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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
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- 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
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
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.
- 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
Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
arXiv
A 2017 paper by Schulman, Wolski, Dhariwal, Radford and Klimov that introduced proximal policy optimization (PPO), a reinforcement learning method that is much simpler to implement and tune and became OpenAI's default RL algorithm.
- 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
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.
- 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.
- 2014
Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le's 2014 paper showed that two LSTMs, one reading the input and one writing the output, could translate sentences and outperform a phrase-based statistical baseline. It set the encoder–decoder pattern behind later translation models.
- 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.
- 2013
Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space
arXiv
Submitted to arXiv in January 2013 by Tomas Mikolov and colleagues at Google, this paper introduced CBOW and Skip-gram, two simple architectures that learn word vectors quickly from very large text collections. They are the basis of the word2vec project.
- 2012
Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks
NeurIPS
A 2012 NIPS paper by Jeffrey Dean, Andrew Ng and colleagues that introduced DistBelief, a framework for training deep networks across clusters of thousands of machines, together with the Downpour SGD and Sandblaster optimisation procedures.
- 2003
A Neural Probabilistic Language Model
JMLR
Published in 2003 by Yoshua Bengio and colleagues, this paper proposed learning a vector for every word together with a neural network that predicts the next word. It introduced the core idea behind word embeddings and reached lower test perplexity than n-gram models.
- 1997
Long Short-Term Memory
Neural Computation
Published in 1997 by Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber, the LSTM paper introduced a memory cell with gates and a "constant error carousel" that lets recurrent networks learn across long time gaps. It shaped the recurrent models that came before Transformers.
- 1993
Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank
Computational Linguistics
A 1993 journal article by Mitchell P. Marcus, Beatrice Santorini and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz describing the Penn Treebank: over one million words of Wall Street Journal text annotated with syntactic bracketing, built as a resource for work on English sentence structure.
- 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.
- 1988
ALVINN: An Autonomous Land Vehicle in a Neural Network
ANIPS11
A 3-layer back-propagation network that takes camera and laser range finder images and outputs the direction to steer, trained on simulated road images and tested on Carnegie Mellon's autonomous navigation test vehicle.