Measuring Error Alignment for Decision-Making Systems

Given that AI systems are set to play a pivotal role in future decision-making processes, their trustworthiness and reliability are of critical concern. Due to their scale and complexity, modern AI systems resist direct interpretation, and alternative ways are needed to establish trust in those systems, and determine how well they align with human values. We argue that good measures of the information processing similarities between AI and humans, may be able to achieve these same ends. While Representational alignment (RA) approaches measure similarity between the internal states of two systems, the associated data can be expensive and difficult to collect for human systems. In contrast, Behavioural alignment (BA) comparisons are cheaper and easier, but questions remain as to their sensitivity and reliability. We propose two new behavioural alignment metrics misclassification agreement which measures the similarity between the errors of two systems on the same instances, and class-level error similarity which measures the similarity between the error distributions of two systems. We show that our metrics correlate well with RA metrics, and provide complementary information to another BA metric, within a range of domains, and set the scene for a new approach to value alignment.

Unsupervised Learning of Graph from Recipes

Cooking recipes are one of the most readily available kinds of procedural text. They consist of natural language instructions that can be challenging to interpret. In this paper, we propose a model to identify relevant information from recipes and generate a graph to represent the sequence of actions in the recipe. In contrast with other approaches, we use an unsupervised approach. We iteratively learn the graph structure and the parameters of a $\mathsf{GNN}$ encoding the texts (text-to-graph) one sequence at a time while providing the supervision by decoding the graph into text (graph-to-text) and comparing the generated text to the input. We evaluate the approach by comparing the identified entities with annotated datasets, comparing the difference between the input and output texts, and comparing our generated graphs with those generated by state of the art methods.

PizzaCommonSense: Learning to Model Commonsense Reasoning about Intermediate Steps in Cooking Recipes

Decoding the core of procedural texts, exemplified by cooking recipes, is crucial for intelligent reasoning and instruction automation. Procedural texts can be comprehensively defined as a sequential chain of steps to accomplish a task employing resources. From a cooking perspective, these instructions can be interpreted as a series of modifications to a food preparation, which initially comprises a set of ingredients. These changes involve transformations of comestible resources. For a model to effectively reason about cooking recipes, it must accurately discern and understand the inputs and outputs of intermediate steps within the recipe. Aiming to address this, we present a new corpus of cooking recipes enriched with descriptions of intermediate steps of the recipes that explicate the input and output for each step. We discuss the data collection process, investigate and provide baseline models based on T5 and GPT-3.5. This work presents a challenging task and insight into commonsense reasoning and procedural text generation.

A Graphical Formalism for Commonsense Reasoning with Recipes

Whilst cooking is a very important human activity, there has been little consideration given to how we can formalize recipes for use in a reasoning framework. We address this need by proposing a graphical formalization that captures the comestibles (ingredients, intermediate food items, and final products), and the actions on comestibles in the form of a labelled bipartite graph. We then propose formal definitions for comparing recipes, for composing recipes from subrecipes, and for deconstructing recipes into subrecipes. We also introduce and compare two formal definitions for substitution into recipes which are required when there are missing ingredients, or some actions are not possible, or because there is a need to change the final product somehow.

Automatic Concept Extraction for Concept Bottleneck-based Video Classification

Recent efforts in interpretable deep learning models have shown that concept-based explanation methods achieve competitive accuracy with standard end-to-end models and enable reasoning and intervention about extracted high-level visual concepts from images, e.g., identifying the wing color and beak length for bird-species classification. However, these concept bottleneck models rely on a necessary and sufficient set of predefined concepts-which is intractable for complex tasks such as video classification. For complex tasks, the labels and the relationship between visual elements span many frames, e.g., identifying a bird flying or catching prey-necessitating concepts with various levels of abstraction. To this end, we present CoDEx, an automatic Concept Discovery and Extraction module that rigorously composes a necessary and sufficient set of concept abstractions for concept-based video classification. CoDEx identifies a rich set of complex concept abstractions from natural language explanations of videos-obviating the need to predefine the amorphous set of concepts. To demonstrate our method's viability, we construct two new public datasets that combine existing complex video classification datasets with short, crowd-sourced natural language explanations for their labels. Our method elicits inherent complex concept abstractions in natural language to generalize concept-bottleneck methods to complex tasks.

