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30 posts
Introduction Will highly intelligent machines inevitably think like us? Our experiences with AI that is simultaneously incredibly powerful and incredibly flawed are evidence that not all forms of intelligence are the same. Until recently, all human-level intelligence was human. Now, AI seems to threaten our monopoly. But truly human-level and human-like artificial general intelligence (AGI) is still quite…
Authors: Hoang Long Dang and David RawlinsonUPDATE: Full HRM-Agent paper now available. When the Hierarchical Reasoning Model was released, we were very excited about its combination of small size and impressive reasoning abilities. These qualities seem to be enhanced by recurrent processing, but with a surprisingly simple gradient update based on the converged recurrent forward state — turning a…
Since the arrival of Chat GPT, I’ve felt that progress in AI has been largely incremental. Of course, even Chat GPT was/is mostly just a scaled up Transformer model, which was introduced by Vaswani et al in 2017. The belief that AI is advancing relatively slowly is a radical and unpopular opinion these days, and it’s been…
We are very happy to announce that we’ve been awarded an Artificial Intelligence for Decision Making Initiative grant from Defence Science Institute on Effective updating of deep learning models with limited new data. More specifically, the grant is for the Continual Few-Shot Learning project that we blogged about recently.
In continual learning, the neural network learns from a stream of data, acquiring new knowledge incrementally. It’s not possible to assume an i.i.d. stationary dataset available in one batch. Catastrophic forgetting of previous knowledge is a well known challenge. A wide variety of approaches fall broadly into 3 categories [6]: Regularization-based methods, Parameter isolation methods…
We were really excited to present a couple of papers recently at IJCNN, the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. One of those papers was an extension to the work that we previously published on AHA, Artificial Hippocampal Algorithm based on Complementary Learning Systems by O’Reilly and McClelland (see that paper summary blog post here).…
Executive Control is core to what most people recognise as true intelligence. For example, the ability to attend to relevant cues and maintain task dependent information whilst ignoring distracting details and taking appropriate actions. Working Memory (WM) is a core component of Executive Control. “Working memory is a short-term repository for task-relevant information that is…
We’ve just undertaken a review and refresh of our research roadmap! The topics and approach we will take in the coming year are all laid out in a new page: Research Roadmap Our primary topics for the coming year include: Continual Few-Shot Learning (CFSL) via our Episodic memory system Using reinforcement learning to control a…
The Whole Brain Architecture Initiative (WBAI) aims to foster research into architectural approaches to general intelligence. They have held a series of events – the Hackathons – that encourage and support the development of new models which provide working solutions to questions about the possible architecture of general intelligence in the brain. You can read…
We’re very happy to report that we recently published a preprint on AHA, an ‘Artificial Hippocampal Algorithm’ for Episodic Machine Learning. It’s the culmination of a multi-year research project and is a starting point for the next wave of developments. This article describes the motivation for developing AHA and a brief description of the research.…
The standard definitions of Episodic and Semantic Memory hide some important subtleties that impact the development of Machine Learning algorithms for AI (particularly those building Episodic Learning capability). This article explores this issue and provides a context for upcoming articles work to take us a step closer to ‘animal-like’ machine learning
As AI/ML researchers, we have obviously pondered the risks of AI. We even wrote about it. But what might surprise you is the risks that keep AI/ML folk awake at night aren’t the ones you hear about in the media. We’re not worried about runaway “paperclip maximizers” or “skynet”-style machine coups. Andrew Ng says: “worrying…
We recently published 2 new ML/neuroscience research projects as part of the Request for Research (RFRs) projects, with WBAI. They’re fascinating topics that have arisen through the relationship with our advisor Elkhonon Goldberg from the Luria Neuroscience Institute.
It’s such a joy to be able to test an idea, go straight to the idea without wrestling with the tools. We recently developed an experimental setup which, so far, looks like it will do just that. I’m excited about it and hope it can help you too, so here it is. We’ll go through the why we created another framework, and how each module in the experiment setup works.
