Machine learning needs rich feedback for AI teaching: Monash professor

In much the same way children have to be told not only what they are saying is wrong, but why it is wrong, artificial intelligence (AI) systems need to be able to receive and act on similar feedback, according to Monash University Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering Head Professor Tom Drummond. "I think fundamentally we need ways of giving machine learning systems more feedback than'yes' or'no'," Drummond told journalists at the GTCx Australia conference on Tuesday. "Rich feedback is important in human education, I think probably we're going to see the rise of machine teaching as an important field -- how do we design systems so that they can take rich feedback and we can have a dialogue about what the system has learnt?" To illustrate his point, Drummond used the example of a system that was able recognise and caption images of fire hydrants, and appeared to be working well until one of the images was modified. "You take Photoshop, and you colour it green, and it says: 'A red fire hydrant'."