Can AI learn to reason about the world like children?

This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence. Even before they speak their first words, human babies develop mental models about objects and people. This is one of the key capabilities that allows us humans to learn to live socially and cooperate (or compete) with each other. But for artificial intelligence, even the most basic behavioral reasoning tasks remain a challenge. Advanced deep learning models can do complicated tasks such as detect people and objects in images, sometimes even better than humans.