Merging Symbolic and Data-Driven AI for Robot Autonomy

“You could think of it as the space of possible questions that people can ask.” For a given state of the game board, the symbolic AI has to search this enormous space of possible questions to find a good question, which makes it extremely slow. Once trained, the deep nets far outperform the purely symbolic AI at generating questions. This video shows a more sophisticated challenge, called CLEVRER, in which artificial intelligences had to answer questions about video sequences showing objects in motion. The video previews the sorts of questions that could be asked, and later parts of the video show how one AI converted the questions into machine-understandable form. If you ask it questions for which the knowledge is either missing or erroneous, it fails.

• The work in AI started by projects like the General Problem Solver and other rule-based reasoning systems like Logic Theorist became the foundation for almost 40 years of research.
• The technology actually dates back to the 1950s, says expert.ai’s Luca Scagliarini, but was considered old-fashioned by the 1990s when demand for procedural knowledge of sensory and motor processes was all the rage.
• “It’s one of the most exciting areas in today’s machine learning,” says Brenden Lake, a computer and cognitive scientist at New York University.
• Semantic networks, conceptual graphs, frames, and logic are all approaches to modeling knowledge such as domain knowledge, problem-solving knowledge, and the semantic meaning of language.

It is also usually the case that the data needed to train a machine learning model either doesn’t exist or is insufficient. In those cases, rules derived from domain knowledge can help generate training data. symbolic ai The deep learning hope—seemingly grounded not so much in science, but in a sort of historical grudge—is that intelligent behavior will emerge purely from the confluence of massive data and deep learning.

Further Reading on Symbolic AI

The greatest promise here is analogous to experimental particle physics, where large particle accelerators are built to crash atoms together and monitor their behaviors. In natural language processing, researchers have built large models with massive amounts of data using deep neural networks that cost millions of dollars to train. The next step lies in studying the networks to see how this can improve the construction of symbolic representations required for higher order language tasks. We introduce SymbolicAI, a versatile and modular framework employing a logic-based approach to concept learning and flow management in generative processes. We leverage probabilistic programming principles to tackle complex tasks, and utilize differentiable and classical programming paradigms with their respective strengths.

The challenge for any AI is to analyze these images and answer questions that require reasoning. Some questions are simple (“Are there fewer cubes than red things?”), but others are much more complicated (“There is a large brown block in front of the tiny rubber cylinder that is behind the cyan block; are there any big cyan metallic cubes that are to the left of it?”). A second flaw in symbolic reasoning is that the computer itself doesn’t know what the symbols mean; i.e. they are not necessarily linked to any other representations of the world in a non-symbolic way. Again, this stands in contrast to neural nets, which can link symbols to vectorized representations of the data, which are in turn just translations of raw sensory data.

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A separate inference engine processes rules and adds, deletes, or modifies a knowledge store. Expert systems can operate in either a forward chaining – from evidence to conclusions – or backward chaining – from goals to needed data and prerequisites – manner. More advanced knowledge-based systems, such as Soar can also perform meta-level reasoning, that is reasoning about their own reasoning in terms of deciding how to solve problems and monitoring the success of problem-solving strategies.

Basic computations of the network include predicting high-level objects and their properties from low-level objects and binding/aggregating relevant objects together. These computations operate at a more fundamental level than convolutions, capturing convolution as a special case while being significantly more general than it. All operations are executed in an input-driven fashion, thus sparsity and dynamic computation per sample are naturally supported, complementing recent popular ideas of dynamic networks and may enable new types of hardware accelerations.

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The conjecture behind the DSN model is that any type of real world objects sharing enough common features are mapped into human brains as a symbol. Those symbols are connected by links, representing the composition, correlation, causality, or other relationships between them, forming a deep, hierarchical symbolic network structure. Powered by such a structure, the DSN model is expected to learn like humans, because of its unique characteristics. Second, it can learn symbols from the world and construct the deep symbolic networks automatically, by utilizing the fact that real world objects have been naturally separated by singularities. Third, it is symbolic, with the capacity of performing causal deduction and generalization.

