A Cognitively-Inspired Neural Architecture for Visual Abstract Reasoning Using Contrastive Perceptual and Conceptual Processing

We introduce a new neural architecture for solving visual abstract reasoning tasks inspired by human cognition, specifically by observations that human abstract reasoning often interleaves perceptual and conceptual processing as part of a flexible, iterative, and dynamic cognitive process. Inspired by this principle, our architecture models visual abstract reasoning as an iterative, self-contrasting learning process that pursues consistency between perceptual and conceptual processing of visual stimuli. We explain how this new Contrastive Perceptual-Conceptual Network (CPCNet) works using matrix reasoning problems in the style of the well-known Raven's Progressive Matrices intelligence test. Experiments on the machine learning dataset RAVEN show that CPCNet achieves higher accuracy than all previously published models while also using the weakest inductive bias. We also point out a substantial and previously unremarked class imbalance in the original RAVEN dataset, and we propose a new variant of RAVEN -- AB-RAVEN -- that is more balanced in terms of abstract concepts.

A Computational Account Of Self-Supervised Visual Learning From Egocentric Object Play

Research in child development has shown that embodied experience handling physical objects contributes to many cognitive abilities, including visual learning. One characteristic of such experience is that the learner sees the same object from several different viewpoints. In this paper, we study how learning signals that equate different viewpoints -- e.g., assigning similar representations to different views of a single object -- can support robust visual learning. We use the Toybox dataset, which contains egocentric videos of humans manipulating different objects, and conduct experiments using a computer vision framework for self-supervised contrastive learning. We find that representations learned by equating different physical viewpoints of an object benefit downstream image classification accuracy. Further experiments show that this performance improvement is robust to variations in the gaps between viewpoints, and that the benefits transfer to several different image classification tasks.

FERN: Leveraging Graph Attention Networks for Failure Evaluation and Robust Network Design

Robust network design, which aims to guarantee network availability under various failure scenarios while optimizing performance/cost objectives, has received significant attention. Existing approaches often rely on model-based mixed-integer optimization that is hard to scale or employ deep learning to solve specific engineering problems yet with limited generalizability. In this paper, we show that failure evaluation provides a common kernel to improve the tractability and scalability of existing solutions. By providing a neural network function approximation of this common kernel using graph attention networks, we develop a unified learning-based framework, FERN, for scalable Failure Evaluation and Robust Network design. FERN represents rich problem inputs as a graph and captures both local and global views by attentively performing feature extraction from the graph. It enables a broad range of robust network design problems, including robust network validation, network upgrade optimization, and fault-tolerant traffic engineering that are discussed in this paper, to be recasted with respect to the common kernel and thus computed efficiently using neural networks and over a small set of critical failure scenarios. Extensive experiments on real-world network topologies show that FERN can efficiently and accurately identify key failure scenarios for both OSPF and optimal routing scheme, and generalizes well to different topologies and input traffic patterns. It can speed up multiple robust network design problems by more than 80x, 200x, 10x, respectively with negligible performance gap.

Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Natural Language to First-Order Logic Translation

Translating natural language sentences to first-order logic (NL-FOL translation) is a longstanding challenge in the NLP and formal logic literature. This paper introduces LogicLLaMA, a LLaMA-7B model fine-tuned for NL-FOL translation using LoRA on a single GPU. LogicLLaMA is capable of directly translating natural language into FOL rules, which outperforms GPT-3.5. LogicLLaMA is also equipped to correct FOL rules predicted by GPT-3.5, and can achieve similar performance as GPT-4 with a fraction of the cost. This correction ability was achieved by a novel supervised fine-tuning (SFT) + reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, which initially trains on synthetically perturbed NL-FOL pairs to encourage chain-of-thought reasoning and then fine-tunes with RLHF on GPT-3.5 outputs using a FOL verifier as the reward model. To train LogicLLaMA, we present MALLS (large language $\textbf{M}$odel gener$\textbf{A}$ted N$\textbf{L}$-FO$\textbf{L}$ pair$\textbf{S}$), a dataset of 34K high-quality and diverse sentence-level NL-FOL pairs collected from GPT-4. The dataset was created by implementing a pipeline that prompts GPT-4 for pairs, and dynamically adjusts the prompts to ensure the collection of pairs with rich and diverse contexts at different levels of complexity, and verifies the validity of the generated FOL rules. Codes, weights, and data are available at $\href{https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA}{{\small \text{https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA}}}$.

An Approach for Solving Tasks on the Abstract Reasoning Corpus

The Abstract Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is an intelligence tests for measuring fluid intelligence in artificial intelligence systems and humans alike. In this paper we present a system for reasoning about and solving ARC tasks. Our system relies on a program synthesis approach that searches a space of potential programs for ones that can solve tasks from the ARC. Programs are in a domain specific language, and in some instances our search algorithm is guided by insights from a corpus of ground truth programs. In particular: We describe an imperative style domain specific language, called Visual Imagery Reasoning Language (VIMRL), for reasoning about tasks in the ARC. We also demonstrate an innovative approach for how large search spaces can be decomposed using special high level functions that determine their own arguments through local searches on a given task item. Finally, we share our results obtained on the publicly available ARC items as well as our system's strong performance on a private test, recently tying for 4th place on the global ARCathon 2022 challenge.

