Exploration-focused training lets robotics AI immediately handle new tasks

Enlarge (credit: boonchai wedmakawand)

Reinforcement-learning algorithms in systems like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini can work wonders, but they usually need hundreds of thousands of shots at a task before they get good at it. That’s why it’s always been hard to transfer this performance to robots. You can’t let a self-driving car crash 3,000 times just so it can learn crashing is bad.

But now a team of researchers at Northwestern University may have found a way around it.