Thursday, February 27, 2020

Innate concepts for an AI

Stanislas Dehaene argues that humans are born with certain innate, genetically hardwired concepts and that to have human level intelligence an AI will also have to have these implanted in it.* There has been a lot of work on face recognition. I have not given A.s.a. H. such a module but certainly could do so. I have used pretrained neural networks as one sort of preprocessor for A.s.a. in order to identify things like letters and numbers. The Google AIY vision kit can recognize more than a thousand common objects. (A.s.a. has the equivalent of "place neurons" that detect gps, beacons, etc.) The AIY voice kit can recognize many common vocal commands. There is much research going on with respect to natural language understanding.

A.s.a. is hierarchical. Low level regularities are learned more quickly than higher level ones. We have also played with adjusting the learning rates differently on different levels of the concept hierarchy.** When we have done some hand coding of concepts this is equivalent to giving A.s.a. innate concepts. We have sometimes given a layer in the hierarchy a two dimensional memory to allow it to create a spatial map or 2-D vision field. A.s.a. has been given an innate sense of time via time stepping and the time dilation algorithm.

A.s.a. records, updates, and employs probabilities, are they sufficient?

A.s.a.'s hierarchically organized concepts are immediately available for reuse in new combinations. I've emphasized the importance of output/actions, prediction, and extrapolation in addition to simply passively learning sensory input patterns.

A.s.a. may be more comparable to a society of humans rather than one single person.*** Agents can specialize, helping to deal with the combinatorial explosion.**** Various agents can compete against each other in each generation. A.s.a. really can multitask even if individual humans can not.

I have been continuously working on attention mechanisms. How should error correction be propagated between layers of the concept hierarchy? What should a good object concept include? Can consolidation of learning be equated with a society training a specialist agent or is more needed?

* See, for example, How We Learn, Viking, 2020. (Something of a counter argument is in my blog of 21 February 2020.) Dehaene may equate AI to deep learning neural networks and big data, the current fad. There is, of course, a lot more to AI than that.

** And a simulated annealing process.

*** Alternatively, an A.s.a. agent might be likened to one of the specialized regions in a human brain.

**** One sort of attention mechanism.

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