Researchers work on empowering AI with imagination

Researchers at Alphabet’s Deep Mind are working on developing technologies that would empower artificial intelligence (AI) systems with imagination. In two recently published papers, they explain architectures that are intended to provide AI with new ways ’to learn and construct plans to maximise the efficiency of a task’ and ‘adopt flexible strategies for exploiting their imagination’. One paper proposes an ‘imagination-based planner’ – an AI system which can learn to construct, evaluate, and execute plans, and which, before taking action, can perform imagination steps (proposing an imagined action and evaluating it). The second paper describes ‘imagination-augmented agents’, designed to learn to interpret predictions from a learned environment model to construct plans for decisions and actions.