Ashley Edwards

Ashley Edwards, who was working at DeepMind when she co-authored the Genie paper and is now at Runway, covered several key aspects of the Genie AI system and its applications in video generation, robotics, and game creation. MLST is sponsored by Brave: The Brave Search API covers over 20 billion webpages, built from scratch without Big Tech biases or the recent extortionate price hikes on search API access. Perfect for AI model training and retrieval augmentated generation. Try it now - get 2,000 free queries monthly at http://brave.com/api. Genie's approach to learning interactive environments, balancing compression and fidelity. The use of latent action models and VQE models for video processing and tokenization. Challenges in maintaining action consistency across frames and integrating text-to-image models. Evaluation metrics for AI-generated content, such as FID and PS&R diff metrics. The discussion also explored broader implications and applications: The potential impact of AI video generation on content creation jobs. Applications of Genie in game generation and robotics. The use of foundation models in robotics and the differences between internet video data and specialized robotics data. Challenges in mapping AI-generated actions to real-world robotic actions. Ashley Edwards: https://ashedwards.github.io/ TOC (*) are best bits 00:00:00 1. Intro to Genie & Brave Search API: Trade-offs & limitations * 00:02:26 2. Genie's Architecture: Latent action, VQE, video processing * 00:05:06 3. Genie's Constraints: Frame consistency & image model integration 00:07:26 4. Evaluation: FID, PS&R diff metrics & latent induction methods 00:09:44 5. AI Video Gen: Content creation impact, depth & parallax effects 00:11:39 6. Model Scaling: Training data impact & computational trade-offs 00:13:50 7. Game & Robotics Apps: Gamification & action mapping challenges * 00:16:16 8. Robotics Foundation Models: Action space & data considerations * 00:19:18 9. Mask-GPT & Video Frames: Real-time optimization, RL from videos 00:20:34 10. Research Challenges: AI value, efficiency vs. quality, safety 00:24:20 11. Future Dev: Efficiency improvements & fine-tuning strategies Refs: 1. Genie (learning interactive environments from videos) / Ashley and DM collegues [00:01] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15391 2. VQ-VAE (Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder) / Aaron van den Oord, Oriol Vinyals, Koray Kavukcuoglu [02:43] https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00937 3. FID (Fréchet Inception Distance) metric / Martin Heusel et al. [07:37] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08500 4. PS&R (Precision and Recall) metric / Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi et al. [08:02] https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00035 5. Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture / Alexey Dosovitskiy et al. [12:14] https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929 6. Genie (robotics foundation models) / Google DeepMind [17:34] https://deepmind.google/research/publications/60474/ 7. Chelsea Finn's lab work on robotics datasets / Chelsea Finn [17:38] https://ai.stanford.edu/~cbfinn/ 8. Imitation from observation in reinforcement learning / YuXuan Liu [20:58] https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03374 9. Waymo's autonomous driving technology / Waymo [22:38] https://waymo.com/ 10. Gen3 model release by Runway / Runway [23:48] https://runwayml.com/ 11. Classifier-free guidance technique / Jonathan Ho and Tim Salimans [24:43] https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12598

Ashley Edwards

Research Scientist

Runway

Today, we're joined by Ashley Edwards, a member of technical staff at Runway, to discuss Genie: Generative Interactive Environments, a system for creating ‘playable’ video environments for training deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents at scale in a completely unsupervised manner. We explore the motivations behind Genie, the challenges of data acquisition for RL, and Genie’s capability to learn world models from videos without explicit action data, enabling seamless interaction and frame prediction. Ashley walks us through Genie’s core components—the latent action model, video tokenizer, and dynamics model—and explains how these elements collaborate to predict future frames in video sequences. We discuss the model architecture, training strategies, benchmarks used, as well as the application of spatiotemporal transformers and the MaskGIT techniques used for efficient token prediction and representation. Finally, we touched on Genie’s practical implications, its comparison to other video generation models like “Sora,” and potential future directions in video generation and diffusion models. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/696.

Ashley Edwards

Research Scientist

Runway