Reverse-engineering core common sense with the tools of probabilistic programs, game-style simulation engines, and inductive program synthesis

Joshua Tenenbaum (MIT, USA)

None of today’s AI systems or approaches comes anywhere close to capturing the common sense of a toddler, or even a 3-month old infant. I will talk about some of the challenges facing conventional machine learning paradigms, such as end-to-end unsupervised learning in deep networks and deep reinforcement learning, and discuss some initial, small steps we have taken with an alternative cognitively-inspired AI approach. This requires us to develop a different engineering toolset, based on probabilistic programs, game-style simulation programs as general-purpose startup software (or “the game engine in the head”), and learning as programming (or “the child as hacker”).

Joshua Tenenbaum is the Paul E. Newton Career Development Professor of Cognitive Science and Computation in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1999 and after a brief postdoc with the MIT AI Lab, he joined the Stanford University faculty as Assistant Professor of Psychology and (by courtesy) Computer Science. He returned to MIT as a faculty member in 2002. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Science, and he has been active on the program committees of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) and Cognitive Science (CogSci) conferences. In 2019, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

GECCO 2021
The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
July 10-14, 2021 — Lille, France (online)
https://gecco-2021.sigevo.org