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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
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- 2021
Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code (Codex / HumanEval)
arXiv
A 2021 paper from OpenAI introduces Codex, a GPT model fine-tuned on public GitHub code, and HumanEval, an evaluation set that judges generated Python programs by whether they work rather than by how closely they match a reference.
- 2021
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
FAccT '21
A 2021 FAccT paper by Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and Shmitchell that asks whether language models can be too large and sets out recommendations on costs, data, research goals and alternative directions.
- 2021
Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation (DALL·E)
arXiv
A 2021 OpenAI paper describing a single 12-billion-parameter autoregressive transformer trained on 250 million image-text pairs, which generates images from text and, evaluated zero-shot, is competitive with domain-specific models.
- 2020
The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling
arXiv
The Pile is an 825 GiB English text dataset of 22 combined sources, released by EleutherAI on 31 December 2020 with an arXiv paper. It became the training data for several of the group's open models.
- 2020
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
NeurIPS
A 2020 paper by Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain and Pieter Abbeel that trained a U-Net to reverse a gradual noising process, making diffusion models a practical rival to GANs and paving the way for DALL-E 2, Imagen and Stable Diffusion.
- 2020
NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis
arXiv
A 2020 paper by Mildenhall, Srinivasan, Tancik, Barron, Ramamoorthi and Ng that represents a scene as a neural radiance field: a network mapping 5D coordinates to density and colour, optimized from a sparse set of images with known camera poses.
- 2019
C4: Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (T5 paper)
JMLR
A 2019 paper that casts every language task as text-to-text, systematically compares transfer-learning choices, releases the C4 corpus and models, and reports state-of-the-art results on summarization, question answering, and classification.
- 2019
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer (T5)
JMLR
A 2019 Google paper that frames every language task as text in, text out, using one encoder-decoder Transformer and one training setup. It also introduced the C4 dataset, and the released T5 models became common research starting points.
- 2019
SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems
arXiv
SuperGLUE is a benchmark for general-purpose language understanding, released in 2019 as a harder successor to GLUE. It bundles eight tasks, a single-number metric, an analysis toolkit and a public leaderboard.
- 2019
Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners (GPT-2)
OpenAI
OpenAI's 2019 paper on GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter Transformer trained on web text. It showed that a model trained only to predict the next word could perform several tasks when prompted, and its staged release sparked public debate.
- 2018
A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks
arXiv
This 2018 paper introduces a style-based GAN generator that separates high-level attributes from stochastic variation and allows scale-specific control, improving distribution quality, interpolation, and disentanglement.
- 2018
Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Andrew Brock, Jeff Donahue and Karen Simonyan that trained generative adversarial networks at the largest scale attempted at the time, introduced BigGANs and set a new state of the art in class-conditional image synthesis.
- 2018
Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Diederik P. Kingma and Prafulla Dhariwal presenting Glow, a flow-based generative model built on invertible 1x1 convolutions, which improved log-likelihood on standard benchmarks and could synthesise and manipulate large images.
- 2018
GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding
arXiv
GLUE is a benchmark and analysis platform that evaluates natural language understanding models across a diverse set of existing tasks, with an online comparison platform and a hand-crafted diagnostic suite for linguistic analysis.
- 2017
Neural Discrete Representation Learning
arXiv
A 2017 paper by van den Oord, Vinyals and Kavukcuoglu proposing VQ-VAE, a generative model whose latent code is discrete rather than continuous, and whose prior is learned rather than fixed, so that useful representations can be learned without supervision.
- 2017
Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation
arXiv
A 2017 paper by Karras, Aila, Laine and Lehtinen that trains generative adversarial networks by growing the generator and discriminator from low to high resolution, improving stability, quality and variation.
- 2017
Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
NeurIPS
A 2017 paper showing that an AI agent can learn a task from short human comparisons instead of a hand-written reward. The method, reinforcement learning from human feedback, later became central to training chat assistants.
- 2017
Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks
arXiv
CycleGAN learns image-to-image translation between two domains without aligned pairs, combining an adversarial loss with a cycle-consistency constraint to constrain the mapping.
- 2016
WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio
arXiv
WaveNet is a deep neural network that generates raw audio waveforms one sample at a time, predicting each sample from all the ones before it. Used for text-to-speech, it was rated by listeners as more natural than the systems it was compared with.
- 2016
SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text
arXiv
SQuAD is a reading-comprehension dataset of more than 100,000 crowdworker questions on Wikipedia articles, each answered by a span of its passage. Released in 2016, it gave machine comprehension a large, freely available benchmark with a measured human ceiling.