We describe a method, based on Jennifer Nado's proposal for classification procedures as targets of conceptual engineering, that implements such procedures by prompting a large language model. We apply this method, using data from the Wikidata knowledge graph, to evaluate stipulative definitions related to two paradigmatic conceptual engineering projects: the International Astronomical Union's redefinition of PLANET and Haslanger's ameliorative analysis of WOMAN. Our results show that classification procedures built using our approach can exhibit good classification performance and, through the generation of rationales for their classifications, can contribute to the identification of issues in either the definitions or the data against which they are being evaluated. We consider objections to this method, and discuss implications of this work for three aspects of theory and practice of conceptual engineering: the definition of its targets, empirical methods for their investigation, and their practical roles. The data and code used for our experiments, together with the experimental results, are available in a Github repository.
Conditional independence (CI) testing is a fundamental task in modern statistics and machine learning. The conditional randomization test (CRT) was recently introduced to test whether two random variables, $X$ and $Y$, are conditionally independent given a potentially high-dimensional set of random variables, $Z$. The CRT operates exceptionally well under the assumption that the conditional distribution $X|Z$ is known. However, since this distribution is typically unknown in practice, accurately approximating it becomes crucial. In this paper, we propose using conditional diffusion models (CDMs) to learn the distribution of $X|Z$. Theoretically and empirically, it is shown that CDMs closely approximate the true conditional distribution. Furthermore, CDMs offer a more accurate approximation of $X|Z$ compared to GANs, potentially leading to a CRT that performs better than those based on GANs. To accommodate complex dependency structures, we utilize a computationally efficient classifier-based conditional mutual information (CMI) estimator as our test statistic. The proposed testing procedure performs effectively without requiring assumptions about specific distribution forms or feature dependencies, and is capable of handling mixed-type conditioning sets that include both continuous and discrete variables. Theoretical analysis shows that our proposed test achieves a valid control of the type I error. A series of experiments on synthetic data demonstrates that our new test effectively controls both type-I and type-II errors, even in high dimensional scenarios.
Mechanism design, a branch of economics, aims to design rules that can autonomously achieve desired outcomes in resource allocation and public decision making. The research on mechanism design using machine learning is called automated mechanism design or mechanism learning. In our research, we constructed a new network based on the existing method for single auctions and aimed to automatically design a mechanism by applying it to double auctions. In particular, we focused on the following four desirable properties for the mechanism: individual rationality, balanced budget, Pareto efficiency, and incentive compatibility. We conducted experiments assuming a small-scale double auction and clarified how deterministic the trade matching of the obtained mechanism is. We also confirmed how much the learnt mechanism satisfies the four properties compared to two representative protocols. As a result, we verified that the mechanism is more budget-balanced than the VCG protocol and more economically efficient than the MD protocol, with the incentive compatibility mostly guaranteed.
Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes with communication (Dec-POMDP-Com) provide a framework for multiagent decision making under uncertainty, but the NEXP-complete complexity renders solutions intractable in general. While sharing actions and observations can reduce the complexity to PSPACE-complete, we propose an approach that bridges POMDPs and Dec-POMDPs by communicating only suggested joint actions, eliminating the need to share observations while maintaining performance comparable to fully centralized planning and execution. Our algorithm estimates joint beliefs using shared actions to prune infeasible beliefs. Each agent maintains possible belief sets for other agents, pruning them based on suggested actions to form an estimated joint belief usable with any centralized policy. This approach requires solving a POMDP for each agent, reducing computational complexity while preserving performance. We demonstrate its effectiveness on several Dec-POMDP benchmarks showing performance comparable to centralized methods when shared actions enable effective belief pruning. This action-based communication framework offers a natural avenue for integrating human-agent cooperation, opening new directions for scalable multiagent planning under uncertainty, with applications in both autonomous systems and human-agent teams.
Research and industry are rapidly advancing the innovation and adoption of foundation model-based systems, yet the tools for managing these models have not kept pace. Understanding the provenance and lineage of models is critical for researchers, industry, regulators, and public trust. While model cards and system cards were designed to provide transparency, they fall short in key areas: tracing model genealogy, enabling machine readability, offering reliable centralized management systems, and fostering consistent creation incentives. This challenge mirrors issues in software supply chain security, but AI/ML remains at an earlier stage of maturity. Addressing these gaps requires industry-standard tooling that can be adopted by foundation model publishers, open-source model innovators, and major distribution platforms. We propose a machine-readable model specification format to simplify the creation of model records, thereby reducing error-prone human effort, notably when a new model inherits most of its design from a foundation model. Our solution explicitly traces relationships between upstream and downstream models, enhancing transparency and traceability across the model lifecycle. To facilitate the adoption, we introduce the unified model record (UMR) repository , a semantically versioned system that automates the publication of model records to multiple formats (PDF, HTML, LaTeX) and provides a hosted web interface (//modelrecord.com/). This proof of concept aims to set a new standard for managing foundation models, bridging the gap between innovation and responsible model management.
