Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches to problem-solving and decision-making are becoming more and more complex, leading to a decrease in the understandability of solutions. The European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation tries to tackle this problem by stipulating a "right to explanation" for decisions made by AI systems. One of the AI paradigms that may be affected by this new regulation is Answer Set Programming (ASP). Thanks to the emergence of efficient solvers, ASP has recently been used for problem-solving in a variety of domains, including medicine, cryptography, and biology. To ensure the successful application of ASP as a problem-solving paradigm in the future, explanations of ASP solutions are crucial. In this survey, we give an overview of approaches that provide an answer to the question of why an answer set is a solution to a given problem, notably off-line justifications, causal graphs, argumentative explanations and why-not provenance, and highlight their similarities and differences. Moreover, we review methods explaining why a set of literals is not an answer set or why no solution exists at all.
Universität Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）
Reactive answer set programming has paved the way for incorporating online information into operative solving processes. Although this technology was originally devised for dealing with data streams in dynamic environments, like assisted living and cognitive robotics, it can likewise be used to incorporate facts, rules, or queries provided by a user. As a result, we present the design and implementation of a system for interactive query answering with reactive answer set programming. Our system quontroller is based on the reactive solver oclingo and implemented as a dedicated front-end. We des…
Researchers in answer set programming and constraint programming have spent significant efforts in the development of hybrid languages and solving algorithms combining the strengths of these traditionally separate fields. These efforts resulted in a new research area: constraint answer set programming. Constraint answer set programming languages and systems proved to be successful at providing declarative, yet efficient solutions to problems involving hybrid reasoning tasks. One of the main contributions of this paper is the first comprehensive account of the constraint answer set language and…
Query answering in Answer Set Programming (ASP) is usually solved by computing (a subset of) the cautious consequences of a logic program. This task is computationally very hard, and there are programs for which computing cautious consequences is not viable in reasonable time. However, current ASP solvers produce the (whole) set of cautious consequences only at the end of their computation. This paper reports on strategies for computing cautious consequences, also introducing anytime algorithms able to produce sound answers during the computation.
A prominent problem in knowledge representation is how to answer queries taking into account also the implicit consequences of an ontology representing domain knowledge. While this problem has been widely studied within the realm of description logic ontologies, it has been surprisingly neglected within the context of vague or imprecise knowledge, particularly from the point of view of mathematical fuzzy logic. In this paper we study the problem of answering conjunctive queries and threshold queries w.r.t. ontologies in fuzzy DL-Lite. Specifically, we show through a rewriting approach that thr…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Werstern Sydney University（西悉尼大学）
Traditional inconsistency-tolerent query answering in ontology-based data access relies on selecting maximal components of an ABox/database which are consistent with the ontology. However, some rules in ontologies might be unreliable if they are extracted from ontology learning or written by unskillful knowledge engineers. In this paper we present a framework of handling inconsistent existential rules under stable model semantics, which is defined by a notion called rule repairs to select maximal components of the existential rules. Surprisingly, for R-acyclic existential rules with R-stratifi…
Scalable Neural-Probabilistic Answer Set Programming
TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI)（黑森人工智能中心（hessian.AI））；Centre for Cognitive Science, TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学认知科学中心）；German Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））
New Mexico State University（新墨西哥州立大学）；Saint Joseph’s University（圣约瑟夫大学）
We present an explanation system for applications that leverage Answer Set Programming (ASP). Given a program P, an answer set A of P, and an atom a in the program P, our system generates all explanation graphs of a which help explain why a is true (or false) given the program P and the answer set A. We illustrate the functionality of the system using some examples from the literature.
