Robots designed to assist people with disabilities have become more capable, but they’ve also become harder to control. New research offers a way to operate such complex mechanical systems more intuitively.

Weak supervision is the practice of assigning likely labels to unlabeled data using a variety of simple labeling functions. Then supervised methods can be used on top of the now-labeled data.

Humans understand the world by abstraction: If you grasp the concept of grabbing a stick, then you’ll also comprehend grabbing a ball. New work explores deep learning agents’ ability to do the same thing — an important aspect of their ability to generalize.

How to build robots that respond to novel situations? When prior experience is limited, enabling a model to describe its uncertainty can enable it to explore more avenues to success.