Mindstorms in Natural Language-Based Societies of Mind

Both Minsky's "society of mind" and Schmidhuber's "learning to think" inspire diverse societies of large multimodal neural networks (NNs) that solve problems by interviewing each other in a "mindstorm." Recent implementations of NN-based societies of minds consist of large language models (LLMs) and other NN-based experts communicating through a natural language interface. In doing so, they overcome the limitations of single LLMs, improving multimodal zero-shot reasoning. In these natural language-based societies of mind (NLSOMs), new agents -- all communicating through the same universal symbolic language -- are easily added in a modular fashion. To demonstrate the power of NLSOMs, we assemble and experiment with several of them (having up to 129 members), leveraging mindstorms in them to solve some practical AI tasks: visual question answering, image captioning, text-to-image synthesis, 3D generation, egocentric retrieval, embodied AI, and general language-based task solving. We view this as a starting point towards much larger NLSOMs with billions of agents-some of which may be humans. And with this emergence of great societies of heterogeneous minds, many new research questions have suddenly become paramount to the future of artificial intelligence. What should be the social structure of an NLSOM? What would be the (dis)advantages of having a monarchical rather than a democratic structure? How can principles of NN economies be used to maximize the total reward of a reinforcement learning NLSOM? In this work, we identify, discuss, and try to answer some of these questions.

QR-CLIP: Introducing Explicit Open-World Knowledge for Location and Time Reasoning

Daily images may convey abstract meanings that require us to memorize and infer profound information from them. To encourage such human-like reasoning, in this work, we teach machines to predict where and when it was taken rather than performing basic tasks like traditional segmentation or classification. Inspired by Horn's QR theory, we designed a novel QR-CLIP model consisting of two components: 1) the Quantity module first retrospects more open-world knowledge as the candidate language inputs; 2) the Relevance module carefully estimates vision and language cues and infers the location and time. Experiments show our QR-CLIP's effectiveness, and it outperforms the previous SOTA on each task by an average of about 10% and 130% relative lift in terms of location and time reasoning. This study lays a technical foundation for location and time reasoning and suggests that effectively introducing open-world knowledge is one of the panaceas for the tasks.