Building Better Reinforcement Learning With World Models & Self-Attention Methods

Internal mental models, as well as consciousness and the concept of mind modeling, are major themes in neuroscience and psychology. However, we do not understand them well enough to create conscious artificial intelligence. In this talk, David Ha, Research Scientist at Google Brain, explores building "world models" for artificial agents. Such world models construct an abstract representation of the agent's environment that allows it to navigate it. David discusses artificial agents' use of world models and self-attention as a kind of limitation, connecting it in with computational evolution and artificial life ideas and methods. The goal of the presentation is to motivate scientists to create conscious machines by encouraging them to build artificial life that includes an internal mental model.