Allen Institute open-sources AllenAct, a framework for research in embodied AI

Researchers at the Allen Institute for AI today launched AllenAct, a platform intended to promote reproducible research in embodied AI with a focus on modularity and flexibility. AllenAct, which is available in beta, supports multiple training environments and algorithms with tutorials, pretrained models, and out-of-the-box real-time visualizations. Embodied AI, the AI subdomain concerning systems that learn to complete tasks through environmental interactions, has experienced substantial growth. The Allen Institute argues that this growth has been mostly beneficial, but it takes issue with the fragmented nature of embodied AI development tools, which it says discourages good science. In a recent analysis, the Allen Institute found that the number of embodied AI papers now exceeds 160 (up from around 20 in 2018 and 60 in 2019) and that the number of environments, tasks, modalities, and algorithms varies widely among them.