Ed Gent in Singularity Hub:
Teaching algorithms to mimic humans typically requires hundreds or thousands of examples. But a new AI from Google DeepMind can pick up new skills from human demonstrators on the fly. One of humanity’s greatest tricks is our ability to acquire knowledge rapidly and efficiently from each other. This kind of social learning, often referred to as cultural transmission, is what allows us to show a colleague how to use a new tool or teach our children nursery rhymes. It’s no surprise that researchers have tried to replicate the process in machines. Imitation learning, in which AI watches a human complete a task and then tries to mimic their behavior, has long been a popular approach for training robots. But even today’s most advanced deep learning algorithms typically need to see many examples before they can successfully copy their trainers.
When humans learn through imitation, they can often pick up new tasks after just a handful of demonstrations. Now, Google DeepMind researchers have taken a step toward rapid social learning in AI with agents that learn to navigate a virtual world from humans in real time. “Our agents succeed at real-time imitation of a human in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data,” the researchers write in a paper in Nature Communications. “We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission.”
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