Reasoning about actions and change (RAC) is essential to understand and interact with the ever-changing environment. Previous AI research has shown the importance of fundamental and indispensable knowledge of actions, i.e., preconditions and effects. However, traditional methods rely on logical formalization which hinders practical applications. With recent transformer-based language models (LMs), reasoning over text is desirable and seemingly feasible, leading to the question of whether LMs can effectively and efficiently learn to solve RAC problems. We propose four essential RAC tasks as a comprehensive textual benchmark and generate problems in a way that minimizes the influence of other linguistic requirements (e.g., grounding) to focus on RAC. The resulting benchmark, TRAC, encompassing problems of various complexities, facilitates a more granular evaluation of LMs, precisely targeting the structural generalization ability much needed for RAC. Experiments with three high-performing transformers indicates that additional efforts are needed to tackle challenges raised by TRAC.
Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT have recently demonstrated impressive results across a wide range of tasks. LLMs are still limited, however, in that they frequently fail at complex reasoning, their reasoning processes are opaque, they are prone to 'hallucinate' facts, and there are concerns about their underlying biases. Letting models verbalize reasoning steps as natural language, a technique known as chain-of-thought prompting, has recently been proposed as a way to address some of these issues. Here we present the first release of ThoughtSource, a meta-dataset and software library for chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. The goal of ThoughtSource is to improve future artificial intelligence systems by facilitating qualitative understanding of CoTs, enabling empirical evaluations, and providing training data. This first release of ThoughtSource integrates six scientific/medical, three general-domain and five math word question answering datasets.
Humans are well-versed in reasoning about the behaviors of physical objects and choosing actions accordingly to accomplish tasks, while it remains a major challenge for AI. To facilitate research addressing this problem, we propose a new testbed that requires an agent to reason about physical scenarios and take an action appropriately. Inspired by the physical knowledge acquired in infancy and the capabilities required for robots to operate in real-world environments, we identify 15 essential physical scenarios. We create a wide variety of distinct task templates, and we ensure all the task templates within the same scenario can be solved by using one specific strategic physical rule. By having such a design, we evaluate two distinct levels of generalization, namely the local generalization and the broad generalization. We conduct an extensive evaluation with human players, learning agents with varying input types and architectures, and heuristic agents with different strategies. Inspired by how human IQ is calculated, we define the physical reasoning quotient (Phy-Q score) that reflects the physical reasoning intelligence of an agent using the physical scenarios we considered. Our evaluation shows that 1) all agents are far below human performance, and 2) learning agents, even with good local generalization ability, struggle to learn the underlying physical reasoning rules and fail to generalize broadly. We encourage the development of intelligent agents that can reach the human level Phy-Q score. Website: //github.com/phy-q/benchmark
How does the size of a swarm affect its collective action? Despite being arguably a key parameter, no systematic and satisfactory guiding principles exist to select the number of units required for a given task and environment. Even when limited by practical considerations, system designers should endeavor to identify what a reasonable swarm size should be. Here, we show that this fundamental question is closely linked to that of selecting an appropriate swarm density. Our analysis of the influence of density on the collective performance of a target tracking task reveals different `phases' corresponding to markedly distinct group dynamics. We identify a `transition' phase, in which a complex emergent collective response arises. Interestingly, the collective dynamics within this transition phase exhibit a clear trade-off between exploratory actions and exploitative ones. We show that at any density, the exploration-exploitation balance can be adjusted to maximize the system's performance through various means, such as by changing the level of connectivity between agents. While the density is the primary factor to be considered, it should not be the sole one to be accounted for when sizing the system. Due to the inherent finite-size effects present in physical systems, we establish that the number of constituents primarily affects system-level properties such as exploitation in the transition phase. These results illustrate that instead of learning and optimizing a swarm's behavior for a specific set of task parameters, further work should instead concentrate on learning to be adaptive, thereby endowing the swarm with the highly desirable feature of being able to operate effectively over a wide range of circumstances.
Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.
