In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark to investigate models' logical reasoning capabilities in complex real-life scenarios. Current explanation datasets often employ synthetic data with simple reasoning structures. Therefore, it cannot express more complex reasoning processes, such as the rebuttal to a reasoning step and the degree of certainty of the evidence. To this end, we propose a comprehensive logical reasoning explanation form. Based on the multi-hop chain of reasoning, the explanation form includes three main components: (1) The condition of rebuttal that the reasoning node can be challenged; (2) Logical formulae that uncover the internal texture of reasoning nodes; (3) Reasoning strength indicated by degrees of certainty. The fine-grained structure conforms to the real logical reasoning scenario, better fitting the human cognitive process but, simultaneously, is more challenging for the current models. We evaluate the current best models' performance on this new explanation form. The experimental results show that generating reasoning graphs remains a challenging task for current models, even with the help of giant pre-trained language models.
Library learning compresses a given corpus of programs by extracting common structure from the corpus into reusable library functions. Prior work on library learning suffers from two limitations that prevent it from scaling to larger, more complex inputs. First, it explores too many candidate library functions that are not useful for compression. Second, it is not robust to syntactic variation in the input. We propose library learning modulo theory (LLMT), a new library learning algorithm that additionally takes as input an equational theory for a given problem domain. LLMT uses e-graphs and equality saturation to compactly represent the space of programs equivalent modulo the theory, and uses a novel e-graph anti-unification technique to find common patterns in the corpus more directly and efficiently. We implemented LLMT in a tool named BABBLE. Our evaluation shows that BABBLE achieves better compression orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art. We also provide a qualitative evaluation showing that BABBLE learns reusable functions on inputs previously out of reach for library learning.
Software bugs claim approximately 50% of development time and cost the global economy billions of dollars. Once a bug is reported, the assigned developer attempts to identify and understand the source code responsible for the bug and then corrects the code. Over the last five decades, there has been significant research on automatically finding or correcting software bugs. However, there has been little research on automatically explaining the bugs to the developers, which is essential but a highly challenging task. In this paper, we propose Bugsplainer, a transformer-based generative model, that generates natural language explanations for software bugs by learning from a large corpus of bug-fix commits. Bugsplainer can leverage structural information and buggy patterns from the source code to generate an explanation for a bug. Our evaluation using three performance metrics shows that Bugsplainer can generate understandable and good explanations according to Google's standard, and can outperform multiple baselines from the literature. We also conduct a developer study involving 20 participants where the explanations from Bugsplainer were found to be more accurate, more precise, more concise and more useful than the baselines.
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is essential for enabling clinical users to get informed decision support from AI and comply with evidence-based medical practice. Applying XAI in clinical settings requires proper evaluation criteria to ensure the explanation technique is both technically sound and clinically useful, but specific support is lacking to achieve this goal. To bridge the research gap, we propose the Clinical XAI Guidelines that consist of five criteria a clinical XAI needs to be optimized for. The guidelines recommend choosing an explanation form based on Guideline 1 (G1) Understandability and G2 Clinical relevance. For the chosen explanation form, its specific XAI technique should be optimized for G3 Truthfulness, G4 Informative plausibility, and G5 Computational efficiency. Following the guidelines, we conducted a systematic evaluation on a novel problem of multi-modal medical image explanation with two clinical tasks, and proposed new evaluation metrics accordingly. Sixteen commonly-used heatmap XAI techniques were evaluated and found to be insufficient for clinical use due to their failure in G3 and G4. Our evaluation demonstrated the use of Clinical XAI Guidelines to support the design and evaluation of clinically viable XAI.
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles are deployed for a variety tasks including surveillance and monitoring. Perching and staring allow the vehicle to monitor targets without flying, saving battery power and increasing the overall mission time without the need to frequently replace batteries. This paper addresses the Active Visual Perching (AVP) control problem to autonomously perch on inclined surfaces up to $90^\circ$. Our approach generates dynamically feasible trajectories to navigate and perch on a desired target location, while taking into account actuator and Field of View (FoV) constraints. By replanning in mid-flight, we take advantage of more accurate target localization increasing the perching maneuver's robustness to target localization or control errors. We leverage the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions to identify the compatibility between planning objectives and the visual sensing constraint during the planned maneuver. Furthermore, we experimentally identify the corresponding boundary conditions that maximizes the spatio-temporal target visibility during the perching maneuver. The proposed approach works on-board in real-time with significant computational constraints relying exclusively on cameras and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Experimental results validate the proposed approach and shows the higher success rate as well as increased target interception precision and accuracy with respect to a one-shot planning approach, while still retaining aggressive capabilities with flight envelopes that include large excursions from the hover position on inclined surfaces up to 90$^\circ$, angular speeds up to 750~deg/s, and accelerations up to 10~m/s$^2$.
