Memento Learning: How OpenAI Created AI Agents that can Learn by Going Backwards

Memento broke many of the traditional paradigms in the film industry by structuring two parallel narratives, one chronologically going backwards and one going forward. The novel form narrative implemented in Memento forces the audience to constantly reevaluate their knowledge of the plot and they keep learning small details every few minutes of the film. It turns out that replaying a knowledge sequence backwards for small time intervals is an incredibly captivating method of learning. Intuitively, the Memento form of learning seems like perfect for AI agents. Last year, researchers from OpenAI leveraged that learning methodology to created AI agents that learned to play Montezuma's Revenge using a single demonstration.