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OMNI: Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness (arxiv.org)
4 points by ashbot on Jun 11, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A big AI model trained on human writing scores which tasks are worth learning, so an agent picks its next challenge by both how learnable and how interesting it is. This beat picking tasks at random or by how fast the agent was improving.

Abstract

Open-ended algorithms aim to learn new, interesting behaviors forever. That requires a vast environment search space, but there are thus infinitely many possible tasks. Even after filtering for tasks the current agent can learn (i.e., learning progress), countless learnable yet uninteresting tasks remain (e.g., minor variations of previously learned tasks). An Achilles Heel of open-endedness research is the inability to quantify (and thus prioritize) tasks that are not just learnable, but also $\textit{interesting}$ (e.g., worthwhile and novel). We propose solving this problem by $\textit{Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness}$ (OMNI). The insight is that we can utilize foundation models (FMs) as a model of interestingness (MoI), because they $\textit{already}$ internalize human concepts of interestingness from training on vast amounts of human-generated data, where humans naturally write about what they find interesting or boring. We show that FM-based MoIs improve open-ended learning by focusing on tasks that are both learnable $\textit{and interesting}$, outperforming baselines based on uniform task sampling or learning progress alone. This approach has the potential to dramatically advance the ability to intelligently select which tasks to focus on next (i.e., auto-curricula), and could be seen as AI selecting its own next task to learn, facilitating self-improving AI and AI-Generating Algorithms. Project website at https://www.jennyzhangzt.com/omni/

Jenny Zhang, Joel Lehman, Kenneth Stanley, Jeff Clune
arXiv:2306.01711 · cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jun 2, 2023 · updated Feb 15, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 47 pages, 33 figures

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