Repurposing of Resources: from Everyday Problem Solving through to Crisis Management

The human ability to repurpose objects and processes is universal, but it is not a well-understood aspect of human intelligence. Repurposing arises in everyday situations such as finding substitutes for missing ingredients when cooking, or for unavailable tools when doing DIY. It also arises in critical, unprecedented situations needing crisis management. After natural disasters and during wartime, people must repurpose the materials and processes available to make shelter, distribute food, etc. Repurposing is equally important in professional life (e.g. clinicians often repurpose medicines off-license) and in addressing societal challenges (e.g. finding new roles for waste products,). Despite the importance of repurposing, the topic has received little academic attention. By considering examples from a variety of domains such as every-day activities, drug repurposing and natural disasters, we identify some principle characteristics of the process and describe some technical challenges that would be involved in modelling and simulating it. We consider cases of both substitution, i.e. finding an alternative for a missing resource, and exploitation, i.e. identifying a new role for an existing resource. We argue that these ideas could be developed into general formal theory of repurposing, and that this could then lead to the development of AI methods based on commonsense reasoning, argumentation, ontological reasoning, and various machine learning methods, to develop tools to support repurposing in practice.

On the Transferability of VAE Embeddings using Relational Knowledge with Semi-Supervision

We propose a new model for relational VAE semi-supervision capable of balancing disentanglement and low complexity modelling of relations with different symbolic properties. We compare the relative benefits of relation-decoder complexity and latent space structure on both inductive and transductive transfer learning. Our results depict a complex picture where enforcing structure on semi-supervised representations can greatly improve zero-shot transductive transfer, but may be less favourable or even impact negatively the capacity for inductive transfer.

On the Effects of Knowledge-Augmented Data in Word Embeddings

This paper investigates techniques for knowledge injection into word embeddings learned from large corpora of unannotated data. These representations are trained with word cooccurrence statistics and do not commonly exploit syntactic and semantic information from linguistic knowledge bases, which potentially limits their transferability to domains with differing language distributions or usages. We propose a novel approach for linguistic knowledge injection through data augmentation to learn word embeddings that enforce semantic relationships from the data, and systematically evaluate the impact it has on the resulting representations. We show our knowledge augmentation approach improves the intrinsic characteristics of the learned embeddings while not significantly altering their results on a downstream text classification task.

RLOC: Neurobiologically Inspired Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Continuous Control of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

Nonlinear optimal control problems are often solved with numerical methods that require knowledge of system's dynamics which may be difficult to infer, and that carry a large computational cost associated with iterative calculations. We present a novel neurobiologically inspired hierarchical learning framework, Reinforcement Learning Optimal Control, which operates on two levels of abstraction and utilises a reduced number of controllers to solve nonlinear systems with unknown dynamics in continuous state and action spaces. Our approach is inspired by research at two levels of abstraction: first, at the level of limb coordination human behaviour is explained by linear optimal feedback control theory. Second, in cognitive tasks involving learning symbolic level action selection, humans learn such problems using model-free and model-based reinforcement learning algorithms. We propose that combining these two levels of abstraction leads to a fast global solution of nonlinear control problems using reduced number of controllers. Our framework learns the local task dynamics from naive experience and forms locally optimal infinite horizon Linear Quadratic Regulators which produce continuous low-level control. A top-level reinforcement learner uses the controllers as actions and learns how to best combine them in state space while maximising a long-term reward. A single optimal control objective function drives high-level symbolic learning by providing training signals on desirability of each selected controller. We show that a small number of locally optimal linear controllers are able to solve global nonlinear control problems with unknown dynamics when combined with a reinforcement learner in this hierarchical framework. Our algorithm competes in terms of computational cost and solution quality with sophisticated control algorithms and we illustrate this with solutions to benchmark problems.

Foundations for a Probabilistic Event Calculus

We present PEC, an Event Calculus (EC) style action language for reasoning about probabilistic causal and narrative information. It has an action language style syntax similar to that of the EC variant Modular-E. Its semantics is given in terms of possible worlds which constitute possible evolutions of the domain, and builds on that of EFEC, an epistemic extension of EC. We also describe an ASP implementation of PEC and show the sense in which this is sound and complete.