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