Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen founded The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2014 to achieve scientific breakthroughs by building AI systems with reasoning, learning, and reading capabilities. Over the years, the private research institute and startup incubator has pushed the frontiers of AI and machine learning. We have listed their major innovations here. Built on PyTorch, AllenNLP is an open source model. The deep learning library supports the management of experiments and the evaluation after development.

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.

The domain of Embodied AI, in which agents learn to complete tasks through interaction with their environment from egocentric observations, has experienced substantial growth with the advent of deep reinforcement learning and increased interest from the computer vision, NLP, and robotics communities. This growth has been facilitated by the creation of a large number of simulated environments (such as AI2-THOR, Habitat and CARLA), tasks (like point navigation, instruction following, and embodied question answering), and associated leaderboards. While this diversity has been beneficial and organic, it has also fragmented the community: a huge amount of effort is required to do something as simple as taking a model trained in one environment and testing it in another. This discourages good science. We introduce AllenAct, a modular and flexible learning framework designed with a focus on the unique requirements of Embodied AI research. AllenAct provides first-class support for a growing collection of embodied environments, tasks and algorithms, provides reproductions of state-of-the-art models and includes extensive documentation, tutorials, start-up code, and pre-trained models. We hope that our framework makes Embodied AI more accessible and encourages new researchers to join this exciting area. The framework can be accessed at: https://allenact.org/