DARPA Wants AI That Can Learn From Others' Experiences

Humans progress faster when we learn from the experience of others, and scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency, or DARPA, want to translate that to lifelong learning models for artificial intelligence. The research agency opened a new Artificial Intelligence Exploration Opportunity to fund work on "the technical domain of lifelong learning by agents"--AI systems--"that share their experience with each other," according to an announcement on SAM.gov. DARPA is offering up to $1 million per proposal under the Shared-Experience Lifelong Learning, or ShELL, program. "Lifelong learning is a relatively new area of machine learning research, in which agents continually learn as they encounter varying conditions and tasks while deployed in the field, acquiring experience and knowledge and improving performance on both novel and previous tasks," the funding announcement states. The notice details how this is different from traditional "train-then-deploy" machine learning, which tend to fail in three ways: While lifelong learning is not a new concept for AI research, the announcement notes current research has focused on learning patterns for individual systems, rather than "populations of LL agents that benefit from each other's experiences.