We attempt to define what is necessary to construct an Artificial Scientist, explore and evaluate several approaches to artificial general intelligence (AGI) which may facilitate this, conclude that a unified or hybrid approach is necessary and explore two theories that satisfy this requirement to some degree.

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL), which aims to find an optimal policy from a previously collected static dataset, bears algorithmic difficulties due to function approximation errors from out-of-distribution (OOD) data points. To this end, offline RL algorithms adopt either a constraint or a penalty term that explicitly guides the policy to stay close to the given dataset. However, prior methods typically require accurate estimation of the behavior policy or sampling from OOD data points, which themselves can be a non-trivial problem. Moreover, these methods under-utilize the generalization ability of deep neural networks and often fall into suboptimal solutions too close to the given dataset. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-based offline RL method that takes into account the confidence of the Q-value prediction and does not require any estimation or sampling of the data distribution. We show that the clipped Q-learning, a technique widely used in online RL, can be leveraged to successfully penalize OOD data points with high prediction uncertainties. Surprisingly, we find that it is possible to substantially outperform existing offline RL methods on various tasks by simply increasing the number of Q-networks along with the clipped Q-learning. Based on this observation, we propose an ensemble-diversified actor-critic algorithm that reduces the number of required ensemble networks down to a tenth compared to the naive ensemble while achieving state-of-the-art performance on most of the D4RL benchmarks considered.

Whittle index policy is a powerful tool to obtain asymptotically optimal solutions for the notoriously intractable problem of restless bandits. However, finding the Whittle indices remains a difficult problem for many practical restless bandits with convoluted transition kernels. This paper proposes NeurWIN, a neural Whittle index network that seeks to learn the Whittle indices for any restless bandits by leveraging mathematical properties of the Whittle indices. We show that a neural network that produces the Whittle index is also one that produces the optimal control for a set of Markov decision problems. This property motivates using deep reinforcement learning for the training of NeurWIN. We demonstrate the utility of NeurWIN by evaluating its performance for three recently studied restless bandit problems. Our experiment results show that the performance of NeurWIN is significantly better than other RL algorithms.

Recent developments in large-scale machine learning suggest that by scaling up data, model size and training time properly, one might observe that improvements in pre-training would transfer favorably to most downstream tasks. In this work, we systematically study this phenomena and establish that, as we increase the upstream accuracy, the performance of downstream tasks saturates. In particular, we investigate more than 4800 experiments on Vision Transformers, MLP-Mixers and ResNets with number of parameters ranging from ten million to ten billion, trained on the largest scale of available image data (JFT, ImageNet21K) and evaluated on more than 20 downstream image recognition tasks. We propose a model for downstream performance that reflects the saturation phenomena and captures the nonlinear relationship in performance of upstream and downstream tasks. Delving deeper to understand the reasons that give rise to these phenomena, we show that the saturation behavior we observe is closely related to the way that representations evolve through the layers of the models. We showcase an even more extreme scenario where performance on upstream and downstream are at odds with each other. That is, to have a better downstream performance, we need to hurt upstream accuracy.

We derive information-theoretic generalization bounds for supervised learning algorithms based on the information contained in predictions rather than in the output of the training algorithm. These bounds improve over the existing information-theoretic bounds, are applicable to a wider range of algorithms, and solve two key challenges: (a) they give meaningful results for deterministic algorithms and (b) they are significantly easier to estimate. We show experimentally that the proposed bounds closely follow the generalization gap in practical scenarios for deep learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will create new job opportunities, not destroy them. AI will displace some jobs but will create new ones. The main aim of this article is intended to focus the minds of our political and business leaders as they consider what strategies to pursue to grow the economy (GDP), business activity and stimulate job creation whilst also taking into account the growing challenges of the environment with climate change mitigation increasingly on the agenda. Let's start by reviewing the types of AI and where we are now. Narrow AI: the field of AI where the machine is designed to perform a single task and the machine gets very good at performing that particular task.

It might feel as though artificial intelligence has reached a critical mass, but it hasn't. In fact, it's only starting to make an impact in some sectors, including retail. But, according to findings collected by KPMG, retail AI has room to grow -- and a lot of it. And by 2027, AI in retail will balloon to $19.9 billion from around $7.3 billion in predicted spending in 2022, per Meticulous Research. All this, and only half of the retail professionals believe they've scratched the surface of what's possible when the technology meets in-person shopping.

The widespread usage of social networks during mass convergence events, such as health emergencies and disease outbreaks, provides instant access to citizen-generated data that carry rich information about public opinions, sentiments, urgent needs, and situational reports. Such information can help authorities understand the emergent situation and react accordingly. Moreover, social media plays a vital role in tackling misinformation and disinformation. This work presents TBCOV, a large-scale Twitter dataset comprising more than two billion multilingual tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic collected worldwide over a continuous period of more than one year. More importantly, several state-of-the-art deep learning models are used to enrich the data with important attributes, including sentiment labels, named-entities (e.g., mentions of persons, organizations, locations), user types, and gender information. Last but not least, a geotagging method is proposed to assign country, state, county, and city information to tweets, enabling a myriad of data analysis tasks to understand real-world issues. Our sentiment and trend analyses reveal interesting insights and confirm TBCOV's broad coverage of important topics.

This paper introduces deep synoptic Monte Carlo planning (DSMCP) for large imperfect information games. The algorithm constructs a belief state with an unweighted particle filter and plans via playouts that start at samples drawn from the belief state. The algorithm accounts for uncertainty by performing inference on "synopses," a novel stochastic abstraction of information states. DSMCP is the basis of the program Penumbra, which won the official 2020 reconnaissance blind chess competition versus 33 other programs. This paper also evaluates algorithm variants that incorporate caution, paranoia, and a novel bandit algorithm. Furthermore, it audits the synopsis features used in Penumbra with per-bit saliency statistics.

Understanding human language has been a sub-challenge on the way of intelligent machines. The study of meaning in natural language processing (NLP) relies on the distributional hypothesis where language elements get meaning from the words that co-occur within contexts. The revolutionary idea of distributed representation for a concept is close to the working of a human mind in that the meaning of a word is spread across several neurons, and a loss of activation will only slightly affect the memory retrieval process. Neural word embeddings transformed the whole field of NLP by introducing substantial improvements in all NLP tasks. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive literature review on neural word embeddings. We give theoretical foundations and describe existing work by an interplay between word embeddings and language modelling. We provide broad coverage on neural word embeddings, including early word embeddings, embeddings targeting specific semantic relations, sense embeddings, morpheme embeddings, and finally, contextual representations. Finally, we describe benchmark datasets in word embeddings' performance evaluation and downstream tasks along with the performance results of/due to word embeddings.