ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers are asking industry for ways to guarantee the performance and accuracy of artificial intelligence (AI) in future aerospace and defense applications, and stop relying on what amounts to be ad-hoc guesswork.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued a broad agency announcement (HR001124S0029) for the Artificial Intelligence Quantified (AIQ) project.
AIQ seeks to find ways of assessing and understanding the capabilities of AI to enable mathematical guarantees on performance. Successful use of military AI requires ensuring safe and responsible operation of autonomous and semi-autonomous technologies.
Still, methods for guaranteeing the capabilities and limitations of AI do not exist today. That's where the AIQ program comes in. AIQ will develop technology to assess and understand the capabilities of AI to enable guaranteed performance and accuracy, which up to now has not been possible.
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The program will test the hypothesis that mathematical methods, combined with advances in measurement and modeling will enable guaranteed quantification of AI capabilities.
The program will address three interrelated capability levels: specific problem level; classes of problem level; and natural class level. The state-of-the-art methods for assessment are ad hoc, deal with the simplest of capabilities, and are not properly grounded in a rigorous theory.
AIQ brings together two technical areas: providing rigorous foundations for understanding and guaranteeing capabilities; and finding ways to evaluate AI models.
This program to guarantee the performance of AI has two 18-month phases -- one that focuses on specific problems; and the other that focuses on compositions of classes and architectures.
Proposers must submit two-page abstracts no later than 25 June 2024, and full proposals by 13 Aug. 2024 through the DARPA Broad Agency Announcement Tool (BAAT), which is online at https://baa.darpa.mil/Public/SecurityAgreement.
Email questions or concerns to DARPA at [email protected]. More information is online at https://sam.gov/opp/78b028e5fc8b4953acb74fabf712652d/view.
