Google and Others Are Building AI Systems That Doubt Themselves Posted on : Jan 09 - 2018

Researchers at Uber and Google are working on modifications to the two most popular deep-learning frameworks that will enable them to handle probability. This will provide a way for the smartest AI programs to measure their confidence in a prediction or a decision—essentially, to know when they should doubt themselves.

Deep learning, which involves feeding example data to a large and powerful neural network, has been an enormous success over the past few years, enabling machines to recognize objects in images or transcribe speech almost perfectly. But it requires lots of training data and computing power, and it can be surprisingly brittle.

Somewhat counterintuitively, this self-doubt offers one fix. The new approach could be useful in critical scenarios involving self-driving cars and other autonomous machines.

“You would like a system that gives you a measure of how certain it is,” says Dustin Tran, who is working on this problem at Google. “If a self-driving car doesn’t know its level of uncertainty, it can make a fatal error, and that can be catastrophic.”

The work reflects the realization that uncertainty is a key aspect of human reasoning and intelligence. Adding it to AI programs could make them smarter and less prone to blunders, says Zoubin Ghahramani, a prominent AI researcher who is a professor at the University of Cambridge and chief scientist at Uber.

This may prove vitally important as AI systems are used in ever more critical scenarios. “We want to have a rock-solid framework for deep learning, but make it easier for people to represent uncertainty,” Ghahramani told me recently over coffee one morning during a major AI conference in Long Beach, California.

During the same AI conference, a group of researchers gathered at a nearby bar one afternoon to discuss Pyro, a new programming language released by Uber that merges deep learning with probabilistic programming.

The meetup in Long Beach was organized by Noah Goodman, a professor at Stanford who is also affiliated with Uber’s AI Lab. With curly, unkempt hair and an unbuttoned shirt, he could easily be mistaken for a yoga teacher rather than an AI expert. Among those at the gathering was Tran, who has also contributed to the development of Pyro. View More