Neurosymbolic Graph Enrichment for Grounded World Models

The development of artificial intelligence systems capable of understanding and reasoning about complex real-world scenarios is a significant challenge. In this work we present a novel approach to enhance and exploit LLM reactive capability to address complex problems and interpret deeply contextual real-world meaning. We introduce a method and a tool for creating a multimodal, knowledge-augmented formal representation of meaning that combines the strengths of large language models with structured semantic representations. Our method begins with an image input, utilizing state-of-the-art large language models to generate a natural language description. This description is then transformed into an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph, which is formalized and enriched with logical design patterns, and layered semantics derived from linguistic and factual knowledge bases. The resulting graph is then fed back into the LLM to be extended with implicit knowledge activated by complex heuristic learning, including semantic implicatures, moral values, embodied cognition, and metaphorical representations. By bridging the gap between unstructured language models and formal semantic structures, our method opens new avenues for tackling intricate problems in natural language understanding and reasoning.

A Reference Software Architecture for Social Robots

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes difficult to rapidly develop, customise, and personalise robotic solutions. These challenges may be mitigated at design time by choosing certain architectural styles, implementing specific architectural patterns and using particular technologies. Leveraging on our experience in the MARIO project, in this paper we propose a series of principles that social robots may benefit from. These principles lay also the foundations for the design of a reference software architecture for Social Robots. The ultimate goal of this work is to establish a common ground based on a reference software architecture to allow to easily reuse robotic software components in order to rapidly develop, implement, and personalise Social Robots.