🤖 Artificial Intelligence Interview Questions and Answers (2025)
Basic Level Questions
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?▶
Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence in machines programmed to think, learn, and make decisions.
What are the main types of AI?▶
Narrow AI, which is designed for specific tasks, and General AI, which can perform any intellectual task a human can.
What is Machine Learning?▶
Machine Learning is a subset of AI focused on building systems that learn from data to improve performance on tasks.
What is supervised learning?▶
Supervised learning trains models on labeled data to make predictions or classifications.
What is unsupervised learning?▶
Unsupervised learning identifies patterns or groupings in unlabeled data.
What is a neural network?▶
A neural network is a computational model inspired by human brain structure, used to recognize patterns and solve AI problems.
What is deep learning?▶
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning involving neural networks with many layers that learn hierarchical representations.
What is overfitting?▶
Overfitting occurs when a model learns noise and details from training data too well, reducing performance on new data.
What is reinforcement learning?▶
Reinforcement learning trains models to make sequences of decisions by rewarding desired actions and penalizing undesired ones.
What are AI applications?▶
Applications include speech recognition, autonomous vehicles, image recognition, chatbots, recommendation systems, and robotics.
Intermediate Level Questions
What is the difference between AI, machine learning, and deep learning?▶
AI is a broad concept of machines simulating intelligence; machine learning is a subset involving learning from data; deep learning is a subset of ML using deep neural networks.
Explain supervised learning algorithms.▶
Common algorithms include linear regression, logistic regression, decision trees, support vector machines, and neural networks.
What are decision trees?▶
Decision trees split data based on feature conditions to make predictions; interpretable and used for classification and regression.
What is the bias-variance tradeoff?▶
Bias is error from assumptions in the model, variance is error from sensitivity to training data; balancing both is key to good generalization.
What is ensemble learning?▶
Combining multiple models to improve predictive performance, e.g., Random Forest, Gradient Boosting.
Explain gradient descent.▶
An optimization algorithm that iteratively adjusts model parameters to minimize the loss function.
What are activation functions? Name examples.▶
Activation functions introduce non-linearity; common examples are ReLU, Sigmoid, and Tanh.
What are hyperparameters?▶
Settings like learning rate, number of layers, and batch size set before training a model that affect performance.
What is regularization?▶
Techniques to reduce overfitting by penalizing complex models, such as L1, L2 regularization, and dropout.
What is early stopping?▶
A technique to stop training when validation error increases, preventing overfitting.
Explain convolutional neural networks (CNNs).▶
CNNs are deep learning models effective for image and spatial data analysis, using convolutional layers to extract features.
Explain recurrent neural networks (RNNs).▶
RNNs are designed for sequential data and use internal states to capture temporal dependencies.
What are long short-term memory networks (LSTMs)?▶
LSTMs are RNN variants addressing vanishing gradient problems for longer sequence learning.
What is transfer learning?▶
Using a pre-trained model on a large dataset as the starting point for a related task to improve learning efficiency.
What is data preprocessing?▶
Techniques applied to raw data to clean, normalize, and prepare it for modeling.
What is the role of loss functions?▶
Loss functions quantify the difference between predicted and actual outputs to guide model optimization.
What are optimizers? Examples?▶
Algorithms like SGD, Adam, and RMSprop adjust model parameters to minimize loss during training.
What is the vanishing gradient problem?▶
When gradients diminish in deep networks during backpropagation, hindering weight updates.
How to handle class imbalance?▶
Techniques include resampling, synthetic data generation, and cost-sensitive learning.
Explain batch normalization.▶
Method to normalize layer inputs during training to stabilize and accelerate learning.
Advanced Level Questions
What is the architecture of a Transformer model?▶
A Transformer uses self-attention mechanisms and feed-forward layers to process sequences in parallel, improving efficiency over RNNs.
Explain self-attention.▶
Self-attention computes a weighted representation of all elements in the sequence to capture dependencies irrespective of distance.
What is BERT and its significance?▶
BERT is a bidirectional Transformer model pretrained via masked language modeling that achieves state-of-the-art NLP performance.
What is GPT?▶
The Generative Pre-trained Transformer is a unidirectional Transformer model optimized for text generation tasks.
How does transfer learning work in AI?▶
Models pretrained on large datasets are fine-tuned on smaller, task-specific datasets to improve performance and reduce training time.
What is reinforcement learning?▶
A learning paradigm where agents learn to make decisions by interacting with the environment and receiving rewards.
Explain Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).▶
GANs consist of generator and discriminator models competing to produce realistic fake data indistinguishable from real data.
What are attention and positional encoding in Transformers?▶
Attention relates inputs regardless of position; positional encoding injects order information to compensate for attention’s position-agnostic nature.
What is model interpretability?▶
Techniques to understand and explain how AI models make decisions, important for trust and compliance.
What challenges face deep learning at scale?▶
Challenges include computational cost, data requirements, model tuning, and deployment complexities.
What strategies exist to mitigate overfitting in deep models?▶
Using regularization, dropout, data augmentation, early stopping, and transfer learning.
How to deploy AI models in production?▶
Using containerization, APIs, model monitoring, versioning, and continuous retraining pipelines.
What is continual learning?▶
Capability of models to learn from new data without forgetting previously learned knowledge.
Explain explainable AI (XAI).▶
Approaches that provide human-understandable explanations for AI decisions to enhance transparency and trust.
What is the transformer attention mask?▶
Masks prevent the model from attending to padding tokens or future tokens during training.
What is zero-shot learning?▶
Ability of models to perform tasks without explicit training examples through generalization.
How does attention contribute to model scalability?▶
Attention mechanisms enable parallel processing and efficient handling of long-range dependencies.
Explain the training and fine-tuning process in large language models.▶
Large LMs are pretrained on vast text corpora and fine-tuned on specific tasks or datasets for specialization.
What are adversarial examples?▶
Inputs crafted with subtle perturbations that cause AI models to make incorrect predictions.
What are ethical concerns in AI?▶
Includes biases in data, privacy violations, autonomy, accountability, and the impact on employment.