Learning vs Prior - shivamvats/notes GitHub Wiki

(Based on Matt Masons' talk at Georgia Tech)

A common (nurture) argument in favor of learning approaches for manipulation is to point towards human who learn or pick up a lot of amazing skills in their lives. Hence, the argument goes we should also find learning-based approaches to accomplish hard tasks.

The counter (nature) argument is that even a baby is born with an extremely powerful set of physical and mental structure (prior) which makes it possible for him to learn the skill that he does.

One can think of this as the learning being just a local optimization done using the strong prior that the human has. Eliminate this prior and even simple tasks become impossible.