2408 17198 Towards Symbolic XAI Explanation Through Human Understandable Logical Relationships Between Features

Time periods and titles are drawn from Henry Kautz’s 2020 AAAI Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture[19] and the longer Wikipedia article on the History of AI, with dates and titles differing slightly for increased clarity.

You now have a basic understanding of how to use the Package Runner provided to run packages and aliases from the command line. This file is located in the .symai/packages/ directory in your home directory (~/.symai/packages/). We provide a package manager called sympkg that allows you to manage extensions from the command line. With sympkg, you can install, remove, list installed packages, or update a module. If your command contains a pipe (|), the shell will treat the text after the pipe as the name of a file to add it to the conversation. The shell will save the conversation automatically if you type exit or quit to exit the interactive shell.

These operations define the behavior of symbols by acting as contextualized functions that accept a Symbol object and send it to the neuro-symbolic engine for evaluation. Operations then return one or multiple new objects, which primarily consist of new symbols but may include other types as well. Polymorphism plays a crucial role in operations, allowing them to be applied to various data types such as strings, integers, floats, and lists, with different behaviors based on the object instance.

Due to limited computing resources, we currently utilize OpenAI’s GPT-3, ChatGPT and GPT-4 API for the neuro-symbolic engine. However, given adequate computing resources, it is feasible to use local machines to reduce latency and costs, with alternative engines like OPT or Bloom. This would enable recursive executions, loops, and more complex expressions. This method allows us to design domain-specific benchmarks and examine how well general learners, such as GPT-3, adapt with certain prompts to a set of tasks. A key idea of the SymbolicAI API is code generation, which may result in errors that need to be handled contextually. In the future, we want our API to self-extend and resolve issues automatically.

The purpose of this paper is to generate broad interest to develop it within an open source project centered on the Deep Symbolic Network (DSN) model towards the development of general AI. symbolic ai has been used in a wide range of applications, including expert systems, natural language processing, and game playing. It can be difficult to represent complex, ambiguous, or uncertain knowledge with symbolic AI. Furthermore, symbolic AI systems are typically hand-coded and do not learn from data, which can make them brittle and inflexible.

Moreover, we can log user queries and model predictions to make them accessible for post-processing. Consequently, we can enhance and tailor the model’s responses based on real-world data. “This is a prime reason why language is not wholly solved by current deep learning systems,” Seddiqi said. This page includes some recent, notable research that attempts to combine deep learning with symbolic learning to answer those questions. 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.

However, in the following example, the Try expression resolves the syntax error, and we receive a computed result. We adopt a divide-and-conquer approach, breaking down complex problems into smaller, manageable tasks. We use the expressiveness and flexibility of LLMs to evaluate these sub-problems. By re-combining the results of these operations, we can solve the broader, more complex problem. This class provides an easy and controlled way to manage the use of external modules in the user’s project, with main functions including the ability to install, uninstall, update, and check installed modules.

Artificial general intelligence

It is used to manage expression loading from packages and accesses the respective metadata from the package.json. The Package Initializer is a command-line tool provided that allows developers to create new GitHub packages from the command line. It automates the process of setting up a new package directory structure and files. You can access the Package Initializer by using the symdev command in your terminal or PowerShell. Symsh provides path auto-completion and history auto-completion enhanced by the neuro-symbolic engine.

“This change to the ticker symbol ‘ARAI’ better reflects our identity and our commitment to integrating artificial intelligence into our innovative delivery solutions,” said Arrive AI CEO Dan O’Toole. “As we move closer to our public offering, this updated symbol represents the next step in our journey to revolutionize last-mile delivery through cutting-edge technology.” If you wish to contribute to this project, please read the CONTRIBUTING.md file for details on our code of conduct, as well as the process for submitting pull requests. Special thanks go to our colleagues and friends at the Institute for Machine Learning at Johannes Kepler University (JKU), Linz for their exceptional support and feedback. We are also grateful to the AI Austria RL Community for supporting this project.

