New artificial intelligence inspired by the functioning of the human brain

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has enabled the development of high-performance automatic learning techniques in recent years. However, these techniques are often applied task by task, which implies that an intelligent agent trained for one task will perform poorly on other tasks, even very similar ones. To overcome this problem, researchers at the University of Liège (ULiège) have developed a new algorithm based on a biological mechanism called neuromodulation. This algorithm makes it possible to create intelligent agents capable of performing tasks not encountered during training. This novel and exceptional result is presented this week in the magazine PLOS ONE.