Building machines that can make decisions based on common sense is no easy feat. A machine must be able to do more than merely find patterns in data; it also needs a way of interpreting the intentions and beliefs behind people’s choices.

At the 2021 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Researchers from IBM, MIT, and Harvard University have come together to release a DARPA “Common Sense AI” dataset for benchmarking AI intuition. They are also releasing two machine learning models that represent different approaches to the problem that relies on testing techniques psychologists use to study infants’ behavior to accelerate the development of AI exhibiting common sense.

This research work is the first of its kind to use psychology to create more fluid and better AI systems. It aims to develop machine commonsense that makes sense because it has innate human qualities – such as intuition, common knowledge, or understanding of social cues.