Over the last few years, there have been several breakthroughs and exciting new research directions in Reinforcement Learning, Hippocampus Inspired Architectures, Attention and Few-Shot Learning. There has been a move towards multi-component, heterogeneous, stateful architectures, many guided by ideas from cognitive sciences. Google DeepMind and Google Brain are leading the way making progress on several…
Eager Execution is an imperative, object oriented and more Pythonic way of using TensorFlow. It is a flexible machine learning platform for research and experimentation where operations are immediately evaluated and return concrete values, instead of constructing a computational graph that is executed later.
The dataset is an integral part of an ML engineer’s toolkit. We recently compiled useful information about a range of these well known datasets. It’s all in one place, and hopefully useful to others as well.
ML Today Today’s Machine Learning has demonstrated unprecedented performance in what seems like every application thrown at it. Almost all the success has been based on advanced memory systems that can learn to recognise an input based on a large number of training examples. This is the equivalent to memory for facts. The biological terminology…
2018 is a fresh new year and an exciting milestone for Project AGI. Dave and I have been discussing, dreaming, playing around with and striving towards general purpose AI for over 6 years. It started with musings on the algorithmic underpinnings of consciousness and the nature of intelligence. We quickly moved into the more practical…
There are plenty of established machine learning frameworks out there, and new frameworks are popping up frequently to address specific niches. We were interested in examining if one of these frameworks fits in our workflow. I surveyed the most popular frameworks, and aim to provide a helpful comparative analysis.
This month’s reading list has two parts: a non-Reinforcement Learning list, and a Reinforcement Learning list. Since our next blog post will be on Reinforcement Learning, readers might like to refer to our RL reading list separately. Non-Reinforcement Learning reading list A Framework for searching for General Artificial Intelligence Authors: Marek Rosa, Jan Feyereisl, The…
Hello everyone! I am Abdelrahman Ahmed (or Abdel for short) and I joined the Project AGI team as a Research Assistant a few months ago. I thought it would be a good time to tell you more about myself and what I am working on at Project AGI. Who am I? Originally from Egypt, I…
We attended the 2017 10th Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, which was located in our hometown of Melbourne, Australia! Excitingly, the IJCAI 2017 conference is also in Melbourne this week and ICML 2017 was in Sydney this year. In particular, the “Architectures for Generality and Autonomy” workshop may be of interest to readers. You can find…
Hello everyone! I am Yi-Ling and I am the newest member of the AGI project team. It is an incredibly exciting time to be dipping one’s toes in the field of Artificial Intelligence, given the impressive progress and explosion of AI applications in recent years. In my case, I am actually going to dive in…
I found this video interview with Eric Horvitz, the head of Microsoft Research, to be a really interesting window into their work and vision – a large part of which is AI. As Eric states, there is a “growing consensus that the next, if not last, enduring competitive battlefield, among major IT companies will be…
Just a few days ago, Jay posted here about the recent public attention to AI and the potential future dangers that it presents. Discussion on the topic continues, but it’s not all talk. There are at least two institutes focussed on practical steps to mitigate the risks. There is an institute called MIRI that exists…
By Punarjay Chakravarty In the past year or so, there has been a spate of high-profile pronouncements by respected scientists and engineers, cautioning the world about the potential ill-effects of AI. Stephen Hawking, one of the foremost experts on theoretical and astro physics told the BBC that “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell…
DeepMind, based on a deep learning architecture made a big impact in the tech industry. Deep learning continues to gain traction in the machine learning community and in the mainstream, both in terms of public awareness of its capabilities as well as through commercialisation. This article by Simon Winder provides a very accessible introduction to…
It’s exciting to see growing interest and participation in the AGI community. This is another brief post to share two examples. In this case, they both build on one approach to AGI, and that is HTM. FXAI – Explorations Into Computational Intelligence A blog that is pretty well described by the title. The author, Felix…
by David Rawlinson and Gideon Kowadlo The Blog This blog will be written by several people. Other contributors are welcome – send us an email to introduce yourself! The content will be a series of short articles about a set of common architectures for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Specifically, we will look at the…