You can access these apps by calling the sym+ command in your terminal or PowerShell. Building applications with LLMs at the core using our Symbolic API facilitates the integration of classical and differentiable programming in Python. One of the biggest is to be able to automatically encode better rules for symbolic AI.

Deep learning and neuro-symbolic AI 2011–now

The “symbols” he refers to are discrete physical things that are assigned a definite semantics — like and . As previously mentioned, we can create contextualized prompts to define the behavior of operations on our neural engine. However, this limits the available context size due to GPT-3 Davinci’s context length constraint of 4097 tokens. This issue can be addressed using the Stream processing expression, which opens a data stream and performs chunk-based operations on the input stream. The current & operation overloads the and logical operator and sends few-shot prompts to the neural computation engine for statement evaluation.

• “With symbolic AI there was always a question mark about how to get the symbols,” IBM’s Cox said.
• Knowledge-based systems have an explicit knowledge base, typically of rules, to enhance reusability across domains by separating procedural code and domain knowledge.
• Currently, most AI researchers [citation needed] believe deep learning, and more likely, a synthesis of neural and symbolic approaches (neuro-symbolic AI), will be required for general intelligence.

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning architecture comprising a neural back end and a symbolic front end with the potential to overcome each of these shortcomings. As proof-of-concept, we present a preliminary implementation of the architecture and apply it to several variants of a simple video game. We investigate an unconventional direction of research that aims at converting neural networks, a class of distributed, connectionist, sub-symbolic models into a symbolic level with the ultimate goal of achieving AI interpretability and safety. It achieves a form of “symbolic disentanglement”, offering one solution to the important problem of disentangled representations and invariance.

AI offers a new computing paradigm that brings rational design one step closer to reality. With the release of Orb, research organizations around the world get access to the world’s leading AI under a permissive open-source license, drastically increasing the speed and accuracy of their simulations. The justice system, banks, and private companies use algorithms to make decisions that have profound impacts on people’s lives. At ASU, we have created various educational products on this emerging areas. We offered a gradautate-level course in fall of 2022, created a tutorial session at AAAI, a YouTube channel, and more.

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. Insofar as computers suffered from the same chokepoints, their builders relied on all-too-human hacks like symbols to sidestep the limits to processing, storage and I/O. As computational capacities grow, the way we digitize and process our analog reality can also expand, until we are juggling billion-parameter tensors instead of seven-character strings.

Analog to the human concept learning, given the parsed program, the perception module learns visual concepts based on the language description of the object being referred to. Meanwhile, the learned visual concepts facilitate learning new words and parsing new sentences. We use curriculum learning to guide searching over the large compositional space of images and language. Extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our model on learning visual concepts, word representations, and semantic parsing of sentences. Further, our method allows easy generalization to new object attributes, compositions, language concepts, scenes and questions, and even new program domains.

Operations

To think that we can simply abandon symbol-manipulation is to suspend disbelief. Qualitative simulation, such as Benjamin Kuipers’s QSIM,[90] approximates human reasoning about naive physics, such as what happens when we heat a liquid in a pot on the stove. We expect it to heat and possibly boil over, even though we may not know its temperature, its boiling point, or other details, such as atmospheric pressure. Cognitive architectures such as ACT-R may have additional capabilities, such as the ability to compile frequently used knowledge into higher-level chunks. Japan championed Prolog for its Fifth Generation Project, intending to build special hardware for high performance. Similarly, LISP machines were built to run LISP, but as the second AI boom turned to bust these companies could not compete with new workstations that could now run LISP or Prolog natively at comparable speeds.