Over the past few years, the rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision has greatly promoted the performance of medical image segmentation (MedISeg). However, the recent MedISeg publications usually focus on presentations of the major contributions (e.g., network architectures, training strategies, and loss functions) while unwittingly ignoring some marginal implementation details (also known as "tricks"), leading to a potential problem of the unfair experimental result comparisons. In this paper, we collect a series of MedISeg tricks for different model implementation phases (i.e., pre-training model, data pre-processing, data augmentation, model implementation, model inference, and result post-processing), and experimentally explore the effectiveness of these tricks on the consistent baseline models. Compared to paper-driven surveys that only blandly focus on the advantages and limitation analyses of segmentation models, our work provides a large number of solid experiments and is more technically operable. With the extensive experimental results on both the representative 2D and 3D medical image datasets, we explicitly clarify the effect of these tricks. Moreover, based on the surveyed tricks, we also open-sourced a strong MedISeg repository, where each of its components has the advantage of plug-and-play. We believe that this milestone work not only completes a comprehensive and complementary survey of the state-of-the-art MedISeg approaches, but also offers a practical guide for addressing the future medical image processing challenges including but not limited to small dataset learning, class imbalance learning, multi-modality learning, and domain adaptation. The code has been released at: //github.com/hust-linyi/MedISeg
With the rise of deep convolutional neural networks, object detection has achieved prominent advances in past years. However, such prosperity could not camouflage the unsatisfactory situation of Small Object Detection (SOD), one of the notoriously challenging tasks in computer vision, owing to the poor visual appearance and noisy representation caused by the intrinsic structure of small targets. In addition, large-scale dataset for benchmarking small object detection methods remains a bottleneck. In this paper, we first conduct a thorough review of small object detection. Then, to catalyze the development of SOD, we construct two large-scale Small Object Detection dAtasets (SODA), SODA-D and SODA-A, which focus on the Driving and Aerial scenarios respectively. SODA-D includes 24704 high-quality traffic images and 277596 instances of 9 categories. For SODA-A, we harvest 2510 high-resolution aerial images and annotate 800203 instances over 9 classes. The proposed datasets, as we know, are the first-ever attempt to large-scale benchmarks with a vast collection of exhaustively annotated instances tailored for multi-category SOD. Finally, we evaluate the performance of mainstream methods on SODA. We expect the released benchmarks could facilitate the development of SOD and spawn more breakthroughs in this field. Datasets and codes will be available soon at: \url{//shaunyuan22.github.io/SODA}.
Current deep learning research is dominated by benchmark evaluation. A method is regarded as favorable if it empirically performs well on the dedicated test set. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving sets of benchmark data are investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten due to the iterative parameter updates. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless treated in isolation from real world application and typically judged by monitoring accumulated test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant. It is assumed that during deployment a model is guaranteed to encounter data that stems from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown instances and break down in the face of corrupted data. In this work we argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, the identification of statistically deviating data outside of the observed dataset, and the adjacent field of active learning, where data is incrementally queried such that the expected performance gain is maximized, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Based on these forgotten lessons, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Our results show that this not only benefits each individual paradigm, but highlights the natural synergies in a common framework. We empirically demonstrate improvements when alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data in active learning, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application where previously proposed methods fail.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
Reasoning with knowledge expressed in natural language and Knowledge Bases (KBs) is a major challenge for Artificial Intelligence, with applications in machine reading, dialogue, and question answering. General neural architectures that jointly learn representations and transformations of text are very data-inefficient, and it is hard to analyse their reasoning process. These issues are addressed by end-to-end differentiable reasoning systems such as Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs), although they can only be used with small-scale symbolic KBs. In this paper we first propose Greedy NTPs (GNTPs), an extension to NTPs addressing their complexity and scalability limitations, thus making them applicable to real-world datasets. This result is achieved by dynamically constructing the computation graph of NTPs and including only the most promising proof paths during inference, thus obtaining orders of magnitude more efficient models. Then, we propose a novel approach for jointly reasoning over KBs and textual mentions, by embedding logic facts and natural language sentences in a shared embedding space. We show that GNTPs perform on par with NTPs at a fraction of their cost while achieving competitive link prediction results on large datasets, providing explanations for predictions, and inducing interpretable models. Source code, datasets, and supplementary material are available online at //github.com/uclnlp/gntp.
Commonsense knowledge and commonsense reasoning are some of the main bottlenecks in machine intelligence. In the NLP community, many benchmark datasets and tasks have been created to address commonsense reasoning for language understanding. These tasks are designed to assess machines' ability to acquire and learn commonsense knowledge in order to reason and understand natural language text. As these tasks become instrumental and a driving force for commonsense research, this paper aims to provide an overview of existing tasks and benchmarks, knowledge resources, and learning and inference approaches toward commonsense reasoning for natural language understanding. Through this, our goal is to support a better understanding of the state of the art, its limitations, and future challenges.