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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
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- 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.
- 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
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
NAACL
Google's 2018 BERT paper introduced an encoder-only Transformer that reads text in both directions and is pre-trained by hiding words. It set new results on eleven language tasks and made download-and-fine-tune the default workflow.
- 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
Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (GPT)
OpenAI
OpenAI's 2018 paper introducing GPT, a Transformer decoder pre-trained to predict the next token and then fine-tuned for specific tasks. It improved the state of the art on 9 of 12 tasks studied and set the recipe the GPT series followed.
- 2017
A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play
Science
A 2017 arXiv paper, later published in Science, reporting that a single self-play reinforcement learning algorithm, AlphaZero, mastered chess, shogi and Go and beat strong specialised programs in each.
- 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
Attention Is All You Need
NeurIPS
A 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer, a neural network built entirely on attention with no recurrence. It set new machine translation results and became the architecture behind almost every large language model since.
- 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
Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation
arXiv
A 2016 paper describing Google's neural machine translation system, GNMT: a deep LSTM encoder-decoder with attention, designed to make end-to-end translation practical by addressing rare words, parallelism and inference cost.
- 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.
- 2014
Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate
ICLR
Submitted to arXiv in September 2014 by Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho and Yoshua Bengio, this paper let a translation model look back at the whole source sentence while producing each word. This mechanism, called attention, later became a basis for Transformer models.
- 2014
Generative Adversarial Nets
arXiv
Goodfellow, Bengio, and co-authors proposed a generative-model framework with adversarially trained generator and discriminator.
- 2013
Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes
arXiv
A 2013 paper by Diederik P. Kingma and Max Welling that introduced a stochastic variational inference and learning algorithm for directed latent-variable models with intractable posteriors, making approximate inference practical on large datasets.
- 2010
Phone recognition with the mean-covariance restricted Boltzmann Machine
NIPS
A 2010 NIPS paper by Dahl, Ranzato, Mohamed and Hinton applies Deep Belief Nets and a mean-covariance RBM to acoustic modeling, reaching 20.5% phone error on speaker-independent TIMIT phone recognition.
- 2006
A fast learning algorithm for deep belief nets
Neural Computation
A 2006 paper by Hinton, Osindero and Teh that uses complementary priors and a greedy layer-by-layer algorithm to train deep belief nets, then fine-tunes them; the resulting three-hidden-layer model both modelled and classified handwritten digits well.
- 2003
Latent Dirichlet Allocation
JMLR
A generative probabilistic model that represents each document as a finite mixture over topics, fitted with variational approximate inference and EM, and evaluated on document modelling, text classification and collaborative filtering.
- 1990
Elephants Don't Play Chess
Rodney Brooks's 1990 paper argued for building artificial intelligence from the ground up, with ongoing physical interaction with the environment as the main constraint on design, rather than through the abstract manipulation of symbols that had dominated the field for roughly thirty years.