Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
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Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
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Re: Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
#2To reference an earlier article on HN, this reads like a future of, "Robot, observe these field workers picking fruit for a week. Now practice in this field for a day. OK, now the job is yours.
What I can't tell at all from this article is whether that day is years or decades away.
Re: Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
#3To reference an earlier article on HN, this reads like a future of, "Robot, observe these field workers picking fruit for a week. Now practice in this field for a day. OK, now the job is yours. What I can't tell at all from this article is whether that day is years or decades away.
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Re: Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
#4To reference an earlier article on HN, this reads like a future of, "Robot, observe these field workers picking fruit for a week. Now practice in this field for a day. OK, now the job is yours. What I can't tell at all from this article is whether that day is years or decades away.
How can we even really differentiate years from decades when there is potential for building on top of research and radical acceleration at any time.
Re: Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
#5To reference an earlier article on HN, this reads like a future of, "Robot, observe these field workers picking fruit for a week. Now practice in this field for a day. OK, now the job is yours. What I can't tell at all from this article is whether that day is years or decades away.
> whether that day is years or decades away
Yes, it's both. Depends on the task.
Afaik we can already program industrial robots by showing them what to do. Robot records movement in its actuators, then keeps replaying over and over.
And we already have machine learning agents that can observe your behavior and learn which news stories are "good" news stories and which aren't. (algo newsfeeds). You could use them to observe a magazine editor and after a few issues, you'd have a robo editor.
Re: Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
#6To reference an earlier article on HN, this reads like a future of, "Robot, observe these field workers picking fruit for a week. Now practice in this field for a day. OK, now the job is yours. What I can't tell at all from this article is whether that day is years or decades away.
> whether that day is years or decades away Yes, it's both. Depends on the task. Afaik we can already program industrial robots by showing them what to do. Robot records movement in its actuators, then keeps replaying over and over. And we already have machine learning agents that can observe your behavior and learn which news stories are "good" news stories and which aren't. (algo newsfeeds). You could use them to o…
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Re: Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
#7To reference an earlier article on HN, this reads like a future of, "Robot, observe these field workers picking fruit for a week. Now practice in this field for a day. OK, now the job is yours. What I can't tell at all from this article is whether that day is years or decades away.
Yeah, I think “easily programmable humanoid” will be up there with the smartphone, maybe even the computer in terms of impact. Imagine walking into a restaurant, telling the app what food you want, and having a robot walk it over to you. Imagine going to a retail store, giving a voice query of what you’re looking for, and have a robot bring back the best candidates. Imagine owning an Etsy shop, but having a robot automate the entire creation process. Imagine...
Re: Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
#8To reference an earlier article on HN, this reads like a future of, "Robot, observe these field workers picking fruit for a week. Now practice in this field for a day. OK, now the job is yours. What I can't tell at all from this article is whether that day is years or decades away.
https://xkcd.com/1425/
It reall, really depends on the job. And in a job, maybe some subtasks can be automated.
Perhaps the picking cannot be automated, but the transportation can. Or instead of computer vision, have a person click the fruit on a screen so the robot know where to pick.
Re: Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
#9The headline seems to misuse the word "semantic" (not to mention "understand"). Does the door-opening robot now understand how to open all hinged doors with a similar opening mechanism? Or was it just trained to imitate a sequence of changes in a 2D image from a fixed angle? Can the same software and robot also be taught to open windows? Boxes? We are talking about "semantics" explicitly here. Does it understand "open" versus "closed" for these different types of closures/portals?
I don't want to discount the value of this research. It's absolutely necessary to do this sort of basic proof-of-concept testing of these ideas. But the claim being made implicitly here is way beyond what's actually going on. The software understands nothing, and the "semantics" extend to simple image-matching of objects, but there's no deeper meaning associated with the labels, so I think calling that "semantics" is a major stretch.
This approach is not going to teach a robot how to pick fruit, or serve food, or clean floors anytime soon. In the best case where this is even a workable approach, research like this is just the first of millions more tiny steps along the path. Anyway I think it's naive to assume that a good way to approach automation is to write software to let robots learn by watching humans do the desired task. As cool as that sounds, chances are that approach would ultimately be a massively inefficient way to solve the problem. It'd be like trying to invent the automobile by building a steam-powered horse robot that can tow carriages. The critical purpose is being overlooked in favor of a cool-looking but totally impractical toy demo.
Re: Teaching Robots to Understand Semantic Concepts
#10The headline seems to misuse the word "semantic" (not to mention "understand"). Does the door-opening robot now understand how to open all hinged doors with a similar opening mechanism? Or was it just trained to imitate a sequence of changes in a 2D image from a fixed angle? Can the same software and robot also be taught to open windows? Boxes? We are talking about "semantics" explicitly here. Does it understand "ope…
That seems to be what they are aiming towards but true AI is not the same as Machine Learning.
Google is still using what we could call a very rudimentary form of AI as they describe "Unsupervised learning on very small datasets is one of the most challenging scenarios in machine learning. To make this feasible, we use deep visual features from a large network trained for image recognition on ImageNet".