Congratulations go out to Piotr Miłoś – Senior Researcher at deepsense.ai – and the AWARElab team on the selection of their research papers at NeurIPS 2021. It is the third time a deepsense.ai researcher is to present a research paper at the NeurIPS conference.

In this year’s installment of the world’s most closely watched AI conference, Piotr Miłoś together with the AWARElab team, share their insights in the following areas:

• Subgoal Search for Complex Reasoning Tasks. Authors: K. Czechowski, T. Odrzygóźdź,  M. Zbysiński, M. Zawalski, K. Olejnik, Y. Wu, Ł. Kuciński, P. Miłoś
• Continual World: A Robotic Benchmark for Continual Reinforcement Learning. Authors: M. Wołczyk, M. Zając, R. Pascanu, Ł. Kuciński, P. Miłoś
• Catalytic Role of Noise and Necessity of Inductive Biases in the Emergence of Compositional Communication. Authors: Ł. Kuciński, T. Korbak, P. Kołodziej, P. Miłoś

“I’m excited about all these papers. The subgoal approach lets us efficiently prove mathematical inequalities and solve challenging combinatorial tasks like Rubic’s cube. Continual World is the first benchmark blending the important fields of continual and reinforcement learning. Both of them are conjectured to be key in the long goal of developing truly intelligent systems. Finally, the study of biases has been an increasingly important topic in AI. Our work sets the ground for a better understanding of the emergence of structured signals. I’d like to thank my team for their great work, and I’m looking forward to new developments. We’ve already started follow-on projects!”

– Piotr Miłoś, Senior Researcher at deepsense.ai.

For 35 years, the NeurIPS conference – one of the premier gatherings in artificial intelligence and machine learning – has been held at various locations around the world. The conference is organized by the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, a non-profit corporation whose purpose is to foster insights into solving difficult problems by bringing together researchers from the biological, psychological, technological, mathematical, and theoretical areas of science and engineering. In response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the 2021 NeurIPS is the second to be held virtually.

deepsense.ai supported students from the no. VI High School in Bydgoszcz in carrying out a space probe project, as part of the international CanSat competition organized by the European Space Agency (ESA). On September 19, 2021 the probe was launched into the sky.

During the Congress of Polish Physicists in Bydgoszcz, a special balloon took the probe up over 40 km, passing through the stratosphere. The collected data was analyzed from a physical point of view and a special web application was used to visualize their findings.

“Visiting the no. VI High School students is always a great pleasure for me. I’m very impressed with the commitment these young people have towards broadening their knowledge and overcoming new challenges.”

– Patryk Miziuła, Senior Data Scientist at deepsense.ai.

The mathematical and IT profiled “Euclid” class from no. VI High School of Jan and Jędrzej Śniadeckich in Bydgoszcz has been supported by deepsense.ai for the last 3 years. Under this patronage, deepsense.ai staff conduct meetings with the students on artificial intelligence and related issues. The most recent workshop, titled “Machine learning – how to start” and delivered by Patryk Miziuła, took place over two days in September.

Taking place online on July 14, this year’s AI World Executive Summit will bring together innovators and thought leaders from across this diverse ecosystem and deliver key knowledge for participants to bring back to their organizations. deepsense.ai has been a strategic partner of AI World summits since the first conference and will again this year be supporting the event.

deepsense.ai VP of Engineering and Board Member Michał Iwanowski will share insights about the development of AI for enterprise during the session “To Make or to Buy – How to Get the Best of Both Worlds in Your AI Transformation.”

“I’m always pleased to actively participate in AI World conferences, because it is a great place to discuss AI applications with practitioners. This year I would like to present deepsense.ai’s expertise in the area of successful enterprise AI deployments. There is no question that enterprises that can successfully leverage the potential of AI will be the ones to get ahead. While businesses are certain about the goals they want to use AI for, how to execute and deploy it successfully remains a difficult question. I’m looking forward to providing some useful insights on that question,”
– Michał says.

The AI World Executive Summit is organized by AI Trends, the leading industry media channel focused on the business and technology of AI.

deepsense.ai has been selected to be a part of Silicon Valley Innovation Platform run by the Plug and Play Tech Center, the world’s largest early stage investor, accelerator, and corporate innovation hub. During the selection process deepsense.ai beat out over 1000 innovative tech companies from all over the world.