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
Answering realistic questions about biological systems and pathways similar to the ones used by text books to test understanding of students about biological systems is one of our long term research goals. Often these questions require simulation based reasoning. To answer such questions, we need formalisms to build pathway models, add extensions, simulate, and reason with them. We chose Petri Nets and Answer Set Programming (ASP) as suitable formalisms, since Petri Net models are similar to biological pathway diagrams; and ASP provides easy extension and strong reasoning abilities. We found t…
Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；Samsung AI Research（三星人工智能研究院）
State-of-the-art inference approaches in probabilistic logic programming typically start by computing the relevant ground program with respect to the queries of interest, and then use this program for probabilistic inference using knowledge compilation and weighted model counting. We propose an alternative approach that uses efficient Datalog techniques to integrate knowledge compilation with forward reasoning with a non-ground program. This effectively eliminates the grounding bottleneck that so far has prohibited the application of probabilistic logic programming in query answering scenarios…
CENTRIA（里斯本新大学科学技术学院信息学系人工智能中心）；Faculdade Ciências e Tecnologias Universidade Nova de Lisboa（里斯本新大学科学技术学院）
Ontologies and rules are usually loosely coupled in knowledge representation formalisms. In fact, ontologies use open-world reasoning while the leading semantics for rules use non-monotonic, closed-world reasoning. One exception is the tightly-coupled framework of Minimal Knowledge and Negation as Failure (MKNF), which allows statements about individuals to be jointly derived via entailment from an ontology and inferences from rules. Nonetheless, the practical usefulness of MKNF has not always been clear, although recent work has formalized a general resolution-based method for querying MKNF w…
A data integration system provides transparent access to different data sources by suitably combining their data, and providing the user with a unified view of them, called global schema. However, source data are generally not under the control of the data integration process, thus integrated data may violate global integrity constraints even in presence of locally-consistent data sources. In this scenario, it may be anyway interesting to retrieve as much consistent information as possible. The process of answering user queries under global constraint violations is called consistent query answ…
The task of Video Question Answering (VideoQA) consists in answering natural language questions about a video and serves as a proxy to evaluate the performance of a model in scene sequence understanding. Most methods designed for VideoQA up-to-date are end-to-end deep learning architectures which struggle at complex temporal and causal reasoning and provide limited transparency in reasoning steps. We present the HySTER: a Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Event Reasoner to reason over physical events in videos. Our model leverages the strength of deep learning methods to extract information from video fr…
University of Bremen（不来梅大学）；Örebro University（厄勒布鲁大学）；CoDesign Lab / Cognitive Vision（协同设计实验室/认知视觉实验室）
We demonstrate the need and potential of systematically integrated vision and semantics} solutions for visual sensemaking (in the backdrop of autonomous driving). A general method for online visual sensemaking using answer set programming is systematically formalised and fully implemented. The method integrates state of the art in (deep learning based) visual computing, and is developed as a modular framework usable within hybrid architectures for perception & control. We evaluate and demo with community established benchmarks KITTIMOD and MOT. As use-case, we focus on the significance of huma…
International Institute of Information Technology（国际信息技术学院）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology（因德拉普拉斯塔信息技术学院）
Knowledge Graph (KG) embeddings provide a low-dimensional representation of entities and relations of a Knowledge Graph and are used successfully for various applications such as question answering and search, reasoning, inference, and missing link prediction. However, most of the existing KG embeddings only consider the network structure of the graph and ignore the semantics and the characteristics of the underlying ontology that provides crucial information about relationships between entities in the KG. Recent efforts in this direction involve learning embeddings for a Description Logic (lo…
Consistent query answering over a database that violates primary key constraints is a classical hard problem in database research that has been traditionally dealt with logic programming. However, the applicability of existing logic-based solutions is restricted to data sets of moderate size. This paper presents a novel decomposition and pruning strategy that reduces, in polynomial time, the problem of computing the consistent answer to a conjunctive query over a database subject to primary key constraints to a collection of smaller problems of the same sort that can be solved independently. T…
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
While in recent years machine learning (ML) based approaches have been the popular approach in developing end-to-end question answering systems, such systems often struggle when additional knowledge is needed to correctly answer the questions. Proposed alternatives involve translating the question and the natural language text to a logical representation and then use logical reasoning. However, this alternative falters when the size of the text gets bigger. To address this we propose an approach that does logical reasoning over premises written in natural language text. The proposed method use…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)（艾伦人工智能研究所（AI2））
Answering science questions posed in natural language is an important AI challenge. Answering such questions often requires non-trivial inference and knowledge that goes beyond factoid retrieval. Yet, most systems for this task are based on relatively shallow Information Retrieval (IR) and statistical correlation techniques operating on large unstructured corpora. We propose a structured inference system for this task, formulated as an Integer Linear Program (ILP), that answers natural language questions using a semi-structured knowledge base derived from text, including questions requiring mu…
Aligning LLMs through Multi-perspective User Preference Ranking-based Feedback for Programming Question Answering
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学人工智能与数据科学学院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
As large language models (LLMs) grow larger and more sophisticated, assessing their "reasoning" capabilities in natural language grows more challenging. Recent question answering (QA) benchmarks that attempt to assess reasoning are often limited by a narrow scope of covered situations and subject matters. We introduce WikiWhy, a QA dataset built around a novel auxiliary task: explaining why an answer is true in natural language. WikiWhy contains over 9,000 "why" question-answer-rationale triples, grounded on Wikipedia facts across a diverse set of topics. Each rationale is a set of supporting …
ChainReaction: Causal Chain-Guided Reasoning for Modular and Explainable Causal-Why Video Question Answering
Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore（新加坡高性能计算研究所，科技研究局）；Centre for Frontier AI Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore（科技研究局前沿人工智能研究中心，新加坡）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore（新加坡南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）
Université de Nice–Sophia Antipolis（尼斯-索菲亚安提波利斯大学）；Brown University（布朗大学）
This report describes experimental results for a set of benchmarks on program verification. It compares the capabilities of CPBVP "Constraint Programming framework for Bounded Program Verification" [4] with the following frameworks: ESC/Java, CBMC, Blast, EUREKA and Why.
