François CholletVerified account

Cool, and I appreciate your Neisser reference. Active perception is still not a hot topic in AI today. I used to do some research in that area (active vision with an anticipative eye saccade model) in 2012, and back then these ideas had very little traction. It's trending up tho.

That's actually exciting. The fact that active perception is not a hot topic in AI is amazing to me, as it's almost taken for granted in our field. Is that bc its hard to build it into AI, or does it represent a fertile avenue for collaboration between cognitive & AI researchers?

It has simply not yet shown to be necessary, or even useful. It actually seemed like a more attractive avenue when we knew less and our models performed worse.

ML models don't attempt to emulate human cognition, and they're solving a different problem than embodied cognition in the first place, with different constraints and different degrees of freedom.

If your input is a static image that you're trying to classify, that's a very different setup than being an embodied agent immersed in a dynamic world subject to cause and effect. In the former case, processing all the information available in one go is actually more effective

You can take context into account without active perception. Active perception only becomes really useful in a dynamic world where it's possible to formulate & test hypotheses (requires a time component)

The current deep learning standard for implementing context-awareness is "neural attention" (cf Transformers), perhaps you know about it. It has very little in common with active perception though.