Cognitive LLMs: Towards Integrating Cognitive Architectures and Large Language Models for Manufacturing Decision-making

Resolving the dichotomy between the human-like yet constrained reasoning processes of Cognitive Architectures and the broad but often noisy inference behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a challenging but exciting pursuit, for enabling reliable machine reasoning capabilities in production systems. Because Cognitive Architectures are famously developed for the purpose of modeling the internal mechanisms of human cognitive decision-making at a computational level, new investigations consider the goal of informing LLMs with the knowledge necessary for replicating such processes, e.g., guided perception, memory, goal-setting, and action. Previous approaches that use LLMs for grounded decision-making struggle with complex reasoning tasks that require slower, deliberate cognition over fast and intuitive inference -- reporting issues related to the lack of sufficient grounding, as in hallucination. To resolve these challenges, we introduce LLM-ACTR, a novel neuro-symbolic architecture that provides human-aligned and versatile decision-making by integrating the ACT-R Cognitive Architecture with LLMs. Our framework extracts and embeds knowledge of ACT-R's internal decision-making process as latent neural representations, injects this information into trainable LLM adapter layers, and fine-tunes the LLMs for downstream prediction. Our experiments on novel Design for Manufacturing tasks show both improved task performance as well as improved grounded decision-making capability of our approach, compared to LLM-only baselines that leverage chain-of-thought reasoning strategies.

An Initial Description of Capabilities and Constraints for a Computational Auditory System (an Artificial Ear) for Cognitive Architectures

We present an initial set of factors, features, and constraints for developing a Computational Auditory System (CAS, aka less formally an artificial ear, AE) for use by cognitive architectures. We start to define a CAS and what tasks it should be able to perform. We then outline the features of a CAS for use by a cognitive architecture and factors that influence its performance. We conclude with an update on what has been created so far and insights on how to create and use a CAS in a cognitive architecture and include a set of functionalities for an artificial ear.