This paper presents ReasonFormer, a unified reasoning framework for mirroring the modular and compositional reasoning process of humans in complex decision-making. Inspired by dual-process theory in cognitive science, the representation module (automatic thinking) and reasoning modules (controlled thinking) are decoupled to capture different levels of cognition. Upon the top of the representation module, the pre-trained reasoning modules are modular and professional in specific and fundamental reasoning skills (e.g., logic, simple QA, etc). To mimic the controlled compositional thinking process, different reasoning modules are dynamically activated and composed in both parallel and cascaded manners to control what reasoning skills are activated and how deep the reasoning process will be reached to solve the current problems. The unified reasoning framework solves multiple tasks with a single model, and is trained and inferred in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on 11 datasets requiring different reasoning skills and complexity, ReasonFormer demonstrates substantial performance boosts, revealing the compositional reasoning ability. Few-shot experiments exhibit better generalization ability by learning to compose pre-trained skills for new tasks with limited data, and decoupling the representation module and the reasoning modules. Further analysis shows the modularity of reasoning modules as different tasks activate distinct reasoning skills at different reasoning depths.
Recent advances in pixel-level tasks (e.g., segmentation) illustrate the benefit of long-range interactions between aggregated region-based representations that can enhance local features. However, such pixel-to-region associations and the resulting representation, which often take the form of attention, cannot model the underlying semantic structure of the scene (e.g., individual objects and, by extension, their interactions). In this work, we take a step toward addressing this limitation. Specifically, we propose an architecture where we learn to project image features into latent region representations and perform global reasoning across them, using a transformer, to produce contextualized and scene-consistent representations that are then fused with original pixel-level features. Our design enables the latent regions to represent semantically meaningful concepts, by ensuring that activated regions are spatially disjoint and unions of such regions correspond to connected object segments. The resulting semantic global reasoning (SGR) is end-to-end trainable and can be combined with any semantic segmentation framework and backbone. Combining SGR with DeepLabV3 results in a semantic segmentation performance that is competitive to the state-of-the-art, while resulting in more semantically interpretable and diverse region representations, which we show can effectively transfer to detection and instance segmentation. Further, we propose a new metric that allows us to measure the semantics of representations at both the object class and instance level.
Structural data well exists in Web applications, such as social networks in social media, citation networks in academic websites, and threads data in online forums. Due to the complex topology, it is difficult to process and make use of the rich information within such data. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great advantages on learning representations for structural data. However, the non-transparency of the deep learning models makes it non-trivial to explain and interpret the predictions made by GNNs. Meanwhile, it is also a big challenge to evaluate the GNN explanations, since in many cases, the ground-truth explanations are unavailable. In this paper, we take insights of Counterfactual and Factual (CF^2) reasoning from causal inference theory, to solve both the learning and evaluation problems in explainable GNNs. For generating explanations, we propose a model-agnostic framework by formulating an optimization problem based on both of the two casual perspectives. This distinguishes CF^2 from previous explainable GNNs that only consider one of them. Another contribution of the work is the evaluation of GNN explanations. For quantitatively evaluating the generated explanations without the requirement of ground-truth, we design metrics based on Counterfactual and Factual reasoning to evaluate the necessity and sufficiency of the explanations. Experiments show that no matter ground-truth explanations are available or not, CF^2 generates better explanations than previous state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets. Moreover, the statistic analysis justifies the correlation between the performance on ground-truth evaluation and our proposed metrics.
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.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Recent years have witnessed the enormous success of low-dimensional vector space representations of knowledge graphs to predict missing facts or find erroneous ones. Currently, however, it is not yet well-understood how ontological knowledge, e.g. given as a set of (existential) rules, can be embedded in a principled way. To address this shortcoming, in this paper we introduce a framework based on convex regions, which can faithfully incorporate ontological knowledge into the vector space embedding. Our technical contribution is two-fold. First, we show that some of the most popular existing embedding approaches are not capable of modelling even very simple types of rules. Second, we show that our framework can represent ontologies that are expressed using so-called quasi-chained existential rules in an exact way, such that any set of facts which is induced using that vector space embedding is logically consistent and deductively closed with respect to the input ontology.