Coupling Large Language Models with Logic Programming for Robust and General Reasoning from Text

While large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3, appear to be robust and general, their reasoning ability is not at a level to compete with the best models trained for specific natural language reasoning problems. In this study, we observe that a large language model can serve as a highly effective few-shot semantic parser. It can convert natural language sentences into a logical form that serves as input for answer set programs, a logic-based declarative knowledge representation formalism. The combination results in a robust and general system that can handle multiple question-answering tasks without requiring retraining for each new task. It only needs a few examples to guide the LLM's adaptation to a specific task, along with reusable ASP knowledge modules that can be applied to multiple tasks. We demonstrate that this method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP benchmarks, including bAbI, StepGame, CLUTRR, and gSCAN. Additionally, it successfully tackles robot planning tasks that an LLM alone fails to solve.

Learning to Solve Constraint Satisfaction Problems with Recurrent Transformer

Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are about finding values of variables that satisfy the given constraints. We show that Transformer extended with recurrence is a viable approach to learning to solve CSPs in an end-to-end manner, having clear advantages over state-of-the-art methods such as Graph Neural Networks, SATNet, and some neuro-symbolic models. With the ability of Transformer to handle visual input, the proposed Recurrent Transformer can straightforwardly be applied to visual constraint reasoning problems while successfully addressing the symbol grounding problem. We also show how to leverage deductive knowledge of discrete constraints in the Transformer's inductive learning to achieve sample-efficient learning and semi-supervised learning for CSPs.

Injecting Logical Constraints into Neural Networks via Straight-Through Estimators

Injecting discrete logical constraints into neural network learning is one of the main challenges in neuro-symbolic AI. We find that a straight-through-estimator, a method introduced to train binary neural networks, could effectively be applied to incorporate logical constraints into neural network learning. More specifically, we design a systematic way to represent discrete logical constraints as a loss function; minimizing this loss using gradient descent via a straight-through-estimator updates the neural network's weights in the direction that the binarized outputs satisfy the logical constraints. The experimental results show that by leveraging GPUs and batch training, this method scales significantly better than existing neuro-symbolic methods that require heavy symbolic computation for computing gradients. Also, we demonstrate that our method applies to different types of neural networks, such as MLP, CNN, and GNN, making them learn with no or fewer labeled data by learning directly from known constraints.

Learning Missing Modal Electronic Health Records with Unified Multi-modal Data Embedding and Modality-Aware Attention

Electronic Health Record (EHR) provides abundant information through various modalities. However, learning multi-modal EHR is currently facing two major challenges, namely, 1) data embedding and 2) cases with missing modality. A lack of shared embedding function across modalities can discard the temporal relationship between different EHR modalities. On the other hand, most EHR studies are limited to relying only on EHR Times-series, and therefore, missing modality in EHR has not been well-explored. Therefore, in this study, we introduce a Unified Multi-modal Set Embedding (UMSE) and Modality-Aware Attention (MAA) with Skip Bottleneck (SB). UMSE treats all EHR modalities without a separate imputation module or error-prone carry-forward, whereas MAA with SB learns missing modal EHR with effective modality-aware attention. Our model outperforms other baseline models in mortality, vasopressor need, and intubation need prediction with the MIMIC-IV dataset.

Self-supervised predictive coding and multimodal fusion advance patient deterioration prediction in fine-grained time resolution

In the Emergency Department (ED), accurate prediction of critical events using Electronic Health Records (EHR) allows timely intervention and effective resource allocation. Though many studies have suggested automatic prediction methods, their coarse-grained time resolutions limit their practical usage. Therefore, in this study, we propose an hourly prediction method of critical events in ED, i.e., mortality and vasopressor need. Through extensive experiments, we show that both 1) bi-modal fusion between EHR text and time-series data and 2) self-supervised predictive regularization using L2 loss between normalized context vector and EHR future time-series data improve predictive performance, especially the far-future prediction. Our uni-modal/bi-modal/bi-modal self-supervision scored 0.846/0.877/0.897 (0.824/0.855/0.886) and 0.817/0.820/0.858 (0.807/0.81/0.855) with mortality (far-future mortality) and with vasopressor need (far-future vasopressor need) prediction data in AUROC, respectively.

