Teaching machines to understand video could be the key to giving them common sense

Teaching machines to understand video could be the key to giving them common sense

Yann LeCun says the next frontier in machine vision is software that learns just by observing the world.

Five years ago, researchers made a sudden leap in the accuracy of software that can interpret images. The technology behind it, artificial neural networks, underpins the recent boom in artificial intelligence (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”). It is why Google and Facebook now let you search inside your photos, and it has unlocked new applications for facial recognition.

Yann LeCun, director of Facebook’s AI research group and a professor at New York University, helped pioneer the use of neural networks for machine vision. He says there’s still progress to be made—and that it could lead to software with common sense.

Just how good is machine vision now?

If you have an image with a dominant object in it, and the name of the game is to give the category of the object—that just works. As long as you have enough data, on the order of 1,000 objects per category, we can recognize very specific objects like cars of a particular brand or plants of a particular species or dogs of a particular breed. We can also recognize more abstract categories, like whether images are landscapes, sunsets, weddings, or birthday parties. Just five years ago it wasn’t clear this problem was completely solvable. But that doesn't mean vision is solved.

What’s an important problem that isn’t “solved” yet?

People have been playing for a number of years with the idea of generating captions or descriptions for images and video. There have been, on the face of it, impressive demonstrations, [but] those are not as impressive as they look. Their domain of expertise is very limited to whatever universe we train them on. Most of the systems, you show them images with other types of objects or unusual situations they've never seen and they will say complete garbage about it. They don't have common sense.

What’s the connection between vision and common sense?

It depends who you talk to—even within Facebook there are people with different opinions on this.

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