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Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
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- 2026
Muse Spark Safety & Preparedness Report
arXiv
Meta's safety and preparedness report for Muse Spark, the model behind Meta AI, sets out the catastrophic-risk evaluations behind its launch and argues that, with mitigations applied, residual risk is acceptable.
- 2024
SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos
arXiv
SAM 2 is a Meta FAIR foundation model that segments objects in images and videos from simple prompts such as points, boxes or masks, released together with a large video segmentation dataset and training code.
- 2023
Segment Anything
arXiv 2304.02643
A 2023 paper that introduces the Segment Anything project: a promptable segmentation task, a model, and a dataset of over 1 billion masks on 11 million images, all released to advance foundation models for computer vision.
- 2022
Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback
arXiv
Constitutional AI, a 2022 paper from Anthropic, proposes training a harmless AI assistant with AI-generated feedback guided by a written set of principles, instead of human labels of harmful outputs.
- 2022
Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM)
arXiv
A 2022 paper by Percy Liang, Rishi Bommasani, Tony Lee and many co-authors that ran 30 language models through the same 42 scenarios and seven metrics, turning scattered benchmarks into one standardized evaluation.
- 2022
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (InstructGPT)
NeurIPS
InstructGPT used human-written demonstrations, human rankings of outputs and reinforcement learning to make GPT-3 follow user instructions better. Labelers preferred its outputs even though it was far smaller than GPT-3.
- 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
Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision (CLIP)
ICML
CLIP is an OpenAI model trained on 400 million image-text pairs to map pictures and sentences into one shared space, so it can classify images zero-shot from a written description.
- 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
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
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.
- 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
Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection
arXiv
A 2017 paper by Lin, Goyal, Girshick, He and Dollar that argues dense one-stage detectors are held back by extreme foreground-background imbalance and proposes focal loss, a reshaped cross-entropy that down-weights well-classified examples.
- 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.
- 2017
Mask R-CNN
arXiv
Mask R-CNN is a 2017 framework for object instance segmentation. It detects objects and produces a high-quality mask for each instance by adding a parallel mask branch to Faster R-CNN.
- 2015
Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
CVPR
The 2015 paper introduced residual networks, which add each layer's input back to its output through a shortcut connection. This made networks of over a hundred layers trainable and won first place in several ILSVRC and COCO tasks in 2015.