Relational Programming with Foundation Models

Foundation models have vast potential to enable diverse AI applications. The powerful yet incomplete nature of these models has spurred a wide range of mechanisms to augment them with capabilities such as in-context learning, information retrieval, and code interpreting. We propose Vieira, a declarative framework that unifies these mechanisms in a general solution for programming with foundation models. Vieira follows a probabilistic relational paradigm and treats foundation models as stateless functions with relational inputs and outputs. It supports neuro-symbolic applications by enabling the seamless combination of such models with logic programs, as well as complex, multi-modal applications by streamlining the composition of diverse sub-models. We implement Vieira by extending the Scallop compiler with a foreign interface that supports foundation models as plugins. We implement plugins for 12 foundation models including GPT, CLIP, and SAM. We evaluate Vieira on 9 challenging tasks that span language, vision, and structured and vector databases. Our evaluation shows that programs in Vieira are concise, can incorporate modern foundation models, and have comparable or better accuracy than competitive baselines.

Dolphin: A Programmable Framework for Scalable Neurosymbolic Learning

Neurosymbolic learning has emerged as a promising paradigm to incorporate symbolic reasoning into deep learning models. However, existing frameworks are limited in scalability with respect to both the training data and the complexity of symbolic programs. We propose Dolphin, a framework to scale neurosymbolic learning at a fundamental level by mapping both forward chaining and backward gradient propagation in symbolic programs to vectorized computations. For this purpose, Dolphin introduces a set of abstractions and primitives built directly on top of a high-performance deep learning framework like PyTorch, effectively enabling symbolic programs to be written as PyTorch modules. It thereby enables neurosymbolic programs to be written in a language like Python that is familiar to developers and compile them to computation graphs that are amenable to end-to-end differentiation on GPUs. We evaluate Dolphin on a suite of 13 benchmarks across 5 neurosymbolic tasks that combine deep learning models for text, image, or video processing with symbolic programs that involve multi-hop reasoning, recursion, and even black-box functions like Python eval(). Dolphin only takes 0.33%-37.17% of the time (and 2.77% on average) to train these models on the largest input per task compared to baselines Scallop, ISED, and IndeCateR+, which time out on most of these inputs. Models written in Dolphin also achieve state-of-the-art accuracies even on the largest benchmarks.

Self-supervised Activity Representation Learning with Incremental Data: An Empirical Study

In the context of mobile sensing environments, various sensors on mobile devices continually generate a vast amount of data. Analyzing this ever-increasing data presents several challenges, including limited access to annotated data and a constantly changing environment. Recent advancements in self-supervised learning have been utilized as a pre-training step to enhance the performance of conventional supervised models to address the absence of labelled datasets. This research examines the impact of using a self-supervised representation learning model for time series classification tasks in which data is incrementally available. We proposed and evaluated a workflow in which a model learns to extract informative features using a corpus of unlabeled time series data and then conducts classification on labelled data using features extracted by the model. We analyzed the effect of varying the size, distribution, and source of the unlabeled data on the final classification performance across four public datasets, including various types of sensors in diverse applications.

Dialogue Object Search

We envision robots that can collaborate and communicate seamlessly with humans. It is necessary for such robots to decide both what to say and how to act, while interacting with humans. To this end, we introduce a new task, dialogue object search: A robot is tasked to search for a target object (e.g. fork) in a human environment (e.g., kitchen), while engaging in a "video call" with a remote human who has additional but inexact knowledge about the target's location. That is, the robot conducts speech-based dialogue with the human, while sharing the image from its mounted camera. This task is challenging at multiple levels, from data collection, algorithm and system development,to evaluation. Despite these challenges, we believe such a task blocks the path towards more intelligent and collaborative robots. In this extended abstract, we motivate and introduce the dialogue object search task and analyze examples collected from a pilot study. We then discuss our next steps and conclude with several challenges on which we hope to receive feedback.