Building Maps and Spatial Awareness in Blind AI Agents with Dhruv Batra

Today we continue our coverage of ICLR 2023 joined by Dhruv Batra, an associate professor at Georgia Tech and research director of the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR)  team at META. In our conversation, we discuss Dhruv’s work on the paper Emergence of Maps in the Memories of Blind Navigation Agents, which won an Outstanding Paper Award at the event. We explore navigation with multilayer LSTM and the question of whether embodiment is necessary for intelligence. We delve into the Embodiment Hypothesis and the progress being made in language models and caution on the responsible use of these models. We also discuss the history of AI and the importance of using the right data sets in training. The conversation explores the different meanings of "maps" across AI and cognitive science fields, Dhruv’s experience in navigating mapless systems, and the early discovery stages of memory representation and neural mechanisms.