Artificial Intelligence Interview Questions and Answers



If you are preparing for an artificial intelligence (AI) interview, this guide provides the top 50+ artificial intelligence interview questions and answers along with the detailed explanation covering from basics to advanced AI concepts.

These AI interview questions and answers are helpful for both freshers as well as experienced professionals. We have divided these questions into the following categories:

AI Interview Questions and Answers

Basic AI Concepts Interview Questions and Answers

1. Define Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence or AI is a branch of computer science; its main aim to build advance machines to automate tasks and perform like a human. It includes intelligence, like reasoning, learning, and problem-solving.

2. Differentiate between AI, Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning.

AI is a super set which includes Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning as its subset; ML is a subset of AI which encompasses algorithms that learn from data; Deep Learning is a subset of ML that uses deep neural networks with multiple layers to solve problems.

3. What are the types of AI?

Some common types of AI are as follows -

  1. Narrow AI: It is also known as weak AI; it is specialized one to perform a single task. For example voice assistants, language translation or image recognition.
  2. General AI: It is also known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It understands, learn, and apply intelligence like a human. For example medical AGI Assistant.
  • Superintelligent AI: It surpasses human intelligence. It is most widely applicable in scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills.

4. What is supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning?

There are three forms of machine learning: supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning; these are uses different approaches to solve problems.

  1. Supervised Learning: Learns from labeled data.
  2. Unsupervised Learning: Finds patterns in unlabeled data.
  3. Reinforcement Learning: Learns through rewards and penalties.

5. What is a neural network?

A neural network is a deep learning model which mimic like a human brain and nervous system. It mainly consist nodes, or artificial neurons and three layers - an input layer, one or more hidden layers, and one output layer.

6. What is overfitting? How can you avoid it?

When a model performs well on training data but not well on test data or new data; this occurrence is known as Overfitting. Regularization, cross-validation, and pruning are some possible solutions to avoid Overfitting.

7. What is a perceptron?

A perceptron is a single-layer neural network unit, fundamental in binary classification problems.

8. What is the Turing Test?

The Turing Test measures the capacity of a machine to demonstrate intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from a human.

9. Define deep learning.

Deep Learning is a branch of machine learning that employs multi-layered neural networks to represent complex patterns in large datasets.

10. What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

NLP is a branch of AI which enables machines to understand, interpret, and manipulate human language.

Intermediate Artificial Intelligence Interview Questions and Answers

11. What is activation function in neural network?

An activation functiondetermines that which neurons are triggered when information flows over the network's layers. It is an essential component of neural networks, allowing them to learn complex patterns in data. Some of the most popular and commonly used activation functions in neural networks are ReLU, Leaky ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh, and Softmax.

12. What is the difference between classification and regression?

Classification predicts discrete labels or categorical output like a label or class; regression predicts continuous values like a real-valued number such as price, salary, age.

13. What is backpropagation?

Backpropagation is a method of minimizing error in neural networks that adjusts weights based on the gradient of the loss function.

14. What is a convolutional neural network (CNN)?

A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a type of artificial neural network that is specifically built to analyse structured grid data, such as images, and is commonly used in computer vision tasks. CNNs are modeled for image identification, classification, object detection, and even some natural language processing applications.

15. What is a recurrent neural network (RNN)?

A Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is a type of artificial neural network that processes sequential data by retaining memory that allows it to take in previous inputs while producing outputs. RNNs are suited for sequence data, allowing information to persist across time steps, commonly used in language processing.

16. What is gradient descent?

Gradient descent is an optimization approach that reduces the loss function by iteratively moving in the direction of steepest descent.

17. What is transfer learning?

Transfer learning in deep learning is a machine learning (ML) technique that uses a model that was previously trained to accomplish a new or related task. Transfer learning involves fine-tuning a previously trained model to perform a new task. This technique is useful in deep learning since it allows you to train deep neural networks with less data and training time.

18. What are hyperparameters, and how do they differ from parameters?

Parameters are the internal values of the model learned from the data, whereas hyperparameters are external settings that direct the training process and regulate the structure and efficiency of learning. Both are critical for developing a model that performs well on the job at hand. Overall, Hyperparameters are set before training (e.g., learning rate); parameters are learned during training (e.g., weights).

19. What is a loss function? Give examples.

A loss function measures the difference between predicted and actual values. Examples: Mean Squared Error, Cross-Entropy.

20. Why is data normalization used in neural network?

Data normalization is a pre-processing step in neural networks that converts input data to a consistent range or distribution, typically between 0 and 1 or with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. This stage is critical for increasing the training efficiency, stability, and performance of neural networks.

Advanced Artificial Intelligence Interview Questions and Answers

21. What is reinforcement learning?

Reinforcement learning enables an agent to make decisions by interacting with the environment around it. It is most widely applicable in robotics and other decision-making environments. Reinforcement learning uses a reward system to guide an agent's decisions.

