Neuro-symbolic AI emerges as powerful new approach

Specifically, we wanted to combine the learning representations that neural networks create with the compositionality of symbol-like entities, represented by high-dimensional and distributed vectors. The idea is to guide a neural network to represent unrelated objects with dissimilar high-dimensional vectors. But neither the original, symbolic AI that dominated machine learning research until the late 1980s nor its younger cousin, deep learning, have been able to fully simulate the intelligence it’s capable of. 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 contrast to the US, in Europe the key AI programming language during that same period was Prolog. Prolog provided a built-in store of facts and clauses that could be queried by a read-eval-print loop.

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. So, while naysayers may decry the addition of symbolic modules to deep learning as unrepresentative of how our brains work, proponents of neurosymbolic AI see its modularity as a strength when it comes to solving practical problems.

An AI model trained on data that looks real but won’t leak personal information

Originally, researchers favored the discrete, symbolic approaches towards AI, targeting problems ranging from knowledge representation, reasoning, and planning to automated theorem proving. One of their projects involves technology that could be used for self-driving cars. The AI for such cars typically involves a deep neural network that is trained to recognize objects in its environment and take the appropriate action; the deep net is penalized when it does something wrong during training, such as bumping into a pedestrian (in a simulation, of course). “In order to learn not to do bad stuff, it has to do the bad stuff, experience that the stuff was bad, and then figure out, 30 steps before it did the bad thing, how to prevent putting itself in that position,” says MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab team member Nathan Fulton. Consequently, learning to drive safely requires enormous amounts of training data, and the AI cannot be trained out in the real world.

He is worried that the approach may not scale up to handle problems bigger than those being tackled in research projects. “But as we expand and exercise the symbolic part and address more challenging reasoning tasks, things might become more challenging.” For example, among the biggest successes of symbolic AI are systems used in medicine, such as those that diagnose a patient based on their symptoms. However, Cox’s colleagues at IBM, along with researchers at Google’s DeepMind and MIT, came up with a distinctly different solution that shows the power of neurosymbolic AI. A key factor in evolution of AI will be dependent on a common programming framework that allows simple integration of both deep learning and symbolic logic.

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Note the similarity to the use of background knowledge in the Inductive Logic Programming approach to Relational ML here. Knowable Magazine is from Annual Reviews,

a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and

integrating what is symbolic ai knowledge for the progress of science and the

benefit of society. 1) Hinton, Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng have all suggested that work on unsupervised learning (learning from unlabeled data) will lead to our next breakthroughs.

It achieves a form of “symbolic disentanglement”, offering one solution to the important problem of disentangled representations and invariance. 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.

Getting AI to reason: using neuro-symbolic AI for knowledge-based question answering

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. 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. One of the main stumbling blocks of symbolic AI, or GOFAI, was the difficulty of revising beliefs once they were encoded in a rules engine. Expert systems are monotonic; that is, the more rules you add, the more knowledge is encoded in the system, but additional rules can’t undo old knowledge.

In the past decade, thanks to the large availability of data and processing power, deep learning has gained popularity and has pushed past symbolic AI systems. This page includes some recent, notable research that attempts to combine deep learning with symbolic learning to answer those questions. Symbols also serve to transfer learning in another sense, not from one human to another, but from one situation to another, over the course of a single individual’s life. That is, a symbol offers a level of abstraction above the concrete and granular details of our sensory experience, an abstraction that allows us to transfer what we’ve learned in one place to a problem we may encounter somewhere else. In a certain sense, every abstract category, like chair, asserts an analogy between all the disparate objects called chairs, and we transfer our knowledge about one chair to another with the help of the symbol. Deep Reinforcement Learning combines neural networks with a reinforcement learning architecture that enables software-defined agents to learn the best actions possible in virtual environment scenarios to maximize the notion of cumulative reward.

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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. All of this is encoded as a symbolic program in a programming language a computer can understand. Symbolic AI is reasoning oriented field that relies on classical logic (usually monotonic) and assumes that logic makes machines intelligent. Regarding implementing symbolic AI, one of the oldest, yet still, the most popular, logic programming languages is Prolog comes in handy. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages.

• Fulton and colleagues are working on a neurosymbolic AI approach to overcome such limitations.
• The tremendous success of deep learning systems is forcing researchers to examine the theoretical principles that underlie how deep nets learn.
• This page includes some recent, notable research that attempts to combine deep learning with symbolic learning to answer those questions.

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 framework introduces a set of polymorphic, compositional, and self-referential operations for data stream manipulation, aligning LLM outputs with user objectives. As a result, we can transition between the capabilities of various foundation models endowed with zero- and few-shot learning capabilities and specialized, fine-tuned models or solvers proficient in addressing specific problems. In turn, the framework facilitates the creation and evaluation of explainable computational graphs. We conclude by introducing a quality measure and its empirical score for evaluating these computational graphs, and propose a benchmark that compares various state-of-the-art LLMs across a set of complex workflows.

“You can check which module didn’t work properly and needs to be corrected,” says team member Pushmeet Kohli of Google DeepMind in London. For example, debuggers can inspect the knowledge base or processed question and see what the AI is doing. Deep learning is better suited for System 1 reasoning,  said Debu Chatterjee, head of AI, ML and analytics engineering at ServiceNow, referring to the paradigm developed by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. Deep learning has its discontents, and many of them look to other branches of AI when they hope for the future. The future includes integrating Symbolic AI with Machine Learning, enhancing AI algorithms and applications, a key area in AI Research and Development Milestones in AI.

McCarthy’s Advice Taker can be viewed as an inspiration here, as it could incorporate new knowledge provided by a human in the form of assertions or rules. For example, experimental symbolic machine learning systems explored the ability to take high-level natural language advice and to interpret it into domain-specific actionable rules. In the next article, we will then explore how the sought-after relational NSI can actually be implemented with such a dynamic neural modeling approach. Particularly, we will show how to make neural networks learn directly with relational logic representations (beyond graphs and GNNs), ultimately benefiting both the symbolic and deep learning approaches to ML and AI. While the particular techniques in symbolic AI varied greatly, the field was largely based on mathematical logic, which was seen as the proper (“neat”) representation formalism for most of the underlying concepts of symbol manipulation.

Part I Explainable Artificial Intelligence — Part II

To build AI that can do this, some researchers are hybridizing deep nets with what the research community calls “good old-fashioned artificial intelligence,” otherwise known as symbolic AI. The offspring, which they call neurosymbolic AI, are showing duckling-like abilities and then some. “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.

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