Dog puppies understand humans in a way that their relatives like wolves just don't thanks to undergoing some 14,000 years of domestication, a study has concluded. Researchers from Duke University tested both dog and wolf puppies in a series of tests that involved locating hidden food by picking up on human clues. They found that dog puppies have similar social cognition abilities as human babies -- and are able, for example, to instinctively recognise pointing as communication. This superficially simple understanding is, in fact, rare in the animal kingdom. Not only did the wolf pups in the study lack it, but so do chimps, our closest relatives.

To achieve human-like common sense about everyday life, machine learning systems must understand and reason about the goals, preferences, and actions of others. Human infants intuitively achieve such common sense by making inferences about the underlying causes of other agents' actions. Directly informed by research on infant cognition, our benchmark BIB challenges machines to achieve generalizable, common-sense reasoning about other agents like human infants do. As in studies on infant cognition, moreover, we use a violation of expectation paradigm in which machines must predict the plausibility of an agent's behavior given a video sequence, making this benchmark appropriate for direct validation with human infants in future studies. We show that recently proposed, deep-learning-based agency reasoning models fail to show infant-like reasoning, leaving BIB an open challenge.

Even with impressive advances in application-specific models, we still lack knowledge about how to build a model that can learn in a human-like way and do multiple tasks. To learn in a human-like way, we need to provide a diverse experience that is comparable to humans. In this paper, we introduce our ongoing effort to build a simulated environment for developmental robotics (SEDRo). SEDRo provides diverse human experiences ranging from those of a fetus to a 12th-month-old. A series of simulated tests based on developmental psychology will be used to evaluate the progress of a learning model. We anticipate SEDRo to lower the cost of entry and facilitate research in the developmental robotics community.

As the current trend of artificial intelligence is shifting towards self-supervised learning, conventional norms such as highly curated domain-specific data, application-specific learning models, extrinsic reward based learning policies etc. might not provide with the suitable ground for such developments. In this paper, we introduce SEDRo, a Simulated Environment for Developmental Robotics which allows a learning agent to have similar experiences that a human infant goes through from the fetus stage up to 12 months. A series of simulated tests based on developmental psychology will be used to evaluate the progress of a learning model.

From their first years of life, human beings have the innate ability to learn continuously and build mental models of the world, simply by observing and interacting with things or people in their surroundings. Cognitive psychology studies suggest that humans make extensive use of this previously acquired knowledge, particularly when they encounter new situations or when making decisions. Despite the significant recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), most virtual agents still require hundreds of hours of training to achieve human-level performance in several tasks, while humans can learn how to complete these tasks in a few hours or less. Recent studies have highlighted two key contributors to humans' ability to acquire knowledge so quickly--namely, intuitive physics and intuitive psychology. These intuition models, which have been observed in humans from early stages of development, might be the core facilitators of future learning.

From the sci-fi classic "Bladerunner" to the recent films "Her" and "Ex Machina," pop culture is filled with stories demonstrating our simultaneous fascination with and fear of artificial intelligence (AI). This interest is rooted in questions about where the line between human and artificial intelligence will be, and whether that line might one day disappear. Will robots eventually be able to not only think but also feel and behave like us? Could a robot ever be fully human? It is a relatively new field that started in the 1990s.8 A new multidisciplinary field called developmental robotics is paving the way to some answers.(a) Rather than writing programs that try to mimic specific human behaviors like love, developmental roboticists build machines that learn and develop the way humans do as they grow from newborn infants to adults.