University of California Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
As an important part of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Question Answering (QA) aims at generating answers to questions phrased in natural language. While there has been substantial progress in open-domain question answering, QA systems are still struggling to answer questions which involve geographic entities or concepts and that require spatial operations. In this paper, we discuss the problem of geographic question answering (GeoQA). We first investigate the reasons why geographic questions are difficult to answer by analyzing challenges of geographic questions. We discuss the uniqueness of g…
Deep neural networks have shown striking progress and obtained state-of-the-art results in many AI research fields in the recent years. However, it is often unsatisfying to not know why they predict what they do. In this paper, we address the problem of interpreting Visual Question Answering (VQA) models. Specifically, we are interested in finding what part of the input (pixels in images or words in questions) the VQA model focuses on while answering the question. To tackle this problem, we use two visualization techniques -- guided backpropagation and occlusion -- to find important words in t…
Understanding the meaning of a text is a fundamental challenge of natural language understanding (NLU) and from its early days, it has received significant attention through question answering (QA) tasks. We introduce a general semantics-based framework for natural language QA and also describe the SQuARE system, an application of this framework. The framework is based on the denotational semantics approach widely used in programming language research. In our framework, valuation function maps syntax tree of the text to its commonsense meaning represented using basic knowledge primitives (the …
The recent outbreak of the novel coronavirus is wreaking havoc on the world and researchers are struggling to effectively combat it. One reason why the fight is difficult is due to the lack of information and knowledge. In this work, we outline our effort to contribute to shrinking this knowledge vacuum by creating covidAsk, a question answering (QA) system that combines biomedical text mining and QA techniques to provide answers to questions in real-time. Our system also leverages information retrieval (IR) approaches to provide entity-level answers that are complementary to QA models. Evalua…
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Southeast University-Monash University Joint Research Institute（东南大学-莫纳什大学联合研究院）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Complex question-answering (CQA) involves answering complex natural-language questions on a knowledge base (KB). However, the conventional neural program induction (NPI) approach exhibits uneven performance when the questions have different types, harboring inherently different characteristics, e.g., difficulty level. This paper proposes a meta-reinforcement learning approach to program induction in CQA to tackle the potential distributional bias in questions. Our method quickly and effectively adapts the meta-learned programmer to new questions based on the most similar questions retrieved fr…
Our goal is a question-answering (QA) system that can show how its answers are implied by its own internal beliefs via a systematic chain of reasoning. Such a capability would allow better understanding of why a model produced the answer it did. Our approach is to recursively combine a trained backward-chaining model, capable of generating a set of premises entailing an answer hypothesis, with a verifier that checks that the model itself believes those premises (and the entailment itself) through self-querying. To our knowledge, this is the first system to generate multistep chains that are bo…
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学计算机科学学院）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Despite the rapid progress in multihop question-answering (QA), models still have trouble explaining why an answer is correct, with limited explanation training data available to learn from. To address this, we introduce three explanation datasets in which explanations formed from corpus facts are annotated. Our first dataset, eQASC, contains over 98K explanation annotations for the multihop question answering dataset QASC, and is the first that annotates multiple candidate explanations for each answer. The second dataset eQASC-perturbed is constructed by crowd-sourcing perturbations (while pr…
Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）；New York University（纽约大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar（加拿大高级研究院阿兹列利全球学者项目）
We aim to improve question answering (QA) by decomposing hard questions into simpler sub-questions that existing QA systems are capable of answering. Since labeling questions with decompositions is cumbersome, we take an unsupervised approach to produce sub-questions, also enabling us to leverage millions of questions from the internet. Specifically, we propose an algorithm for One-to-N Unsupervised Sequence transduction (ONUS) that learns to map one hard, multi-hop question to many simpler, single-hop sub-questions. We answer sub-questions with an off-the-shelf QA model and give the resulting…
University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）
We propose a novel approach for answering and explaining multiple-choice science questions by reasoning on grounding and abstract inference chains. This paper frames question answering as an abductive reasoning problem, constructing plausible explanations for each choice and then selecting the candidate with the best explanation as the final answer. Our system, ExplanationLP, elicits explanations by constructing a weighted graph of relevant facts for each candidate answer and extracting the facts that satisfy certain structural and semantic constraints. To extract the explanations, we employ a…
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
While day-to-day questions come with a variety of answer types, the current question-answering (QA) literature has failed to adequately address the answer diversity of questions. To this end, we present GooAQ, a large-scale dataset with a variety of answer types. This dataset contains over 5 million questions and 3 million answers collected from Google. GooAQ questions are collected semi-automatically from the Google search engine using its autocomplete feature. This results in naturalistic questions of practical interest that are nonetheless short and expressed using simple language. GooAQ an…
Tri-VQA: Triangular Reasoning Medical Visual Question Answering for Multi-Attribute Analysis
School of Computing；Artificial Intelligence Southwest Jiaotong University Chengdu, China；Artificial Intelligence Southwest Jiaotong University Chengdu, China z\ c\；Institute of Innovative Research Tokyo Institute of Technology Yokohama, Japan
CausalChaos! Dataset for Comprehensive Causal Action Question Answering Over Longer Causal Chains Grounded in Dynamic Visual Scenes
Institute of High-Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore（高性能计算研究所，科技研究局，新加坡）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Singapore Polytechnic（新加坡理工学院）