Reinforcement learning is most widely used in robotics, gaming, autonomous driving, healthcare, and finance for dynamic decision-making and adapting to changing environments.

22. How does reinforcement learning work?

RL algorithms are dedicatedly designed to work with unlabelled data. It uses a reward and punishment paradigm to process data. In Reinforcement Learning, the agent learns using experience and feedbacks. The agent interacts with the environment and explores it by itself. If performed action is correct then it gets rewards otherwise penalty. The main objective of an agent in reinforcement learning is to improve the performance by getting the maximum positive rewards.

23. What is Q-learning?

Q-learning is a machine learning technique that allows a model to iteratively learn and improve over time by performing the appropriate action. Q-learning is an RL algorithm that helps an agent to learn how to maximize rewards over time.

24. What is attention mechanism in deep learning?

An attention mechanism is a deep learning technique that enables models to focus on important information in input data. Attention mechanisms help models focus on important parts of input, widely used in NLP, such as in Transformers. It's an essential part of modern deep learning and computer vision models.

25. Describe a Transformer model.

The Transformer model is a neural network architecture for processing sequences that employs self-attention methods to assess the relevance of every element in comparison to others, allowing for effective parallelization. It is commonly used in NLP tasks such as translation and text generation because of its ability to capture long-term dependencies. Overall, Transformers use self-attention to process input sequences in parallel, revolutionizing NLP and enabling models like GPT and BERT.

26. What is ensemble learning?

Ensemble learning is a machine learning technique that integrates many models' predictions to improve accuracy, robustness, and generalization. Ensemble learning combines multiple models to improve performance, using techniques like bagging and boosting and improve performance beyond what individual models can achieve.

27. What is the difference between batch gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent?

Batch processes the full dataset in each step, whereas stochastic processes one sample at a time, which can be faster but noisier.

28. What are Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)?

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a form of neural network that made up of two models: a generator and a discriminator that compete to generate realistic data. The generator generates synthetic data, while the discriminator assesses its validity, allowing the generator to produce more realistic outputs, which are frequently employed in image and video synthesis.

29. What is BERT, and why is it important?

BERT is a pre-trained transformer model for NLP tasks, designed to understand context in both directions. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a language model that use deep bidirectional attention to grasp word context in all directions. It is used in NLP tasks, including question answering and sentiment analysis. Hence, it is significantly improving natural language understanding in AI applications.

30. What is the difference between LSTM and GRU?

Both are RNN variants, but GRU is simpler and faster than LSTM, with fewer parameters and no output gate. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) are two forms of recurrent neural networks that capture long-term dependencies in sequential input. LSTMs manage memory flow with three gates (input, forget, and output), whereas GRUs use only two gates (update and reset), making them faster and more efficient but potentially less expressive for complex tasks.

31. What is Bayesian Networks?

Bayesian Networks are probabilistic graphical models that represent the dependencies among random variables. Bayesian networks are a type of Probabilistic Graphical Model that can be used to create models based on data or expert opinion. They have two parts: a structure and parameters. A Bayesian network is a concise, adaptable, and understandable representation of a joint probability distribution. It is also beneficial for knowledge discovery since directed acyclic networks can reflect causal relationships between variables.

32. What are vanishing/exploding gradients?

This issue occurs in deep networks where gradients become very small or very large, affecting learning stability. Vanishing and exploding gradients are problems that arise during the training of deep neural networks, particularly with extended layers. In vanishing gradients, gradients become very small, slowing or ceasing learning; in bursting gradients, gradients become excessively big, creating unstable updates and potentially diverging model parameters.

Practical, Problem-solving & Application-oriented Artificial Intelligence Interview Questions and Answers

33. What are the common approaches to handle missing data?

Handling missing data is a critical step in preparing datasets for machine learning, as it can affect model performance and introduce bias. Some of the common approaches to handle missing data in ML are Removing Data (Dropping), imputation, deletion, or predicting missing values based on patterns, Indicator Variable for Missingness, Data Augmentation.

34. How do you keep your AI models are ethical and unbiased?

To ensure that AI models are ethical and unbiased, rigorous testing across multiple datasets is required, ensure constant monitoring for bias, incorporating ethical issues into the AI development process, and transparency in model decision-making.

35. How do you ensure that the chosen model is best for your data?

To find the optimal model for your data, run different models through cross-validation and compare metrics (such as accuracy, precision, recall, or AUC) relevant to your task. Additionally, check for overfitting and underfitting to ensure the model generalizes effectively to data that was previously unknown.

36. What is PCA, and when is it used?

Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is a dimensionality reduction approach that reduces a dataset to a set of uncorrelated variables known as principle components, which capture the majority of the data's variance. It is frequently used to simplify complex datasets, reduce noise, and enhance computational efficiency in machine learning applications.

