philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Scientists Create a “Periodic Table” for Artificial Intelligence

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“We found that many of today’s most successful AI methods boil down to a single, simple idea — compress multiple kinds of data just enough to keep the pieces that truly predict what you need,” says Ilya Nemenman, Emory professor of physics and senior author of the paper. “This gives us a kind of ‘periodic table’ of AI methods. Different methods fall into different cells, based on which information a method’s loss function retains or discards.”

A loss function is the mathematical rule an AI system uses to evaluate how wrong its predictions are. During training, the model continually adjusts its internal parameters in order to reduce this error, using the loss function as a guide. ...

 They call this approach the Variational Multivariate Information Bottleneck Framework.

“Our framework is essentially like a control knob,” says co-author Michael Martini, who worked on the project as an Emory postdoctoral fellow and research scientist in Nemenman’s group. “You can ‘dial the knob’ to determine the information to retain to solve a particular problem.” ...

“The machine-learning community is focused on achieving accuracy in a system without necessarily understanding why a system is working,” Abdelaleem explains. “As physicists, however, we want to understand how and why something works. So, we focused on finding fundamental, unifying principals to connect different AI methods together.” ...

The researchers applied their framework to dozens of AI methods to test its efficacy. ...

See the full story here: https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-create-a-periodic-table-for-artificial-intelligence/