Kindergarten for AI: Basic Skills Boost Complex Learning in RNNs

Summary: AI systems, like humans and animals, learn better when they first master simple tasks. Researchers showed that recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained with a "kindergarten curriculum" approach, starting with easy tasks, perform more efficiently on complex ones. Inspired by experiments with rats, who learned to combine basic sensory cues to retrieve water, scientists applied the same logic to train RNNs on decision-making tasks. Compared to traditional training, this method led to faste...