Lately, I have been reading some of the papers from Vicarious Inc. Some of you may have read about the (over-hyped) Recursive Cortical Network (RCN) or Schema Network. Some of you found it very infuriating, while others were skeptical about the company.

I will be honest, the papers they present were good and bad in their own ways. The RCN paper does prove that generative modelling is superior to traditional CNNs. Then again, they did not test it on a major dataset like Imagenet (the compilers of the Omniglot dataset performed their own experiments using the RCN recently). The Schema Network sounded revolutionary when it performed “zero-shot knowledge transfer” using a model based algorithm. They never benchmarked meta-reinforcement learning algorithms. On top of that, they did not use the RCN to parse proper entities when playing breakout (it was mentioned that they assumed an object based vision system, referring to their generative vision model). I find their breakthroughs interesting, but I also feel that they are way too hyped by the media when other attention deserving work remain lost on arxiv. What do you guys think?