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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
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- 2025
ARC-AGI-2: A New Challenge for Frontier AI Reasoning Systems
arXiv
A 2025 paper introducing ARC-AGI-2, a benchmark of input-output puzzle tasks built to measure abstract reasoning in frontier AI systems, with human testing as a baseline and a task set designed to give a more granular signal of progress.
- 2024
Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality
ICML
Tri Dao and Albert Gu's paper introduces state space duality, a framework showing that structured state space models and attention variants are closely related, and uses it to derive Mamba-2, whose core layer runs 2 to 8 times faster than Mamba's.
- 2022
Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting
Science
GraphCast is a graph neural network trained on four decades of reanalysis data that produces 10-day global weather forecasts at 0.25 degree resolution in under a minute, outperforming the leading operational deterministic systems on most verification targets.
- 2022
Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers (DiT)
arXiv
A 2022 paper by William Peebles and Saining Xie that replaces the U-Net backbone of diffusion models with a transformer operating on latent patches, showing that image quality improves predictably as compute grows and reaching a state-of-the-art FID of 2.27 on ImageNet 256×256.
- 2022
Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding (Imagen)
arXiv
Imagen is a text-to-image diffusion model that uses a large pretrained language model to encode prompts; it reached a zero-shot FID of 7.27 on COCO and introduced the DrawBench benchmark.
- 2022
Magnetic control of tokamak plasmas through deep reinforcement learning
Nature
A 2022 Nature paper by Degrave, Felici and colleagues showing that a deep reinforcement learning controller can learn on its own to command all of a tokamak's magnetic control coils, producing and holding a range of plasma shapes.
- 2021
High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
arXiv 2112.10752 (CVPR 2022)
A 2021 paper by Rombach, Blattmann, Lorenz, Esser and Ommer that runs diffusion models inside the latent space of pretrained autoencoders, cutting the compute needed for high-resolution image synthesis while adding cross-attention for text and bounding-box control.
- 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
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale (ViT)
arXiv
A 2020 paper showing that a plain Transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches, with no convolution at all, can match state-of-the-art convolutional networks on image classification.
- 2020
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale
arXiv 2010.11929 (ICLR 2021)
A 2020 paper by Alexey Dosovitskiy and colleagues showing that a pure Transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches — the Vision Transformer, or ViT — matches state-of-the-art convolutional networks on image classification when pre-trained on large amounts of data.
- 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
Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model
Nature
MuZero is a DeepMind reinforcement-learning algorithm that learns a model of its environment and plans inside that model, mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi without being given the rules of those games.
- 2019
On the Measure of Intelligence (ARC-AGI)
arXiv
A 2019 paper by Francois Chollet that defines intelligence as skill-acquisition efficiency and introduces the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a benchmark of grid tasks that assumes no specialised knowledge or language.
- 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.