This Robot Learned to Write Japanese—Then Started Copying Languages It Had Never Seen
Robot writes in languages it has never seen before
Researchers at Brown University trained a robot to hand-write Japanese characters, and it surprised them by generalizing to other scripts—Hindi, Greek, English, even cursive—just by looking at examples. The system splits writing into local and global models, learning stroke order and pen movement. It could also replicate children's messy handwriting and a rough sketch of the Mona Lisa, though it struggled with right-to-left languages. A step toward human-robot communication through handwriting.
Just to watch it reproduce the somewhat wobbly writing of these little 6-year-olds, it was just incredible, having never seen that before and never trained on that.
- nujan_dev
A little misleading. The title makes it seem like the robot learnt to write these unknown langauges but it looks like it was shown an image and was able to reproduce what was on the image, even though some of the writing was not in its training domain. Pre-LLMs so still pretty neat, just less impressive than the title suggests.
- pingou
It doesn't seem to me like they trained it to write Japanese characters, but more broadly to reproduce a drawing or pencil strokes, so I don't think it is extremely surprising.
"Their learning system is split into two distinct models. A “local” model is in charge of what’s going on with the current stroke of the pen—so aiming in the right direction and determining how to end the stroke. And a “global” model is in charge of moving the robot’s writing utensil to the next stroke of the character."
- HarHarVeryFunny
Robot taught to draw glyphs can draw glyphs