We’ve built a system for automatically figuring out which object is meant by a word by having a neural network decide if the word belongs to each of about 100 automatically-discovered “types” (non-exclusive categories).

We’re releasing a new batch of seven unsolved problems which have come up in the course of our research at OpenAI.

We’re releasing highly-optimized GPU kernels for an underexplored class of neural network architectures: networks with block-sparse weights. Depending on the chosen sparsity, these kernels can run orders of magnitude faster than cuBLAS or cuSPARSE. We’ve used them to attain state-of-the-art results in text sentiment analysis and generative modeling of text and images.

We’ve developed a hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm that learns high-level actions useful for solving a range of tasks, allowing fast solving of tasks requiring thousands of timesteps. Our algorithm, when applied to a set of navigation problems, discovers a set of high-level actions for walking and crawling in different directions, which enables the agent to master new navigation tasks quickly.

Our latest robotics techniques allow robot controllers, trained entirely in simulation and deployed on physical robots, to react to unplanned changes in the environment as they solve simple tasks. That is, we’ve used these techniques to build closed-loop systems rather than open-loop ones as before.

We show that for the task of simulated robot wrestling, a meta-learning agent can learn to quickly defeat a stronger non-meta-learning agent, and also show that the meta-learning agent can adapt to physical malfunction.

We’ve found that self-play allows simulated AIs to discover physical skills like tackling, ducking, faking, kicking, catching, and diving for the ball, without explicitly designing an environment with these skills in mind. Self-play ensures that the environment is always the right difficulty for an AI to improve. Taken alongside our Dota 2 self-play results, we have increasing confidence that self-play will be a core part of powerful AI systems in the future.

We’re releasing an algorithm which accounts for the fact that other agents are learning too, and discovers self-interested yet collaborative strategies like tit-for-tat in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. This algorithm, Learning with Opponent-Learning Awareness (LOLA), is a small step towards agents that model other minds.

We’re releasing two new OpenAI Baselines implementations: ACKTR and A2C. A2C is a synchronous, deterministic variant of Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C) which we’ve found gives equal performance. ACKTR is a more sample-efficient reinforcement learning algorithm than TRPO and A2C, and requires only slightly more computation than A2C per update.

Our Dota 2 result shows that self-play can catapult the performance of machine learning systems from far below human level to superhuman, given sufficient compute. In the span of a month, our system went from barely matching a high-ranked player to beating the top pros and has continued to improve since then. Supervised deep learning systems can only be as good as their training datasets, but in self-play systems, the available data improves automatically as the agent gets better.

We’ve created a bot which beats the world’s top professionals at 1v1 matches of Dota 2 under standard tournament rules. The bot learned the game from scratch by self-play, and does not use imitation learning or tree search. This is a step towards building AI systems which accomplish well-defined goals in messy, complicated situations involving real humans.

RL-Teacher is an open-source implementation of our interface to train AIs via occasional human feedback rather than hand-crafted reward functions. The underlying technique was developed as a step towards safe AI systems, but also applies to reinforcement learning problems with rewards that are hard to specify.