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OpenAI Fellows Fall 2018
We’re now accepting applications for the next cohort of OpenAI Fellows, a program which offers a compensated 6-month apprenticeship in AI research at OpenAI.
AI and compute
We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had a 2-year doubling period)[^footnote-correction]. Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (a 2-year doubling period would yield only a 7x increase). Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress, so as long as this trend continues, it’s worth preparing for the implications of systems far outside today’s capabilities.
AI safety via debate
We’re proposing an AI safety technique which trains agents to debate topics with one another, using a human to judge who wins.
Evolved Policy Gradients
We’re releasing an experimental metalearning approach called Evolved Policy Gradients, a method that evolves the loss function of learning agents, which can enable fast training on novel tasks. Agents trained with EPG can succeed at basic tasks at test time that were outside their training regime, like learning to navigate to an object on a different side of the room from where it was placed during training.
Gotta Learn Fast: A new benchmark for generalization in RL
Retro Contest
We’re launching a transfer learning contest that measures a reinforcement learning algorithm’s ability to generalize from previous experience.
Variance reduction for policy gradient with action-dependent factorized baselines
Improving GANs using optimal transport
On first-order meta-learning algorithms
Reptile: A scalable meta-learning algorithm
We’ve developed a simple meta-learning algorithm called Reptile which works by repeatedly sampling a task, performing stochastic gradient descent on it, and updating the initial parameters towards the final parameters learned on that task. Reptile is the application of the Shortest Descent algorithm to the meta-learning setting, and is mathematically similar to first-order MAML (which is a version of the well-known MAML algorithm) that only needs black-box access to an optimizer such as SGD or Adam, with similar computational efficiency and performance.
OpenAI Scholars
We’re providing 6–10 stipends and mentorship to individuals from underrepresented groups to study deep learning full-time for 3 months and open-source a project.
Some considerations on learning to explore via meta-reinforcement learning
Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning: Challenging robotics environments and request for research
Preparing for malicious uses of AI
We’ve co-authored a paper that forecasts how malicious actors could misuse AI technology, and potential ways we can prevent and mitigate these threats. This paper is the outcome of almost a year of sustained work with our colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Center for a New American Security, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others.
Interpretable machine learning through teaching
We’ve designed a method that encourages AIs to teach each other with examples that also make sense to humans. Our approach automatically selects the most informative examples to teach a concept—for instance, the best images to describe the concept of dogs—and experimentally we found our approach to be effective at teaching both AIs
Discovering types for entity disambiguation
We’ve built a system for automatically figuring out which object is meant by a word by having a neural network decide if the word belongs to each of about 100 automatically-discovered “types” (non-exclusive categories).
Requests for Research 2.0
We’re releasing a new batch of seven unsolved problems which have come up in the course of our research at OpenAI.