Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in game scenarios, with RL agents beating human competitors in such games as Go and poker. Distributional reinforcement learning, in particular, has proven to be an effective approach for training an agent to maximize reward, producing state-of-the-art results on…
The ability to perceive communication signals and make sense of them played an essential role in the evolution of human intelligence. Computing technology is following the same trajectory. Now, computer vision and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies have enabled the advent of many artificial intelligence…
In both language and mathematics, symbols and their mutual relationships play a central role. The equation x = 1/y asserts the symbols x and y—that is, what they stand for—are related reciprocally; Kim saw the movie asserts that Kim and the movie are perceiver and…
Text to speech (TTS) has attracted a lot of attention recently due to advancements in deep learning. Neural network-based TTS models (such as Tacotron 2, DeepVoice 3 and Transformer TTS) have outperformed conventional concatenative and statistical parametric approaches in terms of speech quality. Neural network-based…
Artificial intelligence has evolved to become a revolutionary technology. It is rapidly changing the economy, both by creating new opportunities (it’s the backbone of the gig economy) and by bringing venerable institutions, like transportation, into the 21st century. Yet deep at its core something is…
Having experience in deep learning doesn’t hurt when it comes to the often mysterious, time- and cost-consuming process of hunting down an appropriate neural architecture. But truth be told, no one really knows what works the best on a new dataset and task. Relying on…
Drone racing has transformed from a niche activity sparked by enthusiastic hobbyists to an internationally televised sport. In parallel, computer vision and machine learning are making rapid progress, along with advances in agile trajectory planning, control, and state estimation for quadcopters. These advances enable increased…
Memory is an important part of human intelligence and the human experience. It grounds us in the current moment, helping us understand where we are and, consequently, what we should do next. Consider the simple example of reading a book. The ultimate goal is to…
One of the core directions of Project Malmo is to develop AI capable of rich interactions. Whether that means learning new skills to apply to challenging problems, understanding complex environments, or knowing when to enlist the help of humans, reinforcement learning (RL) is a core…
While reinforcement learning (RL) has seen significant successes over the past few years, modern deep RL methods are often criticized for how sensitive they are with respect to their hyper-parameters. One such hyper-parameter is the discount factor, which controls how future rewards are weighted compared…
When people create, it’s not very often they achieve what they’re looking for on the first try. Creating—whether it be a painting, a paper, or a machine learning model—is a process that has a starting point from which new elements and ideas are added and…
Visual understanding tasks are typically centered on objects, such as human pose tracking in Microsoft Kinect and obstacle avoidance in autonomous driving. In the deep learning era, these tasks follow a paradigm where bounding boxes are localized in an image, features are extracted within the…