Moving from 2D to 3D: volumetric medical image classification for rectal cancer staging

Volumetric images from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provide invaluable information in preoperative staging of rectal cancer. Above all, accurate preoperative discrimination between T2 and T3 stages is arguably both the most challenging and clinically significant task for rectal cancer treatment, as chemo-radiotherapy is usually recommended to patients with T3 (or greater) stage cancer. In this study, we present a volumetric convolutional neural network to accurately discriminate T2 from T3 stage rectal cancer with rectal MR volumes. Specifically, we propose 1) a custom ResNet-based volume encoder that models the inter-slice relationship with late fusion (i.e., 3D convolution at the last layer), 2) a bilinear computation that aggregates the resulting features from the encoder to create a volume-wise feature, and 3) a joint minimization of triplet loss and focal loss. With MR volumes of pathologically confirmed T2/T3 rectal cancer, we perform extensive experiments to compare various designs within the framework of residual learning. As a result, our network achieves an AUC of 0.831, which is higher than the reported accuracy of the professional radiologist groups. We believe this method can be extended to other volume analysis tasks

Bunched LPCNet2: Efficient Neural Vocoders Covering Devices from Cloud to Edge

Text-to-Speech (TTS) services that run on edge devices have many advantages compared to cloud TTS, e.g., latency and privacy issues. However, neural vocoders with a low complexity and small model footprint inevitably generate annoying sounds. This study proposes a Bunched LPCNet2, an improved LPCNet architecture that provides highly efficient performance in high-quality for cloud servers and in a low-complexity for low-resource edge devices. Single logistic distribution achieves computational efficiency, and insightful tricks reduce the model footprint while maintaining speech quality. A DualRate architecture, which generates a lower sampling rate from a prosody model, is also proposed to reduce maintenance costs. The experiments demonstrate that Bunched LPCNet2 generates satisfactory speech quality with a model footprint of 1.1MB while operating faster than real-time on a RPi 3B. Our audio samples are available at https://srtts.github.io/bunchedLPCNet2.

Strong Equivalence for LPMLN Programs

LPMLN is a probabilistic extension of answer set programs with the weight scheme adapted from Markov Logic. We study the concept of strong equivalence in LPMLN, which is a useful mathematical tool for simplifying a part of an LPMLN program without looking at the rest of it. We show that the verification of strong equivalence in LPMLN can be reduced to equivalence checking in classical logic via a reduct and choice rules as well as to equivalence checking under the "soft" logic of here-and-there. The result allows us to leverage an answer set solver for LPMLN strong equivalence checking. The study also suggests us a few reformulations of the LPMLN semantics using choice rules, the logic of here-and-there, and classical logic.

Bridging Commonsense Reasoning and Probabilistic Planning via a Probabilistic Action Language

To be responsive to dynamically changing real-world environments, an intelligent agent needs to perform complex sequential decision-making tasks that are often guided by commonsense knowledge. The previous work on this line of research led to the framework called "interleaved commonsense reasoning and probabilistic planning" (icorpp), which used P-log for representing commmonsense knowledge and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) or Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs) for planning under uncertainty. A main limitation of icorpp is that its implementation requires non-trivial engineering efforts to bridge the commonsense reasoning and probabilistic planning formalisms. In this paper, we present a unified framework to integrate icorpp's reasoning and planning components. In particular, we extend probabilistic action language pBC+ to express utility, belief states, and observation as in POMDP models. Inheriting the advantages of action languages, the new action language provides an elaboration tolerant representation of POMDP that reflects commonsense knowledge. The idea led to the design of the system pbcplus2pomdp, which compiles a pBC+ action description into a POMDP model that can be directly processed by off-the-shelf POMDP solvers to compute an optimal policy of the pBC+ action description. Our experiments show that it retains the advantages of icorpp while avoiding the manual efforts in bridging the commonsense reasoner and the probabilistic planner.

Explainable Fact Checking with Probabilistic Answer Set Programming

One challenge in fact checking is the ability to improve the transparency of the decision. We present a fact checking method that uses reference information in knowledge graphs (KGs) to assess claims and explain its decisions. KGs contain a formal representation of knowledge with semantic descriptions of entities and their relationships. We exploit such rich semantics to produce interpretable explanations for the fact checking output. As information in a KG is inevitably incomplete, we rely on logical rule discovery and on Web text mining to gather the evidence to assess a given claim. Uncertain rules and facts are turned into logical programs and the checking task is modeled as an inference problem in a probabilistic extension of answer set programs. Experiments show that the probabilistic inference enables the efficient labeling of claims with interpretable explanations, and the quality of the results is higher than state of the art baselines.