The program improved as it played more and more games and ultimately defeated its own creator. In 1959, it defeated the best player, This created a fear of AI dominating AI. This lead towards the connectionist paradigm of AI, also called non-symbolic AI which gave rise to learning and neural network-based approaches to solve AI.

This is easy to think of as a boolean circuit (neural network) sitting on top of a propositional interpretation (feature vector). However, the relational program input interpretations can no longer be thought of as independent values over a fixed (finite) number of propositions, but an unbound set of related facts that are true in the given world (a “least Herbrand model”). Consequently, also the structure of the logical inference on top of this representation can no longer be represented by a fixed boolean circuit. And while these concepts are commonly instantiated by the computation of hidden neurons/layers in deep learning, such hierarchical abstractions are generally very common to human thinking and logical reasoning, too. With this paradigm shift, many variants of the neural networks from the ’80s and ’90s have been rediscovered or newly introduced.

Question-answering is the first major use case for the LNN technology we’ve developed. While achieving state-of-the-art performance on the two KBQA datasets is an advance over other AI approaches, these datasets do not display the full range of complexities that our neuro-symbolic approach can address. In particular, the level of reasoning required by these questions is relatively simple. Although deep learning has historical roots going back decades, neither the term “deep learning” nor the approach was popular just over five years ago, when the field was reignited by papers such as Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton’s now classic (2012) deep network model of Imagenet. In the paper, we show that a deep convolutional neural network used for image classification can learn from its own mistakes to operate with the high-dimensional computing paradigm, using vector-symbolic architectures.

So the main challenge, when we think about GOFAI and neural nets, is how to ground symbols, or relate them to other forms of meaning that would allow computers to map the changing raw sensations of the world to symbols and then reason about them. This directed mapping helps the system to use high-dimensional algebraic operations for richer object manipulations, such as variable binding — an open problem in neural networks. When these “structured” mappings are stored in the AI’s memory (referred to as explicit memory), they help the system learn—and learn not only fast but also all the time. The ability to rapidly learn new objects from a few training examples of never-before-seen data is known as few-shot learning. We see Neuro-symbolic AI as a pathway to achieve artificial general intelligence. By augmenting and combining the strengths of statistical AI, like machine learning, with the capabilities of human-like symbolic knowledge and reasoning, we’re aiming to create a revolution in AI, rather than an evolution.

• Unfortunately, those algorithms are sometimes biased — disproportionately impacting people of color as well as individuals in lower income classes when they apply for loans or jobs, or even when courts decide what bail should be set while a person awaits trial.
• In essence, the concept evolved into a very generic methodology of using gradient descent to optimize parameters of almost arbitrary nested functions, for which many like to rebrand the field yet again as differentiable programming.
• LISP provided the first read-eval-print loop to support rapid program development.
• This page includes some recent, notable research that attempts to combine deep learning with symbolic learning to answer those questions.

The researchers broke the problem into smaller chunks familiar from symbolic AI. In essence, they had to first look at an image and characterize the 3-D shapes and their properties, and generate a knowledge base. Then they had to turn an English-language question into a symbolic program that could operate on the knowledge base and produce an answer. A hybrid approach, known as neurosymbolic AI, combines features of the two main AI strategies.

As its name suggests, the old-fashioned parent, symbolic AI, deals in symbols — that is, names that represent something in the world. For example, a symbolic AI built to emulate the ducklings would have symbols such as “sphere,” “cylinder” and “cube” to represent the physical objects, and symbols such as “red,” “blue” and “green” for colors and “small” and “large” for size. The knowledge base would also have a general rule that says that two objects are similar if they are of the same size or color or shape. In addition, the AI needs to know about propositions, which are statements that assert something is true or false, to tell the AI that, in some limited world, there’s a big, red cylinder, a big, blue cube and a small, red sphere.