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Latest AI tool releases, research breakthroughs, and industry news.
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Deep double descent
We show that the double descent phenomenon occurs in CNNs, ResNets, and transformers: performance first improves, then gets worse, and then improves again with increasing model size, data size, or training time. This effect is often avoided through careful regularization. While this behavior appears to be fairly universal, we don’t yet fully understand why it happens, and view further study of this phenomenon as an important research direction.
Benchmarking safe exploration in deep reinforcement learning
Solving Rubik’s Cube with a robot hand
We’ve trained a pair of neural networks to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a human-like robot hand. The neural networks are trained entirely in simulation, using the same reinforcement learning code as OpenAI Five paired with a new technique called Automatic Domain Randomization (ADR). The system can handle situations it never saw during training, such as being prodded by a stuffed giraffe. This shows that reinforcement learning isn’t just a tool for virtual tasks, but can solve physical-world problems requiring unprecedented dexterity.
Fine-tuning GPT-2 from human preferences
We’ve fine-tuned the 774M parameter GPT-2 language model using human feedback for various tasks, successfully matching the preferences of the external human labelers, though those preferences did not always match our own. Specifically, for summarization tasks the labelers preferred sentences copied wholesale from the input (we’d only asked them to ensure accuracy), so our models learned to copy. Summarization required 60k human labels; simpler tasks which continue text in various styles required only 5k. Our motivation is to move safety techniques closer to the general task of “machines talking to humans,” which we believe is key to extracting information about human values.
Emergent tool use from multi-agent interaction
We’ve observed agents discovering progressively more complex tool use while playing a simple game of hide-and-seek. Through training in our new simulated hide-and-seek environment, agents build a series of six distinct strategies and counterstrategies, some of which we did not know our environment supported. The self-supervised emergent complexity in this simple environment further suggests that multi-agent co-adaptation may one day produce extremely complex and intelligent behavior.
Testing robustness against unforeseen adversaries
We’ve developed a method to assess whether a neural network classifier can reliably defend against adversarial attacks not seen during training. Our method yields a new metric, UAR (Unforeseen Attack Robustness), which evaluates the robustness of a single model against an unanticipated attack, and highlights the need to measure performance across a more diverse range of unforeseen attacks.
OpenAI Robotics Symposium 2019
We hosted the first OpenAI Robotics Symposium on April 27, 2019.
OpenAI Scholars 2019: Final projects
Our second class of OpenAI Scholars has concluded, with all eight scholars producing an exciting final project showcased at Scholars Demo Day at OpenAI.
Transfer of adversarial robustness between perturbation types
Generative modeling with sparse transformers
We’ve developed the Sparse Transformer, a deep neural network which sets new records at predicting what comes next in a sequence—whether text, images, or sound. It uses an algorithmic improvement of the attention mechanism to extract patterns from sequences 30x longer than possible previously.
OpenAI Five defeats Dota 2 world champions
OpenAI Five is the first AI to beat the world champions in an esports game, having won two back-to-back games versus the world champion Dota 2 team, OG, at Finals this weekend. Both OpenAI Five and DeepMind’s AlphaStar had previously beaten good pros privately but lost their live pro matches, making this also the first time an AI has beaten esports pros on livestream.
OpenAI Five Finals
We’ll be holding our final live event for OpenAI Five at 11:30am PT on April 13.
Implicit generation and generalization methods for energy-based models
We’ve made progress towards stable and scalable training of energy-based models (EBMs) resulting in better sample quality and generalization ability than existing models. Generation in EBMs spends more compute to continually refine its answers and doing so can generate samples competitive with GANs at low temperatures, while also having mode coverage guarantees of likelihood-based models. We hope these findings stimulate further research into this promising class of models.
Introducing Activation Atlases
We’ve created activation atlases (in collaboration with Google researchers), a new technique for visualizing what interactions between neurons can represent. As AI systems are deployed in increasingly sensitive contexts, having a better understanding of their internal decision-making processes will let us identify weaknesses and investigate failures.
Neural MMO: A massively multiagent game environment
We’re releasing a Neural MMO, a massively multiagent game environment for reinforcement learning agents. Our platform supports a large, variable number of agents within a persistent and open-ended task. The inclusion of many agents and species leads to better exploration, divergent niche formation, and greater overall competence.
AI safety needs social scientists
We’ve written a paper arguing that long-term AI safety research needs social scientists to ensure AI alignment algorithms succeed when actual humans are involved. Properly aligning advanced AI systems with human values requires resolving many uncertainties related to the psychology of human rationality, emotion, and biases. The aim of this paper is to spark further collaboration between machine learning and social science researchers, and we plan to hire social scientists to work on this full time at OpenAI.
Better language models and their implications
We’ve trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization—all without task-specific training.
Computational limitations in robust classification and win-win results
How AI training scales
We’ve discovered that the gradient noise scale, a simple statistical metric, predicts the parallelizability of neural network training on a wide range of tasks. Since complex tasks tend to have noisier gradients, increasingly large batch sizes are likely to become useful in the future, removing one potential limit to further growth of AI systems. More broadly, these results show that neural network training need not be considered a mysterious art, but can be rigorized and systematized.
Quantifying generalization in reinforcement learning
We’re releasing CoinRun, a training environment which provides a metric for an agent’s ability to transfer its experience to novel situations and has already helped clarify a longstanding puzzle in reinforcement learning. CoinRun strikes a desirable balance in complexity: the environment is simpler than traditional platformer games like Sonic the Hedgehog but still poses a worthy generalization challenge for state of the art algorithms.