Related papers: Discovering containment: from infants to machines
Universal Turing Machines [29, 10, 18] are well known in computer science but they are about manual programming for general purposes. Although human children perform conscious learning (i.e., learning while being conscious) from infancy…
Children typically learn the meanings of nouns earlier than the meanings of verbs. However, it is unclear whether this asymmetry is a result of complexity in the visual structure of categories in the world to which language refers, the…
Visual object recognition -- the behavioral ability to rapidly and accurately categorize many visually encountered objects -- is core to primate cognition. This behavioral capability is algorithmically impressive because of the myriad…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. In this work, we…
Common-sense physical reasoning is an essential ingredient for any intelligent agent operating in the real-world. For example, it can be used to simulate the environment, or to infer the state of parts of the world that are currently…
As children enter elementary school, their understanding of the ordinal structure of numbers transitions from a memorized count list of the first 50-100 numbers to knowing the successor function and understanding the countably infinite. We…
Understanding how infants perceive speech sounds and language structures is still an open problem. Previous research in artificial neural networks has mainly focused on large dataset-dependent generative models, aiming to replicate…
Exploration in novel settings can be challenging without prior experience in similar domains. However, humans are able to build on prior experience quickly and efficiently. Children exhibit this behavior when playing with toys. For example,…
At an early age, human infants are able to learn and build a model of the world very quickly by constantly observing and interacting with objects around them. One of the most fundamental intuitions human infants acquire is intuitive…
Learning visual concepts from raw images without strong supervision is a challenging task. In this work, we show the advantages of prototype representations for understanding and revising the latent space of neural concept learners. For…
The field of visual representation learning has seen explosive growth in the past years, but its benefits in robotics have been surprisingly limited so far. Prior work uses generic visual representations as a basis to learn (task-specific)…
World Models help Artificial Intelligence (AI) predict outcomes, reason about its environment, and guide decision-making. While widely used in reinforcement learning, they lack the structured, adaptive representations that even young…
Our brain can almost effortlessly decompose visual data streams into background and salient objects. Moreover, it can anticipate object motion and interactions, which are crucial abilities for conceptual planning and reasoning. Recent…
Humans and animals show remarkable learning efficiency, adapting to new environments with minimal experience. This capability is not well captured by standard reinforcement learning algorithms that rely on incremental value updates. Rapid…
Phase transitions mark qualitative reorganizations of collective behavior, yet identifying their boundaries remains challenging whenever analytic solutions are absent and conventional simulations fail. Here we introduce learnability as a…
Infants discover categories, detect novelty, and adapt to new contexts without supervision-a challenge for current machine learning. We present a brain-inspired perspective on configurations, a finite-resolution clustering framework that…
Imitation learning is an effective approach for autonomous systems to acquire control policies when an explicit reward function is unavailable, using supervision provided as demonstrations from an expert, typically a human operator.…
Children learn word meanings by tapping into the commonalities across different situations in which words are used and overcome the high level of uncertainty involved in early word learning experiences. We propose a modeling framework to…
In order to autonomously learn wide repertoires of complex skills, robots must be able to learn from their own autonomously collected data, without human supervision. One learning signal that is always available for autonomously collected…
Effective human-robot interaction, such as in robot learning from human demonstration, requires the learning agent to be able to ground abstract concepts (such as those contained within instructions) in a corresponding high-dimensional…