Diffusion models for continuous data gained widespread adoption owing to their high quality generation and control mechanisms. However, controllable diffusion on discrete data faces challenges given that continuous guidance methods do not directly apply to discrete diffusion. Here, we provide a straightforward derivation of classifier-free and classifier-based guidance for discrete diffusion, as well as a new class of diffusion models that leverage uniform noise and that are more guidable because they can continuously edit their outputs. We improve the quality of these models with a novel continuous-time variational lower bound that yields state-of-the-art performance, especially in settings involving guidance or fast generation. Empirically, we demonstrate that our guidance mechanisms combined with uniform noise diffusion improve controllable generation relative to autoregressive and diffusion baselines on several discrete data domains, including genomic sequences, small molecule design, and discretized image generation.
Data generation is a fundamental research problem in data management due to its diverse use cases, ranging from testing database engines to data-specific applications. However, real-world entities often involve complex interactions that cannot be effectively modeled by traditional tabular data. Therefore, graph data generation has attracted increasing attention recently. Although various graph generators have been proposed in the literature, there are three limitations: i) They cannot capture the co-evolution pattern of graph structure and node attributes. ii) Few of them consider edge direction, leading to substantial information loss. iii) Current state-of-the-art dynamic graph generators are based on the temporal random walk, making the simulation process time-consuming. To fill the research gap, we introduce VRDAG, a novel variational recurrent framework for efficient dynamic attributed graph generation. Specifically, we design a bidirectional message-passing mechanism to encode both directed structural knowledge and attribute information of a snapshot. Then, the temporal dependency in the graph sequence is captured by a recurrence state updater, generating embeddings that can preserve the evolution pattern of early graphs. Based on the hidden node embeddings, a conditional variational Bayesian method is developed to sample latent random variables at the neighboring timestep for new snapshot generation. The proposed generation paradigm avoids the time-consuming path sampling and merging process in existing random walk-based methods, significantly reducing the synthesis time. Finally, comprehensive experiments on real-world datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model.
Multimodal Knowledge Graph Construction (MMKC) refers to the process of creating a structured representation of entities and relationships through multiple modalities such as text, images, videos, etc. However, existing MMKC models have limitations in handling the introduction of new entities and relations due to the dynamic nature of the real world. Moreover, most state-of-the-art studies in MMKC only consider entity and relation extraction from text data while neglecting other multi-modal sources. Meanwhile, the current continual setting for knowledge graph construction only consider entity and relation extraction from text data while neglecting other multi-modal sources. Therefore, there arises the need to explore the challenge of continuous multimodal knowledge graph construction to address the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting and ensure the retention of past knowledge extracted from different forms of data. This research focuses on investigating this complex topic by developing lifelong multimodal benchmark datasets. Based on the empirical findings that several state-of-the-art MMKC models, when trained on multimedia data, might unexpectedly underperform compared to those solely utilizing textual resources in a continual setting, we propose a Lifelong MultiModal Consistent Transformer Framework (LMC) for continuous multimodal knowledge graph construction. By combining the advantages of consistent KGC strategies within the context of continual learning, we achieve greater balance between stability and plasticity. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method over prevailing continual learning techniques or multimodal approaches in dynamic scenarios. Code and datasets can be found at //github.com/zjunlp/ContinueMKGC.
Existing Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods are mostly designed based on the idea of matching, i.e., by learning user and item embeddings from data using shallow or deep models, they try to capture the associative relevance patterns in data, so that a user embedding can be matched with relevant item embeddings using designed or learned similarity functions. However, as a cognition rather than a perception intelligent task, recommendation requires not only the ability of pattern recognition and matching from data, but also the ability of cognitive reasoning in data. In this paper, we propose to advance Collaborative Filtering (CF) to Collaborative Reasoning (CR), which means that each user knows part of the reasoning space, and they collaborate for reasoning in the space to estimate preferences for each other. Technically, we propose a Neural Collaborative Reasoning (NCR) framework to bridge learning and reasoning. Specifically, we integrate the power of representation learning and logical reasoning, where representations capture similarity patterns in data from perceptual perspectives, and logic facilitates cognitive reasoning for informed decision making. An important challenge, however, is to bridge differentiable neural networks and symbolic reasoning in a shared architecture for optimization and inference. To solve the problem, we propose a modularized reasoning architecture, which learns logical operations such as AND ($\wedge$), OR ($\vee$) and NOT ($\neg$) as neural modules for implication reasoning ($\rightarrow$). In this way, logical expressions can be equivalently organized as neural networks, so that logical reasoning and prediction can be conducted in a continuous space. Experiments on real-world datasets verified the advantages of our framework compared with both shallow, deep and reasoning models.
We introduce an approach for deep reinforcement learning (RL) that improves upon the efficiency, generalization capacity, and interpretability of conventional approaches through structured perception and relational reasoning. It uses self-attention to iteratively reason about the relations between entities in a scene and to guide a model-free policy. Our results show that in a novel navigation and planning task called Box-World, our agent finds interpretable solutions that improve upon baselines in terms of sample complexity, ability to generalize to more complex scenes than experienced during training, and overall performance. In the StarCraft II Learning Environment, our agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on six mini-games -- surpassing human grandmaster performance on four. By considering architectural inductive biases, our work opens new directions for overcoming important, but stubborn, challenges in deep RL.
We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.