agents that play football (known as soccer in the U.S.).
Machine Learning Research
Weak Foundations Make Weak Models: Foundation AI Models Pass Flaws to Fine-Tuned Variants
A new study examines a major strain of recent research: huge models pretrained on immense quantities of uncurated, unlabeled data and then fine-tuned on a smaller, curated corpus.
Machine Learning Research
Solve RL With This One Weird Trick: How to get better performance from reinforcement learning.
The previous state-of-the-art model for playing vintage Atari games took advantage of a number of advances in reinforcement learning (RL). The new champion is a basic RL architecture plus a trick borrowed from image generation.
Business
Bye Bye Bots: OpenAI quit robotics to focus on AGI.
The independent research lab OpenAI wowed technology watchers in 2019 with a robotic hand that solved Rubik’s Cube. Now it has disbanded the team that built it. OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba revealed that OpenAI shuttered its robotics program last October.
Machine Learning Research
Walking the Dog: Training a robot to walk over unsteady terrain with RL.
A reinforcement learning system enabled a four-legged robot to amble over unfamiliar, rapidly changing terrain.
Machine Learning Research
Behavioral Cloning Shootout: AI learns to play Counter Strike Global Offensive.
Neural networks have learned to play video games like Dota 2 via reinforcement learning by playing for the equivalent of thousands of years (compressed into far less time). In new work, an automated player learned not by playing for millennia but by watching a few days’ worth of recorded gameplay.
Hardware
Computers Making Computers: How Google used AI to help design its TPU v4 chip.
A neural network wrote the blueprint for upcoming computer chips that will accelerate deep learning itself. Google engineers used a reinforcement learning system to arrange the billions of minuscule transistors in an upcoming version of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips.
Science
Medical AI Gets a Grip: An AI System controlled DaVinci surgical robots.
Surgical robots perform millions of delicate operations annually under human control. Now they’re getting ready to operate on their own.
Tech & Society
Drones For Defense: How companies like Anduril are developing military drones.
Drone startups are taking aim at military customers. As large tech companies have backed away from defense work, startups like Anduril, Shield AI, and Teal are picking up the slack. They’re developing autonomous fliers specifically for military operations.