37. What are the suitable methods to evaluate the performance of an AI model?

AI model performance can be measured using key metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score for classification, mean squared error (MSE) or mean absolute error (MAE) for regression, and AUC-ROC for binary classification. Cross-validation and confusion matrix analysis are also useful for assessing model dependability and robustness across multiple data splits.

38. Explain cross-validation and why it is important.

Cross-validation splits data into parts to train and test the model multiple times, reducing overfitting and ensuring generalizability.

39. How can you prevent an AI model from underfitting?

To prevent a model from underfitting, make it more complex by adding features, employing a more powerful algorithm, or lowering regularization. Ensuring sufficient training data and fine-tuning hyperparameters might help the model capture patterns more successfully.

40. What is data augmentation?

Data augmentation increases dataset size by creating modified versions of existing data, often used in image processing. Overall, Data augmentation is a technique that uses existing data to generate new and novel samples data to train machine learning (ML) models. It is an important aspect of the training process for deep learning models, which require big and varied datasets to produce accurate predictions.

41. Explain regularization and its types.

Regularization is a collection of techniques for reducing overfitting in machine learning models. Regularization typically trades slightly reduce in training accuracy for a gain in generalizability. Regularization refers different strategies to reduce overfitting in machine learning models.

42. What are the pros and cons of using a pre-trained model?

Pretrained models save time because they are already trained and ready for use. It avoids the need for extensive training, data collection, and cleaning. Pretrained models are trained on a large amount of data; they outperform models trained on smaller datasets.

43. Explain K-means clustering.

K-means clustering is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that divides data points into number of groups (K) depending on their features. It works by iteratively assigning each data point to the nearest cluster centroid and then updating the centroids to reflect the average of all points within each cluster. This process continues until the centroids stabilize, reducing total variance within clusters.

44. What are industrial applications of AI?

AI is frequently used in industries for predictive maintenance, optimizing supply chains, and improving quality control using real-time data analysis. AI-powered robots and automation increase manufacturing efficiency, while AI aids in healthcare diagnostics, drug research, and patient management.

45. How is AI used in healthcare?

AI in healthcare is used for diagnostics, forecasting patient outcomes, and customizing treatment strategies. It improves medical image analysis, drug discovery, and administrative procedures, resulting in more efficient and accurate patient care.

46. What is the role of AI in finance?

AI in finance facilitates data-driven decision-making by analysing large datasets to identify trends, predict risks, and automate operations such as fraud detection, customer support, and tailored investment recommendations. It also improves trading techniques by implementing algorithmic trading and portfolio optimization.

47. Describe an AI application in e-commerce.

Artificial intelligence in e-commerce may personalize shopping experiences by studying user activity to recommend products, forecast customer preferences, and optimize price. It also improves customer service with chatbots that provide rapid assistance and helps with inventory management by estimating demand.

48. How is AI changing the automotive industry?

Artificial intelligence is transforming the automotive industry by expanding autonomous driving capabilities, optimizing manufacturing through predictive maintenance, and improving customer experience with intelligent in-car assistants. It also improves car safety through real-time data processing and adaptive driving technologies.

49. What is the importance of explainable AI (XAI)?

Explainable AI describes an AI model's impact and probable biases. It contributes to model accuracy, fairness, transparency, and outcomes in AI-powered decision making. Explainable AI is critical for a company to establish trust and confidence when bringing AI models into production. AI explainability also enables an organization to take a responsible approach to AI development.

50. How can AI help in climate change?

AI can help combat climate change by minimizing energy consumption, forecasting extreme weather, and enhancing climate modeling accuracy. It can also help monitor deforestation, measure emissions, and improve renewable energy systems, such as optimizing solar panel placements and grid management, to reduce carbon footprints.

51. Explain ethical AI?

Ethical AI is the practice of designing, developing, and deploying artificial intelligence systems with fairness, transparency, accountability, and privacy as top priorities. It entails reducing biases, protecting user data, and ensuring that AI decisions uphold human rights and do not harm persons or society. Ethical AI aims to construct trustworthy, accessible technologies that are consistent with society principles.

52. What is edge AI?

Edge AI is the deployment of artificial intelligence algorithms directly on local devices, or "edge" devices, rather than cloud-based data centers. Edge AI minimizes latency, enhances data privacy, and operates with minimum internet connectivity. It is especially beneficial for applications that demand real-time analysis, such as self-driving cars, smart cameras, and IoT devices.

53. How does AI significant for cyber security?

AI improves cyber security significantly by recognizing and responding to threats in real time, finding patterns of malicious conduct, and analysing large volumes of data to find vulnerabilities. It automates common activities, resulting in faster response times and better protection against complex cyber-attacks like as phishing and ransomware. Furthermore, AI enhances threat intelligence by predicting probable security breaches before they happen.

54. How would you explain AI to a non-technical person?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is similar to a computer program that can learn from data and make predictions. It mimics human thinking and can perform tasks like speech recognition, text comprehension, and product recommendations without requiring explicit instructions for each action.

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