We believe these systems will usher in a new era of AI where machines can learn more like the way humans do, by connecting words with images and mastering abstract concepts. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) brings the power of deep neural networks to bear on the generic task of trial-and-error learning, and its effectiveness has been convincingly demonstrated on tasks such as Atari video games and the game of Go. However, contemporary DRL systems inherit a number of shortcomings from the current generation of deep learning techniques. For example, they require very large datasets to work effectively, entailing that they are slow to learn even when such datasets are available. Moreover, they lack the ability to reason on an abstract level, which makes it difficult to implement high-level cognitive functions such as transfer learning, analogical reasoning, and hypothesis-based reasoning. Finally, their operation is largely opaque to humans, rendering them unsuitable for domains in which verifiability is important.

Children can be symbol manipulation and do addition/subtraction, but they don’t really understand what they are doing. A certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent of sensory experience. With more linguistic stimuli received in the course of psychological development, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to Universal grammar. When deep learning reemerged in 2012, it was with a kind of take-no-prisoners attitude that has characterized most of the last decade. He gave a talk at an AI workshop at Stanford comparing symbols to aether, one of science’s greatest mistakes.

🤖 Engines

If a constraint is not satisfied, the implementation will utilize the specified default fallback or default value. If neither is provided, the Symbolic API will raise a ConstraintViolationException. The return type is set to int in this example, so the value from the wrapped function will be of type int. The implementation uses auto-casting to a user-specified return data type, and if casting fails, the Symbolic API will raise a ValueError.

The yellow and green highlighted boxes indicate mandatory string placements, dashed boxes represent optional placeholders, and the red box marks the starting point of model prediction. Inheritance is another essential aspect of our API, which is built on the Symbol class as its base. All operations are inherited from this class, offering an easy way to add custom operations by subclassing Symbol while maintaining access to basic operations without complicated syntax or redundant functionality.

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. Deep neural networks are machine learning algorithms inspired by the structure and function of biological neural networks.

The resulting tree can then be used to navigate and retrieve the original information, transforming the large data stream problem into a search problem. The following section demonstrates that most operations in symai/core.py are derived from the more general few_shot decorator. Embedded accelerators for LLMs will likely be ubiquitous in future computation platforms, including wearables, smartphones, tablets, and notebooks. These devices will incorporate models similar to GPT-3, ChatGPT, OPT, or Bloom. Note that the package.json file is automatically created when you use the Package Initializer tool (symdev) to create a new package.

Their Sum-Product Probabilistic Language (SPPL) is a probabilistic programming system. Probabilistic programming languages make it much easier for programmers to define probabilistic models and carry out probabilistic inference — that is, work backward to infer probable explanations for observed data. Basic operations in Symbol are implemented by defining local functions and decorating them with corresponding operation decorators from the symai/core.py file, a collection of predefined operation decorators that can be applied rapidly to any function. Using local functions instead of decorating main methods directly avoids unnecessary communication with the neural engine and allows for default behavior implementation. It also helps cast operation return types to symbols or derived classes, using the self.sym_return_type(…) method for contextualized behavior based on the determined return type.

Perhaps one of the most significant advantages of using neuro-symbolic programming is that it allows for a clear understanding of how well our LLMs comprehend simple operations. Specifically, we gain insight into whether and at what point they fail, enabling us to follow their StackTraces and pinpoint the failure points. In our case, neuro-symbolic programming enables us to debug the model predictions based on dedicated unit tests for simple operations.

We have provided a neuro-symbolic perspective on LLMs and demonstrated their potential as a central component for many multi-modal operations. We offered a technical report on utilizing our framework and briefly discussed the capabilities and prospects of these models for integration with modern software development. In the example below, we demonstrate how to use an Output expression to pass a handler function and access the model’s input prompts and predictions. These can be utilized for data collection and subsequent fine-tuning stages. The handler function supplies a dictionary and presents keys for input and output values.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. DOLCE is an example of an upper ontology that can be used for any domain while WordNet is a lexical resource that can also be viewed as an ontology. YAGO incorporates WordNet as part of its ontology, to align facts extracted from Wikipedia with WordNet synsets. The Disease Ontology is an example of a medical ontology currently being used. In contrast to the US, in Europe the key AI programming language during that same period was Prolog.

