Train a multilingual language translator to translate between Spanish and English and between English and German, and it may be able to translate directly between Spanish and German as well. New work proposes a simple path to better machine translation between languages.

Facebook expanded a system of vision, language, and speech models designed to open the social network to users who are visually impaired. A Facebook service that describes photos in a synthesized voice now recognizes 1,200 visual concepts — 10 times more than the previous version.

Can social media posts reveal early signs of mental illness? A new machine learning model shows promising results. Researchers developed a model that analyzes messages and images posted by Facebook users for indicators of psychological problems.

The worldwide pandemic and a contentious U.S. election whipped up a storm of automated disinformation, and some big AI companies reaped the whirlwind.

A new consortium of companies, schools, and research labs is building open tools for next-generation machine learning. MLCommons aims to foster innovation in machine learning by developing new benchmarks, datasets, and best practices.

Benchmarks provide a scientific basis for evaluating model performance, but they don’t necessarily map well to human cognitive abilities. Facebook aims to close the gap through a dynamic benchmarking method that keeps humans in the loop.

New research teaches robots to anticipate what’s coming rather than focusing on what’s right in front of them. Researchers developed Occupancy Anticipation (OA), a navigation system that predicts unseen obstacles in addition to observing those in its field of view.

The transformer architecture that has shaken up natural language processing may replace recurrent layers in object detection networks. A Facebook team led by Nicolas Carion and Francisco Massa simplified object detection pipelines by using transformers, yielding Detection Transformer (DETR).

Scientists who study animal behavior spend endless hours observing and taking notes about a creature’s actions and reactions. Computer vision could automate much of that work.

Baidu backed out of a U.S.-led effort to promote ethics in AI, leaving the project without a Chinese presence. The Beijing-based search giant withdrew from the Partnership on AI, a consortium that promotes cooperation on issues like digital privacy and algorithmic bias.

A growing body of literature shows that some steps in AI’s forward march may actually move sideways. A new study questions advances in metric learning.

Facebook uses automated systems to block hate speech, but hateful posts can slip through when seemingly benign words and pictures combine to create a nasty message. The social network is tackling this problem by enhancing AI’s ability to recognize context.

Reinforcement learning can beat humans at video games, but humans are better at coming up with strategies to master more complex tasks. New work enables neural networks to connect the dots.

Facebook’s leadership has thwarted changes in its algorithms aimed at making the site less polarizing, according to the Wall Street Journal. The social network’s own researchers determined that its AI software promotes divisive content.

Facebook recently rolled out its entry in the World’s Biggest Chatbot sweepstakes. In keeping with the company’s social-networking dominance, the bot is designed to excel at chitchat on any subject.