Quantifying Independently Reproducible Machine Learning

Many warn that Artificial Intelligence has a serious reproducibility crisis, but is it so? Some conclusions from the author's experience trying to replicate 255 papers. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence

Anything that looks like genuine understanding is just an illusion. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

The Economics of AI Today

Every day we hear claims that AI is about to transform the economy, destroying jobs & creating monopolies. But what do the professional economists think about this? | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

Is NeurIPS getting too big?

At 13,000 attendees, 1,428 accepted papers, and 57 workshops, NeuRIPS has unquestionably become a huge conference. Does that make it worse or better as an academic conference? A bit of both, according to one attendee. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

An Epidemic of AI Misinformation

Maybe every paper abstract should have a mandatory field of what the limitations of the proposed approach are. That way some of the science miscommunications and hypes could maybe be avoided.— Sebastian Risi (@risi1979) October 28, 2019 The media is often tempted to report … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

Introduction to Artificial Life for People who Like AI

The AI enthusiast's Introduction to Artificial Life: old ties between AI and ALife, and what makes ALife research special. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

Machine Learning Can Help Unlock the World of Ancient Japan

Humanity’s rich history has left behind an enormous number of historical documents and artifacts. However, virtually none of these documents, containing stories and recorded experiences essential to our cultural heritage, can be understood by non-experts due to language and writ … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

Gaussian Processes, Not Quite for Dummies

I recall always having this vague impression about Gaussian Processes (GPs) being a magical algorithm that is able to define probability distributions over sets of functions, but I had always procrastinated reading up on the details. It's not completely my fault though! Whenever … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

Evaluation Metrics for Language Modeling

On different metrics for evaluating language models, the relationships among them, mathematical and empirical bounds for those metrics, and suggested best practices with regards to how to report them. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

PyTorch dominates research, Tensorflow dominates industry

Since deep learning regained prominence in 2012, many machine learning frameworks have clamored to become the new favorite among researchers and industry practitioners. From the early academic outputs Caffe and Theano to the massive industry-backed PyTorch and TensorFlow, this de … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

BenderRule: Name the Language You Study

Progress in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) depends on the existence of language resources: | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

NLP's Clever Hans Moment Has Arrived

A review of Timothy Niven and Hung-Yu Kao, 2019: Probing Neural Network Comprehension of Natural Language Arguments | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

Leveraging Learning in Robotics: RSS 2019 Highlights

A Summary of the RSS 2019 Conference. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

Retrospectives: 'Real Talk' for Your Past Papers

Researchers get credit for writing papers. If you’re a professor, the number of accepted papers determines whether you’ll get tenure. If you’re a student, it determines if and when you can graduate, as well as your future industry or academic job prospects. A paper is meant to | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

We Open Sourced Grover

This June, our research team at the University of Washington released Grover, a state-of-the-art detector of neural fake news. Neural Fake News is the threat of AI-generated news articles controlled by human adversaries with the intent to deceive. Grover generates fake news … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

The Past, Present, and Future of AI Art

AI art has a long history that is often overlooked | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

Goodhart’s Law: Are Academic Metrics Being Gamed?

Publishing a paper in academia is challenging, stimulating, and a bit baffling. Challenging because the research might fail. Stimulating because research may start assuming one outcome and finish with a totally different one. Baffling because after the paper is written and ready, … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 4 years ago

Teaching AI to Plan Ahead

Recent advances in neural networks have generated considerable excitement about AI. But AI is not all about neural networks. Other avenues in AI research tackle problems such as building effective models of the world or logical reasoning and are especially useful for dealing with … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

Helena Sarin, an artist who works with GANs, reflects on her creative process

With GANs, there is a certain unpredictability that inspires, unblocks, and creates something special - something that goes far beyond Instagram filters or ordinary style transfer. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

Introduction to deep learning for 3D vision

Imagine you're building a self-driving car that needs to understand its surroundings. How would you enable your car to perceive pedestrians, bikers, and other vehicles around it in order to move safely? You could use a camera for this, but that doesn't seem particularly effective … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

NLP’s generalization problem, and how researchers are tackling it

Better use of inductive biases, human-like common sense, and unseen distributions and tasks. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

Bringing Learning to Robotics: Highlights from RSS 2018

What do robotics researchers, do? Get a glimpse in this summary of highlights from the 2018 Robotics Science and Systems Conference. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

Regulating AI in the era of big tech

On the subject of private and ethical AI, the U.S. government has been disinterested, lacking in expertise, and impotent to stand up to tech corporations. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

How to Fix Reinforcement Learning?

Learning how to learn, as we'll see, is just what we need to move beyond pure RL and leverage prior experience. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

Reinforcement learning’s foundational flaw

By definition, learning from scratch is just about the least sample-efficient approach there can be. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

NLP's ImageNet moment has arrived

The time is ripe for practical transfer learning to make inroads into NLP. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

Libratus: the world's best poker player

In January 2017, four world-class poker players engaged in a three-week battle of heads-up no-limit Texas hold ’em. They were not competing against each other. Instead, they were fighting against a common foe: an AI system called Libratus that was developed by Carnegie Mellon res … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

What does it really mean for an algorithm to be biased?

Formal theories are necessary if we want to enjoy the benefits of algorithms without the drawbacks of algorithmic bias. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 5 years ago

Speech Recognition Is Now Vulnerable to Adversarial Attacks

Carlini and Wagner's latest paper opens up new possibilities in fooling speech recognition algorithms. | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 6 years ago

How should we think about AI bias?

Two dangerous visions According to Engadget, 2017 was the year society started taking algorithmic bias seriously. If it’s really true—well, better late than never. Researchers have been trying to warn us for years about the dangers of putting algorithms in socially imp … | Continue reading


@thegradient.pub | 6 years ago