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Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

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Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#71

Post by snrji »

paraschopra wrote: post #50
snrji wrote: post #10

By no means will I be ever able to grasp Friston's theory, but the free energy minimisation vaguely reminds me of Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning. Can anyone with more understanding than me confirm or deny this apparent resemblance?

There are similarities. The difference in two approaches are: - FEP is Bayesian in nature, while there's usually no notion of uncertainties in curiosity driven RL - In FEP, there's no explicit weighting of explore/exploit tradeoff. It automatically emerges from equations - FEP, since it's Bayesian, allows for more complex reasoning (like counterfactuals) - Curiosity driven RL is scalable while FEP is not feasible for…

Many thanks for your answer.

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#72

Post by snrji »

atschantz wrote: post #41
snrji wrote: post #10

By no means will I be ever able to grasp Friston's theory, but the free energy minimisation vaguely reminds me of Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning. Can anyone with more understanding than me confirm or deny this apparent resemblance?

There is a large overlap, for instance, the popular VIME exploration algorithm [1] uses part of the free energy objective function. However, free energy isn't a theory of curiosity per se, its posed as description of self-organisation. It just so happens that you can express the free energy functional in terms of epistemic (curious) and instrumental (reward) components. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.09674

I see, thanks. Is any AI research center/company trying to model this idea, instead of applying RL?

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#73

Post by snrji »

Tenoke wrote: post #15
snrji wrote: post #10

By no means will I be ever able to grasp Friston's theory, but the free energy minimisation vaguely reminds me of Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning. Can anyone with more understanding than me confirm or deny this apparent resemblance?

That has been my go-to comparison for a while as well, and it sounds like what they refer to in this article when they talk about using active inference-based AI vs classical reinforcement learning.

Yes, although looking at what other people have commented, "our" intuition is quite basic. I will try to read more about FEP.

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#74

Post by modzu »

amelius wrote: post #64
andrewfromx wrote: post #62

I think true AI will not be a computer program that suddenly becomes human like. It will be a human that becomes more and more cyborg like https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/01/thomas-reardon-and-ctrl-la... Soon humans will have more and more brain surgery adding cyborg features to their non-artificial-intelligence, just their natural-intelligence until at some point, they will be so machine like, boom, AI.

Reminds me of the philosophical question of what happens to one's consciousness if you'd replace their neurons, one at a time, by electronic equivalents.

and more generally, the ship of Theseus

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#75

Post by lurquer »

amelius wrote: post #64
andrewfromx wrote: post #62

I think true AI will not be a computer program that suddenly becomes human like. It will be a human that becomes more and more cyborg like https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/01/thomas-reardon-and-ctrl-la... Soon humans will have more and more brain surgery adding cyborg features to their non-artificial-intelligence, just their natural-intelligence until at some point, they will be so machine like, boom, AI.

Reminds me of the philosophical question of what happens to one's consciousness if you'd replace their neurons, one at a time, by electronic equivalents.

It may be a fallacy to assume a neuron is less complex than a brain. Depends on how one measures complexity and at what scale... but living systems -- unlike no living systems -- strangely get more complex the closer in one goes. That is, it's fairly trivial to simulate an earthworm... it's trickier to simulate the components of the earthworm.

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#76

Post by williamdclt »

amelius wrote: post #64
andrewfromx wrote: post #62

I think true AI will not be a computer program that suddenly becomes human like. It will be a human that becomes more and more cyborg like https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/01/thomas-reardon-and-ctrl-la... Soon humans will have more and more brain surgery adding cyborg features to their non-artificial-intelligence, just their natural-intelligence until at some point, they will be so machine like, boom, AI.

Reminds me of the philosophical question of what happens to one's consciousness if you'd replace their neurons, one at a time, by electronic equivalents.

Interesting thought experimement, but it'd need to define "consciousness" which is always what makes those problems unsolvable

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#77

Post by klodolph »

lurquer wrote: post #75
amelius wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the philosophical question of what happens to one's consciousness if you'd replace their neurons, one at a time, by electronic equivalents.

It may be a fallacy to assume a neuron is less complex than a brain. Depends on how one measures complexity and at what scale... but living systems -- unlike no living systems -- strangely get more complex the closer in one goes. That is, it's fairly trivial to simulate an earthworm... it's trickier to simulate the components of the earthworm.

This is a completely minor point here... but "fallacy" means that there's something wrong with the argument, if you have a disagreement about facts or assumptions then the word "fallacy" doesn't really apply (you can just say "wrong" instead).

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#78

Post by ArtWomb »

Most grad-level Deep Learning classes have a week or so devoted to "Approximate Bayes" methods. And it's conceivable future updates to all popular probabilistic programming languages will include "programmable" rather than "fixed-function" inference methods.

"Inference Metaprogramming" paper

https://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/paper/pldi18.pdf

Latest state-of-the-art research will be presented at upcoming NeuroIPS conference

Symposium on Advances in Approximate Bayesian Inference

http://approximateinference.org/accepted/

I think the most fascinating aspect is that Friston and his team are working within the field of Computational and Algorithmic Psychiatry. I mean this pre-print is really interesting: using video game play to diagnose disorder.

Active Inference in OpenAI Gym: A Paradigm for Computational Investigations Into Psychiatric Illness

https://www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S2451-9022(...

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#79

Post by [deleted] »

ArtWomb wrote: post #78

Most grad-level Deep Learning classes have a week or so devoted to "Approximate Bayes" methods. And it's conceivable future updates to all popular probabilistic programming languages will include "programmable" rather than "fixed-function" inference methods. "Inference Metaprogramming" paper https://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/paper/pldi18.pdf Latest state-of-the-art research will be presented at upcoming NeuroIPS co…

[deleted]

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#80

Post by [deleted] »

klodolph wrote: post #77
lurquer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a fallacy to assume a neuron is less complex than a brain. Depends on how one measures complexity and at what scale... but living systems -- unlike no living systems -- strangely get more complex the closer in one goes. That is, it's fairly trivial to simulate an earthworm... it's trickier to simulate the components of the earthworm.

This is a completely minor point here... but "fallacy" means that there's something wrong with the argument, if you have a disagreement about facts or assumptions then the word "fallacy" doesn't really apply (you can just say "wrong" instead).

[deleted]
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