Related papers: Discovering containment: from infants to machines
When humans perform a task with an articulated object, they interact with the object only in a handful of ways, while the space of all possible interactions is nearly endless. This is because humans have prior knowledge about what…
In the last few years we have seen a growing interest in machine learning approaches to computer vision and, especially, to semantic labeling. Nowadays state of the art systems use deep learning on millions of labeled images with very…
Most artificial neural networks used for object detection and recognition are trained in a fully supervised setup. This is not only very resource consuming as it requires large data sets of labeled examples but also very different from how…
Much of the remarkable progress in computer vision has been focused around fully supervised learning mechanisms relying on highly curated datasets for a variety of tasks. In contrast, humans often learn about their world with little to no…
To achieve human-like common sense about everyday life, machine learning systems must understand and reason about the goals, preferences, and actions of other agents in the environment. By the end of their first year of life, human infants…
Towards addressing the Symbol Grounding Problem and motivated by early childhood language development, we leverage a robot which has been equipped with an approximate model of curiosity with particular focus on bottom-up building of…
Infants' ability to recognize and categorize objects develops gradually. The second year of life is marked by both the emergence of more semantic visual representations and a better understanding of word meaning. This suggests that language…
Understanding and modelling children's cognitive processes and their behaviour in the context of their interaction with robots and social artificial intelligence systems is a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful and effective robot…
Visual categorization and learning of visual categories exhibit early onset, however the underlying mechanisms of early categorization are not well understood. The main limiting factor for examining these mechanisms is the limited duration…
Recent advances in self-supervised modeling of text and images open new opportunities for computational models of child language acquisition, which is believed to rely heavily on cross-modal signals. However, prior studies have been limited…
For human children as well as machine learning systems, a key challenge in learning a word is linking the word to the visual phenomena it describes. We explore this aspect of word learning by using the performance of computer vision systems…
Humans do not acquire perceptual abilities in the way we train machines. While machine learning algorithms typically operate on large collections of randomly-chosen, explicitly-labeled examples, human acquisition relies more heavily on…
Iteratively building and testing machine learning models can help children develop creativity, flexibility, and comfort with machine learning and artificial intelligence. We explore how children use machine teaching interfaces with a team…
This paper uses a simple state machine to develop a control algorithm for controlling an infant humanoid in the context of a simple model system. The algorithm is inspired by a baby who starts learning to stand and walk at 7 to 12 months of…
There is strong and diverse evidence for mental rotation (MR) abilities in adults. However, current evidence for MR in children rests on just a few behavioral paradigms adapted from the adult literature. Here, we leverage recent…
We present a computational model of the mechanisms that may determine infants' behavior in the "mobile paradigm". This paradigm has been used in developmental psychology to explore how infants learn the sensory effects of their actions. In…
For many real-world robotics applications, robots need to continually adapt and learn new concepts. Further, robots need to learn through limited data because of scarcity of labeled data in the real-world environments. To this end, my…
Humans acquire language through implicit learning, absorbing complex patterns without explicit awareness. While LLMs demonstrate impressive linguistic capabilities, it remains unclear whether they exhibit human-like pattern recognition…
Children learn continually by asking questions about the concepts they are most curious about. With robots becoming an integral part of our society, they must also learn unknown concepts continually by asking humans questions. The paper…
Children learn to build a visual representation of the world from unsupervised exploration and we hypothesize that a key part of this learning ability is the use of self-generated navigational information as a similarity label to drive a…