Many machine learning problems go beyond supervised learning on independent data points and require an understanding of the underlying causal mechanisms, the interactions between the learning algorithms and their environment, and adaptation to temporal changes. The course highlights some of these challenges and relates them to state-of-the-art research.

Deep neural networks have achieved impressive success on prediction tasks in a supervised learning setting, provided sufficient labelled data is available. However, current AI systems lack a versatile understanding of the world around us, as shown in a limited ability to transfer and generalize between tasks.