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An "agent" is anything that perceives and takes actions in the world. A rational agent has goals or
preferences and takes actions to make them happen.[d][32] In automated planning, the agent has a
specific goal.[33] In automated decision-making, the agent has preferences—there are some
situations it would prefer to be in, and some situations it is trying to avoid. The decision-making
agent assigns a number to each situation (called the "utility") that measures how much the agent
prefers it. For each possible action, it can calculate the "expected utility": the utility of all possible
outcomes of the action, weighted by the probability that the outcome will occur. It can then choose
the action with the maximum expected utility.[34]

In classical planning, the agent knows exactly what the effect of any action will be.[35] In most real-
world problems, however, the agent may not be certain about the situation they are in (it is
"unknown" or "unobservable") and it may not know for certain what will happen after each
possible action (it is not "deterministic"). It must choose an action by making a probabilistic guess
and then reassess the situation to see if the action worked.[36]

In some problems, the agent's preferences may be uncertain, especially if there are other agents or
humans involved. These can be learned (e.g., with inverse reinforcement learning), or the agent
can seek information to improve its preferences.[37] Information value theory can be used to weigh
the value of exploratory or experimental actions.[38] The space of possible future actions and
situations is typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and evaluate situations
while being uncertain of what the outcome will be.

A Markov decision process has a transition model that describes the probability that a particular
action will change the state in a particular way and a reward function that supplies the utility of
each state and the cost of each action. A policy associates a decision with each possible state. The
policy could be calculated (e.g., by iteration), be heuristic, or it can be learned.[39]

Game theory describes the rational behavior of multiple interacting agents and is used in AI
programs that make decisions that involve other agents.[40]

Learning
Machine learning is the study of programs that can improve their performance on a given task
automatically.[41] It has been a part of AI from the beginning.[e]

There are several kinds of machine learning. Unsupervised learning analyzes a stream of data and
finds patterns and makes predictions without any other guidance.[44] Supervised learning requires
a human to label the input data first, and comes in two main varieties: classification (where the
program must learn to predict what category the input belongs in) and regression (where the
program must deduce a numeric function based on numeric input).[45]

In reinforcement learning, the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones.
The agent learns to choose responses that are classified as "good".[46] Transfer learning is when the
knowledge gained from one problem is applied to a new problem.[47] Deep learning is a type of
machine learning that runs inputs through biologically inspired artificial neural networks for all of
these types of learning.[48]

Computational learning theory can assess learners by computational complexity, by sample

complexity (how much data is required), or by other notions of optimization.[49]

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Natural language processing

Natural language processing (NLP)[50] allows programs to read, write and communicate in human
languages such as English. Specific problems include speech recognition, speech synthesis,
machine translation, information extraction, information retrieval and question answering.[51]

Early work, based on Noam Chomsky's generative grammar and semantic networks, had difficulty
with word-sense disambiguation[f] unless restricted to small domains called "micro-worlds" (due
to the common sense knowledge problem[29]). Margaret Masterman believed that it was meaning
and not grammar that was the key to understanding languages, and that thesauri and not
dictionaries should be the basis of computational language structure.

Modern deep learning techniques for NLP include word embedding (representing words, typically
as vectors encoding their meaning),[52] transformers (a deep learning architecture using an
attention mechanism),[53] and others.[54] In 2019, generative pre-trained transformer (or "GPT")
language models began to generate coherent text,[55][56] and by 2023, these models were able to
get human-level scores on the bar exam, SAT test, GRE test, and many other real-world
applications.[57]

Perception
Machine perception is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones,
wireless signals, active lidar, sonar, radar, and tactile sensors) to deduce aspects of the world.
Computer vision is the ability to analyze visual input.[58]

The field includes speech recognition,[59] image classification,[60] facial recognition, object
recognition,[61]object tracking,[62] and robotic perception.[63]

Social intelligence
Affective computing is an interdisciplinary umbrella that
comprises systems that recognize, interpret, process, or
simulate human feeling, emotion, and mood.[65] For example,
some virtual assistants are programmed to speak
conversationally or even to banter humorously; it makes them
appear more sensitive to the emotional dynamics of human
interaction, or to otherwise facilitate human–computer
interaction. Kismet, a robot head which was
made in the 1990s; it is a machine
However, this tends to give naïve users an unrealistic that can recognize and simulate
conception of the intelligence of existing computer agents.[66] emotions.[64]
Moderate successes related to affective computing include
textual sentiment analysis and, more recently, multimodal
sentiment analysis, wherein AI classifies the affects displayed by a videotaped subject.[67]

General intelligence

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