Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS)

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In game theory, generalists sometimes win out over specialists

Whether you’re playing poker against a single opponent or find yourself in a bidding war over a home purchase with another prospective buyer, you are operating under conditions of imperfect information. You know what cards you’re holding in the poker game, and you also know how much above the home’s asking price you can afford, […]

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Could AI tell you where you left your keys?

An auto factory worker can remember the storage bin where she left a partly assembled component the night before, and quickly return to that spot to pick it up. But robots that may work side-by-side with her would struggle to develop and access this same type of “spatiotemporal” memory.Now, MIT researchers have developed a long-term

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When it comes to predicting people’s preferences, it pays to consider “the power of three”

In his 1927 paper, “A law of comparative judgment,” the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value to them, even though they cannot assign a particular number to that choice. Thurstone was a pioneer of “psychometrics” — a

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Games people — and machines — play: Untangling strategic reasoning to advance AI

Gabriele Farina grew up in a small town in a hilly winemaking region of northern Italy. Neither of his parents had college degrees, and although both were convinced they “didn’t understand math,” Farina says, they bought him the technical books he wanted and didn’t discourage him from attending the science-oriented, rather than the classical, high

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Solving the “Whac-a-mole dilemma”: A smarter way to debias AI vision models

In today’s hospitals and clinics, a dermatologist may use an artificial intelligence model for classifying skin lesions to assess if the lesion is at risk of developing into a cancer or if it is benign. But if the model is biased toward certain skin tones, it could fail to identify a high-risk patient.Perhaps one of

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Evaluating the ethics of autonomous systems

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to help optimize decision-making in high-stakes settings. For instance, an autonomous system can identify a power distribution strategy that minimizes costs while keeping voltages stable.But while these AI-driven outputs may be technically optimal, are they fair? What if a low-cost power distribution strategy leaves disadvantaged neighborhoods more vulnerable to

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AI system learns to keep warehouse robot traffic running smoothly

Inside a giant autonomous warehouse, hundreds of robots dart down aisles as they collect and distribute items to fulfill a steady stream of customer orders. In this busy environment, even small traffic jams or minor collisions can snowball into massive slowdowns.To avoid such an avalanche of inefficiencies, researchers from MIT and the tech firm Symbotic

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A better method for identifying overconfident large language models

Large language models (LLMs) can generate credible but inaccurate responses, so researchers have developed uncertainty quantification methods to check the reliability of predictions. One popular method involves submitting the same prompt multiple times to see if the model generates the same answer.But this method measures self-confidence, and even the most impressive LLM might be confidently

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MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab seed to signal: Amplifying early-career faculty impact

The early years of faculty members’ careers are a formative and exciting time in which to establish a firm footing that helps determine the trajectory of researchers’ studies. This includes building a research team, which demands innovative ideas and direction, creative collaborators, and reliable resources. For a group of MIT faculty working with and on artificial

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A better method for planning complex visual tasks

MIT researchers have developed a generative artificial intelligence-driven approach for planning long-term visual tasks, like robot navigation, that is about twice as effective as some existing techniques.Their method uses a specialized vision-language model to perceive the scenario in an image and simulate actions needed to reach a goal. Then a second model translates those simulations

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