The mission of the Plug and Play Tech Center is to drive innovation by connecting entrepreneurs, corporations, and investors worldwide. With its expanded ecosystem consisting of over 500 corporate partners and 200 venture capitalists, Plug and Play matches the world’s largest corporations with cutting-edge technology. Plug and Play was an early investor in Google, PayPal, Dropbox, LendingClub, N26, Soundhound, Honey, Kustomer, and Guardant Health.

‘To be recognised by such a prestigious organization as Plug and Play is a tremendous achievement for our company. I’m extremely proud of deepsense.ai’s development and excited about the new business opportunities the Silicon Valley Innovation Platform can bring us,’ says Michał Iwanowski, VP of Engineering at deepsense.ai.

As part of the acceleration process, deepsense.ai will participate in a 12-week Insurtech business development program focused on tech innovations in the insurance industry.

“Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Atari,” a research paper written by a consortium of authors, has been chosen for a spotlight presentation at the International Conference on Learning Representation. Only 5% of the papers submitted receive this distinction. Two of the leading authors, Piotr Miłoś and Błażej Osiński, are both researchers and senior data scientists at deepsense.ai.

The paper describes research conducted in cooperation with Google Brain, the University of Warsaw and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The high-level goal described in the research is how to enable an AI model to learn useful behaviors by interacting with its environment. In this case, the environment was Atari games, which offer tasks that are simple yet challenging enough to test the research concept. The results of the experiment can be extrapolated to more challenging tasks in increasingly complex environments. The model the deepsense.ai researchers designed learned how to play the games thanks to an extensive chain of trial and error.

An extension of the research might be a robot acquiring skills while moving objects, such as putting dishes in a dishwasher or refrigerator. Such interactions can be costly – the robot will drop any number of dishes along the way, so it takes time and resources for it to train itself thoroughly enough to learn to carry out its tasks efficiently.

To tackle the challenge of expensive interactions, we increase the system’s learning efficiency by endowing it with a predictive module that can imagine the consequences of actions without actually executing them. The module is trained along with this skill and it is used to perform short inner simulations. These simulations substitute most of the interactions normally required by reinforcement learning, resulting in better sample efficiency.

Details about the research are available in the full arXiv preprint, while the press release and an article about artificial imagination can be found on deepsense.ai’s blog.

“We are proud and excited to see our work recognized at one of the most renowned scientific conferences in the world,”
– says Piotr Miłoś, senior data scientist at deepsense.ai and a professor at the Polish Academy of Science.

Reinforcement learning in spotlight

“Spotlight” is a short oral presentation reserved for papers of particular distinction. With only 5% of submitted papers honored this way, the privilege comes amidst our work gaining critical attention in the AI research community. The arXiv paper has been cited more than 50 times in just 10 months, a testament to its significance for other researchers in the field.

This year’s conference, the eighth, will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and is hoped to encourage researchers from Africa and the Middle East to take part. Despite its short history, the conference is currently among the most important deep learning-related scientific events  in the world. The conference publication is recognized on Google scholar as the 42nd most important scientific publication globally.

The conference provides an interesting insight into the development of Artificial Intelligence and is a great way to keep abreast of the latest trends. deepsense.ai has recently used machine learning tools to review the papers submitted to the conference. The analysis showed that reinforcement learning is among the most significant and recurrent trends in machine learning today. Further information on trending topics on the ICLR conferences can be found in deepsense.ai’s analysis.

“Presenting our research on spotlight is a great honor and proof that our contribution to the machine learning community and development is recognized,”
– concludes Błażej Osiński, a senior data scientist and deepsense.ai researcher involved in the project.

This success is the result of deepsense.ai’s strong commitment to R&D. Just a month ago two other papers were presented at NeurIPS workshops, another top-tier AI conference. These included “Developmentally motivated emergence of compositional communication via template transfer” and “Simulation-based reinforcement learning for real-world autonomous driving”.

The full list of paper authors: Lukasz Kaiser, Mohammad Babaeizadeh, Piotr Milos, Blazej Osinski, Roy H Campbell, Konrad Czechowski, Dumitru Erhan, Chelsea Finn, Piotr Kozakowski, Sergey Levine, Afroz Mohiuddin, Ryan Sepassi, George Tucker, Henryk Michalewski

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