Transformers have matched or exceeded earlier architectures in language modeling and image classification. New work shows they can achieve state-of-the-art results in some reinforcement learning tasks as well.

A new machine learning method aims to improve a machine’s ability to determine and locate points of interest.

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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.

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.

A reinforcement learning system enabled a four-legged robot to amble over unfamiliar, rapidly changing terrain.

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.

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.

Surgical robots perform millions of delicate operations annually under human control. Now they’re getting ready to operate on their own.

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.

Bayes-optimal algorithms always make the best decisions given their training and input, if certain assumptions hold true. New work shows that some neural networks can approach this kind of performance.

World models, which learn a compressed representation of a dynamic environment like, say, a video game, have delivered top results in reinforcement learning. A new method makes them much smaller.