For example, OPS5, CLIPS and their successors Jess and Drools operate in this fashion. Currently, most AI researchers [citation needed] believe deep learning, and more likely, a synthesis of neural and symbolic approaches (neuro-symbolic AI), will be required for general intelligence. We hope that our work can be seen as complementary and offer a future outlook on how we would like to use machine learning models as an integral part of programming languages and their entire computational stack.

Instead, they produce task-specific vectors where the meaning of the vector components is opaque. Subsymbolic AI, often represented by contemporary neural networks and deep learning, operates on a level below human-readable symbols, learning directly from raw data. This paradigm doesn’t rely on pre-defined rules or symbols but learns patterns from large datasets through a process that mimics the way neurons in the human brain operate.

This fusion holds promise for creating hybrid AI systems capable of robust knowledge representation and adaptive learning. In the realm of artificial intelligence, symbolic AI stands as a pivotal concept that has significantly influenced the understanding and development of intelligent systems. This guide aims to provide a comprehensive overview of symbolic AI, covering its definition, historical significance, working principles, real-world applications, pros and cons, related terms, and frequently asked questions. By the end of this exploration, readers will gain a profound understanding of the importance and impact of symbolic AI in the domain of artificial intelligence.

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. A key component of the system architecture for all expert systems is the knowledge base, which stores facts and rules for problem-solving.[53]

The simplest approach for an expert system knowledge base is simply a collection or network of production rules. Production rules connect symbols in a relationship similar to an If-Then statement. The expert system processes the rules to make deductions and to determine what additional information it needs, i.e. what questions to ask, using human-readable symbols.

In https://chat.openai.com/, discourse representation theory and first-order logic have been used to represent sentence meanings. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) and explicit semantic analysis also provided vector representations of documents. In the latter case, vector components are interpretable as concepts named by Wikipedia articles.

You can find the EngineRepository defined in functional.py with the respective query method. The prepare and forward methods have a signature variable called argument which carries all necessary pipeline relevant data. For instance, the output of the argument.prop.preprocessed_input contains the pre-processed output of the PreProcessor objects and is usually what you need to build and pass on to the argument.prop.prepared_input, which is then used in the forward call. When creating complex expressions, we debug them by using the Trace expression, which allows us to print out the applied expressions and follow the StackTrace of the neuro-symbolic operations. Combined with the Log expression, which creates a dump of all prompts and results to a log file, we can analyze where our models potentially failed.

Subclassing the Symbol class allows for the creation of contextualized operations with unique constraints and prompt designs by simply overriding the relevant methods. However, it is recommended to subclass the Expression class for additional functionality. Operations are executed using the Symbol object’s value attribute, which contains the original data type converted into a string representation and sent to the engine for processing. As a result, all values are represented as strings, requiring custom objects to define a suitable __str__ method for conversion while preserving the object’s semantics.

But it is undesirable to have inference errors corrupting results in socially impactful applications of AI, such as automated decision-making, and especially in fairness analysis. Acting as a container for information required to define a specific operation, the Prompt class also serves as the base class for all other Prompt classes. If the neural computation engine cannot compute the desired outcome, it will revert to the default implementation or default value. If no default implementation or value is found, the method call will raise an exception.

• We see Neuro-symbolic AI as a pathway to achieve artificial general intelligence.
• By the mid-1960s neither useful natural language translation systems nor autonomous tanks had been created, and a dramatic backlash set in.
• Moreover, they lack the ability to reason on an abstract level, which makes it difficult to implement high-level cognitive functions such as transfer learning, analogical reasoning, and hypothesis-based reasoning.
• By the end of this exploration, readers will gain a profound understanding of the importance and impact of symbolic AI in the domain of artificial intelligence.

