An artificial intelligence system is capable of being an "inventor" under Australian patent law, the federal court has ruled, in a decision that could have wider intellectual property implications. University of Surrey professor Ryan Abbott has launched more than a dozen patent applications across the globe, including in the UK, US, New Zealand and Australia, on behalf of US-based Dr Stephen Thaler. They seek to have Thaler's artificial intelligence device known as Dabus (a device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience) listed as the inventor. The applications claimed Dabus, which is made up of artificial neural networks, invented an emergency warning light and a type of food container, among other inventions. Several countries, including Australia, had rejected the applications, stating a human must be named the inventor.

Sign in to report inappropriate content. An excerpt from the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey" directed by Stanley Kubrick. Synopsis: Mankind finds a mysterious, obviously artificial, artifact buried on the moon and, with the intelligent computer HAL, sets off on a quest, where the way the HAL 9000 super computer malfunctions.

The use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is still restricted to simulation or to enhance human-operated systems through recommendations. Real-world environments (e.g. industrial robots or power grids) are generally designed with safety constraints in mind implemented in the shape of valid actions masks or contingency controllers. For example, the range of motion and the angles of the motors of a robot can be limited to physical boundaries. Violating constraints thus results in rejected actions or entering in a safe mode driven by an external controller, making RL agents incapable of learning from their mistakes. In this paper, we propose a simple modification of a state-of-the-art deep RL algorithm (DQN), enabling learning from forbidden actions. To do so, the standard Q-learning update is enhanced with an extra safety loss inspired by structured classification. We empirically show that it reduces the number of hit constraints during the learning phase and accelerates convergence to near-optimal policies compared to using standard DQN. Experiments are done on a Visual Grid World Environment and Text-World domain.

This paper is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under ITR/IM grant IIS-0081334 and a Sloan Research Fellowship. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Sloan Foundation.