Computational Models of Solving Raven's Progressive Matrices: A Comprehensive Introduction

As being widely used to measure human intelligence, Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) tests also pose a great challenge for AI systems. There is a long line of computational models for solving RPM, starting from 1960s, either to understand the involved cognitive processes or solely for problem-solving purposes. Due to the dramatic paradigm shifts in AI researches, especially the advent of deep learning models in the last decade, the computational studies on RPM have also changed a lot. Therefore, now is a good time to look back at this long line of research. As the title -- ``a comprehensive introduction'' -- indicates, this paper provides an all-in-one presentation of computational models for solving RPM, including the history of RPM, intelligence testing theories behind RPM, item design and automatic item generation of RPM-like tasks, a conceptual chronicle of computational models for solving RPM, which reveals the philosophy behind the technology evolution of these models, and suggestions for transferring human intelligence testing and AI testing.

Deep Non-Monotonic Reasoning for Visual Abstract Reasoning Tasks

While achieving unmatched performance on many well-defined tasks, deep learning models have also been used to solve visual abstract reasoning tasks, which are relatively less well-defined, and have been widely used to measure human intelligence. However, current deep models struggle to match human abilities to solve such tasks with minimum data but maximum generalization. One limitation is that current deep learning models work in a monotonic way, i.e., treating different parts of the input in essentially fixed orderings, whereas people repeatedly observe and reason about the different parts of the visual stimuli until the reasoning process converges to a consistent conclusion, i.e., non-monotonic reasoning. This paper proposes a non-monotonic computational approach to solve visual abstract reasoning tasks. In particular, we implemented a deep learning model using this approach and tested it on the RAVEN dataset -- a dataset inspired by the Raven's Progressive Matrices test. Results show that the proposed approach is more effective than existing monotonic deep learning models, under strict experimental settings that represent a difficult variant of the RAVEN dataset problem.

Visual-Imagery-Based Analogical Construction in Geometric Matrix Reasoning Task

Raven's Progressive Matrices is a family of classical intelligence tests that have been widely used in both research and clinical settings. There have been many exciting efforts in AI communities to computationally model various aspects of problem solving such figural analogical reasoning problems. In this paper, we present a series of computational models for solving Raven's Progressive Matrices using analogies and image transformations. We run our models following three different strategies usually adopted by human testees. These models are tested on the standard version of Raven's Progressive Matrices, in which we can solve 57 out 60 problems in it. Therefore, analogy and image transformation are proved to be effective in solving RPM problems.

Temporal Inductive Logic Reasoning

Inductive logic reasoning is one of the fundamental tasks on graphs, which seeks to generalize patterns from the data. This task has been studied extensively for traditional graph datasets such as knowledge graphs (KGs), with representative techniques such as inductive logic programming (ILP). Existing ILP methods typically assume learning from KGs with static facts and binary relations. Beyond KGs, graph structures are widely present in other applications such as video instructions, scene graphs and program executions. While inductive logic reasoning is also beneficial for these applications, applying ILP to the corresponding graphs is nontrivial: they are more complex than KGs, which usually involve timestamps and n-ary relations, effectively a type of hypergraph with temporal events. In this work, we study two of such applications and propose to represent them as hypergraphs with time intervals. To reason on this graph, we propose the multi-start random B-walk that traverses this hypergraph. Combining it with a path-consistency algorithm, we propose an efficient backward-chaining ILP method that learns logic rules by generalizing from both the temporal and the relational data.

Neural MoCon: Neural Motion Control for Physically Plausible Human Motion Capture

Due to the visual ambiguity, purely kinematic formulations on monocular human motion capture are often physically incorrect, biomechanically implausible, and can not reconstruct accurate interactions. In this work, we focus on exploiting the high-precision and non-differentiable physics simulator to incorporate dynamical constraints in motion capture. Our key-idea is to use real physical supervisions to train a target pose distribution prior for sampling-based motion control to capture physically plausible human motion. To obtain accurate reference motion with terrain interactions for the sampling, we first introduce an interaction constraint based on SDF (Signed Distance Field) to enforce appropriate ground contact modeling. We then design a novel two-branch decoder to avoid stochastic error from pseudo ground-truth and train a distribution prior with the non-differentiable physics simulator. Finally, we regress the sampling distribution from the current state of the physical character with the trained prior and sample satisfied target poses to track the estimated reference motion. Qualitative and quantitative results show that we can obtain physically plausible human motion with complex terrain interactions, human shape variations, and diverse behaviors. More information can be found at~\url{https://www.yangangwang.com/papers/HBZ-NM-2022-03.html}