Deep learning has its discontents, and many of them look to other branches of AI when they hope for the future. McCarthy’s approach to fix the frame problem was circumscription, a kind of non-monotonic logic where deductions could be made from actions that need only specify what would change while not having to explicitly specify everything that would not change. Other non-monotonic logics provided truth maintenance systems that revised beliefs leading to contradictions. A similar problem, called the Qualification Problem, occurs in trying to enumerate the preconditions for an action to succeed.

During the rise of generative AI, it seemed for a moment that a breakthrough would be in sight, but, maybe unsurprisingly, things took a different turn. Much like declarative GeoAI approaches from the past two decades, representation learning encounters similar obstacles. MIT researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence programming language that can assess the fairness of algorithms more exactly, and more quickly, than available alternatives. Symbolic AI works by using symbols to represent objects and concepts, and rules to represent relationships between them. These rules can be used to make inferences, solve problems, and understand complex concepts. In the following example, we create a news summary expression that crawls the given URL and streams the site content through multiple expressions.

Lastly, the decorator_kwargs argument passes additional arguments from the decorator kwargs, which are streamlined towards the neural computation engine and other engines. Word2Vec generates dense vector representations of words by training a shallow neural network to predict a word based on its neighbors in a text corpus. These resulting vectors are then employed in numerous natural language processing applications, such as sentiment analysis, text classification, and clustering. 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. Yes, Symbolic AI can be integrated with machine learning approaches to combine the strengths of rule-based reasoning with the ability to learn and generalize from data.

The holy grail of materials science and chemistry is “rational design” — designing new materials on a computer as you would a piece of furniture or a car engine. Philosophers who were familiar with this tradition were the first to criticize GOFAI and the assertion that it was sufficient for intelligence, such as Hubert Dreyfus and Haugeland. The new SPPL probabilistic programming language was presented in June at the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference Chat GPT on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), in a paper that Saad co-authored with MIT EECS Professor Martin Rinard and Mansinghka. If you don’t want to re-write the entire engine code but overwrite the existing prompt prepare logic, you can do so by subclassing the existing engine and overriding the prepare method. Using the Execute expression, we can evaluate our generated code, which takes in a symbol and tries to execute it.

In pursuit of efficient and robust generalization, we introduce the Schema Network, an object-oriented generative physics simulator capable of disentangling multiple causes of events and reasoning backward through causes to achieve goals. The richly structured architecture of the Schema Network can learn the dynamics of an environment directly from data. We argue that generalizing from limited data and learning causal relationships are essential abilities on the path toward generally intelligent systems. 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. Symbolic AI (or Classical AI) is the branch of artificial intelligence research that concerns itself with attempting to explicitly represent human knowledge in a declarative form (i.e. facts and rules). If such an approach is to be successful in producing human-like intelligence then it is necessary to translate often implicit or procedural knowledge possessed by humans into an explicit form using symbols and rules for their manipulation.

Read more about our work in neuro-symbolic AI from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. Our researchers are working to usher in a new era of AI where machines can learn more like the way humans do, by connecting words with images and mastering abstract concepts. “Our vision is to use neural networks as a bridge to get us to the symbolic domain,” Cox said, referring to work that IBM is exploring with its partners. “We are finding that neural networks can get you to the symbolic domain and then you can use a wealth of ideas from symbolic AI to understand the world,” Cox said. Symbolic AI’s strength lies in its knowledge representation and reasoning through logic, making it more akin to Kahneman’s “System 2” mode of thinking, which is slow, takes work and demands attention. That is because it is based on relatively simple underlying logic that relies on things being true, and on rules providing a means of inferring new things from things already known to be true.

This statement evaluates to True since the fuzzy compare operation conditions the engine to compare the two Symbols based on their semantic meaning. In the example above, the causal_expression method iteratively extracts information, enabling manual resolution or external solver usage. In the example below, we can observe how operations on word embeddings (colored boxes) are performed.