Neural Networks

To date, efforts to decode what people are thinking from their brain waves often relied on electrodes implanted in the cortex. New work used devices outside the head to pick up brain signals that enabled an AI system, as a subject typed, to accurately guess what they were typing.

A new generation of robots can handle some household chores with unusual skill.

It’s not necessary to activate all parts of a large language model to process a given input. Using only the necessary parts saves processing.

Researchers used an AI system to identify animal cell types from gene sequences, including a cell type that conventional approaches had discovered only in the past year. 

Pruning weights from a neural network makes it smaller and faster, but it can take a lot of computation to choose weights that can be removed without degrading the network’s performance.

A neural network detected early signs of pancreatic cancer more effectively than doctors who used the usual risk-assessment criteria. Researchers at MIT and oncologists at Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston...

A neural network makes music for unaccompanied vocal tracks. Chris Donahue, Antoine Caillon, Adam Roberts, and colleagues at Google proposed SingSong, a system that generates musical accompaniments for sung melodies. You can listen to its output here.

Biologists used neural networks to find a new class of antibiotics. Researchers at MIT and Harvard trained models to screen chemical compounds for those that kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the deadliest among bacteria that have...

Online sorting algorithms run trillions of times a day to organize lists according to users’ interests. New work found faster alternatives. Daniel J. Mankowitz and colleagues at Google developed AlphaDev, a system that learned to generate algorithms that sort three...

A neural network helped brain surgeons decide how much healthy tissue to cut out when removing tumors — while the patients were on the operating table.

During training, a neural network usually updates its weights according to an optimizer that’s tuned using hand-picked hyperparameters. New work eliminates the need for optimizer hyperparameters.

Let’s get this out of the way: A brain is not a cluster of graphics processing units, and if it were, it would run software far more complex than the typical artificial neural network. Yet neural networks were inspired by the brain’s architecture.

There was a moment when logistic regression was used to classify just one thing: If you drink a vial of poison, are you likely to be labeled “living” or “deceased”? Times have changed.