Kwabena Boahen

Anthony Zador, Sean Escola, Blake Richards et al. · stanford

Neuroscience has long been an essential driver of progress in artificial intelligence (AI). We propose that to accelerate progress in AI, we must invest in fundamental research in NeuroAI. A core component of this is the embodied Turing test, which challenges AI animal models to interact with the sensorimotor world at skill levels akin to their living counterparts. The embodied Turing test shifts the focus from those capabilities like game playing and language that are especially well-developed or uniquely human to those capabilities, inherited from over 500 million years of evolution, that are shared with all animals. Building models that can pass the embodied Turing test will provide a roadmap for the next generation of AI.

Ashok Cutkosky, Kwabena Boahen

The vast majority of optimization and online learning algorithms today require some prior information about the data (often in the form of bounds on gradients or on the optimal parameter value). When this information is not available, these algorithms require laborious manual tuning of various hyperparameters, motivating the search for algorithms that can adapt to the data with no prior information. We describe a frontier of new lower bounds on the performance of such algorithms, reflecting a tradeoff between a term that depends on the optimal parameter value and a term that depends on the gradients' rate of growth. Further, we construct a family of algorithms whose performance matches any desired point on this frontier, which no previous algorithm reaches.

Ashok Cutkosky, Kwabena Boahen

We propose an online convex optimization algorithm (RescaledExp) that achieves optimal regret in the unconstrained setting without prior knowledge of any bounds on the loss functions. We prove a lower bound showing an exponential separation between the regret of existing algorithms that require a known bound on the loss functions and any algorithm that does not require such knowledge. RescaledExp matches this lower bound asymptotically in the number of iterations. RescaledExp is naturally hyperparameter-free and we demonstrate empirically that it matches prior optimization algorithms that require hyperparameter optimization.