Imperial College ICARL seminars - Felix Hill, DeepMind

We are thrilled to be hosting Felix Hill from DeepMind who will talk about his work How knowing language can make general AI systems smarter.

Note that the talk will be hybrid and you will be able to listen and ask questions both in person or in remote.

If you are in London, we encourage you to attend in person to enjoy the food and drinks during the networking session afterwards.

Abstract

Having and using language makes humans as a species better learners and better able to solve hard problems. I'll present three studies that demonstrate how this is also the case for artificial models of general intelligence. In the first, I show that agents with access to visual and linguistic semantic knowledge explore their environment more effectively than non-linguistic agents, enabling them to learn more about the world around them. In the second, I demonstrate how an agent embodied in a simulated 3D world can be enhanced by learning from explanations -- answers to the question "why?" expressed in language. Agents that learn from explanations solve harder cognitive challenges than those trained from reinforcement learning alone, and can also better learn to make interventions in order to uncover the causal structure of their world. Finally, I'll present evidence that the skewed and bursty distribution of natural language may explain how large language models can be prompted to rapidly acquire new skills or behaviours. Together with other recent literature, this suggests that modelling language may make a neural network better able to acquire new cognitive capacities quickly, even when those capacities are not necessarily explicitly linguistic.

About the speaker

Felix is a Research Scientist at DeepMind where he leads a team focusing on the relationship between natural language and general intelligence. His work combines insights from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience and Linguistics in working towards scientifically and practically useful models of human cognition and behaviour.

Sponsor

This event is sponsored by DeepMind