artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

(AI), particularly

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

(ML), ablation is the removal of a component of an AI system. An ablation study investigates the performance of an AI system by removing certain components to understand the contribution of the component to the overall system. The term is an analogy with biology (removal of components of an organism), and is particularly used in the analysis of artificial neural nets by analogy with ablative brain surgery. Other analogies include other neuroscience biological systems such as Drosophilla central nervous system and the vertebrate brain. Ablation studies require that a system exhibit

graceful degradation Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...

: the system must continue to function even when certain components are missing or degraded. According to some researchers, ablation studies have been deemed a convenient technique in investigating artificial intelligence and its durability to structural damages. Ablation studies damage and/or remove certain components in a controlled setting to investigate all possible outcomes of system failure; this characterizes how each action impacts the system's overall performance and capabilities. The ablation process can be used to test systems that perform tasks such as speech recognition, visual object recognition, and robot control.

History

The term is credited to

Allen Newell Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Departmen ...

, one of the founders of artificial intelligence, who used it in his 1974 tutorial on

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ma ...

, published in . The term is by analogy with

ablation Ablation ( la, ablatio – removal) is removal or destruction of something from an object by vaporization, chipping, erosive processes or by other means. Examples of ablative materials are described below, and include spacecraft material for a ...

in biology. The motivation was that, while individual components are engineered, the contribution of an individual component to the overall system performance is not clear; removing components allows this analysis. Newell compared the human brain to artificial computers. With this in thought, Newell saw both as knowledge systems whereas procedures such as ablation can be performed on both to test certain hypotheses.

References

* * Artificial neural networks Causality {{compu-ai-stub