Large language models like those that power ChatGPT have shown impressive performance on tasks like drafting legal briefs, analyzing the sentiment of customer reviews, or translating documents into different languages.These machine-learning models typically use only natural language to process information and answer queries, which can make it difficult...

Someday, you may want your home robot to carry a load of dirty clothes downstairs and deposit them in the washing machine in the far-left corner of the basement. The robot will need to combine your instructions with its visual observations to determine the steps it should take to complete this task.For an AI agent, this is easier said than done. Current...

Mark Hamilton, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and affiliate of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), wants to use machines to understand how animals communicate. To do that, he set out first to create a system that can learn human language “from scratch.”“Funny enough, the key moment...

When robots come across unfamiliar objects, they struggle to account for a simple truth: Appearances aren’t everything. They may attempt to grasp a block, only to find out it’s a literal piece of cake. The misleading appearance of that object could lead the robot to miscalculate physical properties like the object’s weight and center of mass, using...

Let’s say you want to train a robot so it understands how to use tools and can then quickly learn to make repairs around your house with a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver. To do that, you would need an enormous amount of data demonstrating tool use.Existing robotic datasets vary widely in modality — some include color images while others are composed...

The internet is awash in instructional videos that can teach curious viewers everything from cooking the perfect pancake to performing a life-saving Heimlich maneuver.But pinpointing when and where a particular action happens in a long video can be tedious. To streamline the process, scientists are trying to teach computers to perform this task. Ideally,...