In a paper published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers affiliated with Google, Princeton, the University of Southern California, and Simon Fraser University propose BabyWalk, an AI that learns to navigate by breaking instructions into steps and completing them sequentially. They claim it achieves state-of-the-art results on several metrics and that it’s able […]
Lilt raises $25 million for AI enterprise translation tools
Lilt, which develops AI-powered business translation software, today announced it raised $25 million. The company says the cash infusion will enable future product development, research into natural language processing, and the acceleration of its go-to-market strategy. Lilt’s solutions target development and deployment challenges around enterprise marketing, support, ecommerce, and localization efforts. According to an IDG […]
Facebook’s AI detects gender bias in text
In a technical paper published this week, Facebook researchers describe a framework that decomposes gender bias in text along several dimensions, which they used to annotate data sets and pre-trained and evaluate gender bias classifiers. If the experimental results are any indication, the team’s work might shed light on offensive language in terms of genderedness, […]
PlotMachines AI system writes long-form stories from outlines
In a preprint paper published this week on Arxiv.org, scientists at Microsoft, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and the University of Washington describe PlotMachines, an AI system that learns to transform outlines into stories by tracking plot threads. PlotMachines, the code for which is available on GitHub, could bolster the development of systems capable […]
OpenAI’s Jukebox AI produces music in any style from scratch — complete with lyrics
OpenAI today released Jukebox, a machine learning framework that generates music — including rudimentary songs — as raw audio in a range of genres and musical styles. Provided with a genre, artist, and lyrics as input, Jukebox outputs a new music sample produced from scratch. The code and model are available on GitHub, along with […]
Google’s AI can adjust voice emotion, pitch, and speed with 30 minutes of data
In a paper originally published last October and accepted to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020, researchers affiliated with Google and the University College London propose an AI model that enables control of speech characteristics like pitch, emotion, and speaking rate with as little as 30 minutes of data. The work has obvious […]
Amazon’s AI uses a microphone array to localize multiple speakers in a room
In a technical paper scheduled to be presented next month at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), a group of Amazon researchers propose an AI approach to multiple-source localization, or the problem of estimating a sound’s location using microphone audio. They say that in experiments involving real and simulated data (the […]
Google claims its AI can design computer chips in under 6 hours
In a preprint paper coauthored by Google AI lead Jeff Dean, scientists at Google Research and the Google chip implementation and infrastructure team describe a learning-based approach to chip design that can learn from past experience and improve over time, becoming better at generating architectures for unseen components. They claim it completes designs in under […]
DeepMind’s AI studies game players to exploit weaknesses in their strategies
In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, scientists at Alphabet’s DeepMind propose a new framework that learns an approximate best response to players within games of many kinds. They claim that it achieves consistently high performance against “worst-case opponents” — that is, players who aren’t good yet at least play by the rules and actually complete […]
Google’s AI teaches robots to grasp occluded objects and adapt to new situations
In a pair of papers published on the preprint server Arxiv.org this week, Google and University of California, Berkely researchers describe new AI and machine learning techniques that enable robots to adapt to never-before-seen tasks and grasp occluded objects. The first study details X-Ray, an algorithm that when deployed on a robot can search through […]