New AI system can train robots for armies: Study

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence technique that will teach robots and computer programmes to interact with a human instructor and perform tasks for the army. Researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin considered a specific case where a human provides real-time feedback in the form of critique. First introduced by researchers as Training an Agent Manually via Evaluative Reinforcement (TAMER), the team developed a new algorithm called Deep TAMER. It is an extension of TAMER that uses deep learning – a class of machine learning algorithms that are loosely inspired by the brain to provide a robot the ability to learn how to perform tasks by viewing video streams in a short amount of time with a human trainer. The team considered situations where a human teaches an agent how to behave by observing it and providing critique, for example, "good job" or "bad job" – similar to the way a person might train a dog to do a trick.