Tabular reasoning involves interpreting unstructured queries against structured tables, requiring a synthesis of textual understanding and symbolic reasoning. Existing methods rely on either of the approaches and are constrained by their respective limitations. Textual reasoning excels in semantic interpretation unlike symbolic reasoning (SQL logic), but falls short in mathematical reasoning where SQL excels. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm H-STAR, comprising table extraction and adaptive reasoning, integrating both symbolic and semantic (text-based) approaches. To enhance evidence extraction, H-STAR employs a multi-view approach, incorporating step-by-step row and column retrieval. It also adapts reasoning strategies based on question types, utilizing symbolic reasoning for quantitative and logical tasks, and semantic reasoning for direct lookup and complex lexical queries. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that H-STAR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three tabular question-answering (QA) and fact-verification datasets, underscoring its effectiveness and efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling complex reasoning tasks by generating step-by-step rationales.Some methods have proven effective in boosting accuracy by introducing extra verifiers to assess these paths. However, existing verifiers, typically trained on binary-labeled reasoning paths, fail to fully utilize the relative merits of intermediate steps, thereby limiting the effectiveness of the feedback provided. To overcome this limitation, we propose Tree-based Preference Learning Verifier (Tree-PLV), a novel approach that constructs reasoning trees via a best-first search algorithm and collects step-level paired data for preference training. Compared to traditional binary classification, step-level preferences more finely capture the nuances between reasoning steps, allowing for a more precise evaluation of the complete reasoning path. We empirically evaluate Tree-PLV across a range of arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks, where it significantly outperforms existing benchmarks. For instance, Tree-PLV achieved substantial performance gains over the Mistral-7B self-consistency baseline on GSM8K (67.55% to 82.79%), MATH (17.00% to 26.80%), CSQA (68.14% to 72.97%), and StrategyQA (82.86% to 83.25%).Additionally, our study explores the appropriate granularity for applying preference learning, revealing that step-level guidance provides feedback that better aligns with the evaluation of the reasoning process.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, they still suffer from factual errors when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. Retrieval-augmented reasoning represents a promising approach. However, significant challenges still persist, including inaccurate and insufficient retrieval for complex questions, as well as difficulty in integrating multi-source knowledge. To address this, we propose Beam Aggregation Reasoning, BeamAggR, a reasoning framework for knowledge-intensive multi-hop QA. BeamAggR explores and prioritizes promising answers at each hop of question. Concretely, we parse the complex questions into trees, which include atom and composite questions, followed by bottom-up reasoning. For atomic questions, the LLM conducts reasoning on multi-source knowledge to get answer candidates. For composite questions, the LLM combines beam candidates, explores multiple reasoning paths through probabilistic aggregation, and prioritizes the most promising trajectory. Extensive experiments on four open-domain multi-hop reasoning datasets show that our method significantly outperforms SOTA methods by 8.5%. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that BeamAggR elicits better knowledge collaboration and answer aggregation.

The complex structure of the heart leads to significant challenges in echocardiography, especially in acquisition cardiac ultrasound images. Successful echocardiography requires a thorough understanding of the structures on the two-dimensional plane and the spatial relationships between planes in three-dimensional space. In this paper, we innovatively propose a large-scale self-supervised pre-training method to acquire a cardiac structure-aware world model. The core innovation lies in constructing a self-supervised task that requires structural inference by predicting masked structures on a 2D plane and imagining another plane based on pose transformation in 3D space. To support large-scale pre-training, we collected over 1.36 million echocardiograms from ten standard views, along with their 3D spatial poses. In the downstream probe guidance task, we demonstrate that our pre-trained model consistently reduces guidance errors across the ten most common standard views on the test set with 0.29 million samples from 74 routine clinical scans, indicating that structure-aware pre-training benefits the scanning.

Despite significant advancements in robotic systems and surgical data science, ensuring safe and optimal execution in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) remains a complex challenge. Current surgical error detection methods involve two parts: identifying surgical gestures and then detecting errors within each gesture clip. These methods seldom consider the rich contextual and semantic information inherent in surgical videos, limiting their performance due to reliance on accurate gesture identification. Motivated by the chain-of-thought prompting in natural language processing, this letter presents a novel and real-time end-to-end error detection framework, Chain-of-Thought (COG) prompting, leveraging contextual information from surgical videos. This encompasses two reasoning modules designed to mimic the decision-making processes of expert surgeons. Concretely, we first design a Gestural-Visual Reasoning module, which utilizes transformer and attention architectures for gesture prompting, while the second, a Multi-Scale Temporal Reasoning module, employs a multi-stage temporal convolutional network with both slow and fast paths for temporal information extraction. We extensively validate our method on the public benchmark RMIS dataset JIGSAWS. Our method encapsulates the reasoning processes inherent to surgical activities enabling it to outperform the state-of-the-art by 4.6% in F1 score, 4.6% in Accuracy, and 5.9% in Jaccard index while processing each frame in 6.69 milliseconds on average, demonstrating the great potential of our approach in enhancing the safety and efficacy of RMIS procedures and surgical education. The code will be available.

Multimodal Large Models (MLMs) are becoming a significant research focus, combining powerful large language models with multimodal learning to perform complex tasks across different data modalities. This review explores the latest developments and challenges in MLMs, emphasizing their potential in achieving artificial general intelligence and as a pathway to world models. We provide an overview of key techniques such as Multimodal Chain of Thought (M-COT), Multimodal Instruction Tuning (M-IT), and Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL). Additionally, we discuss both the fundamental and specific technologies of multimodal models, highlighting their applications, input/output modalities, and design characteristics. Despite significant advancements, the development of a unified multimodal model remains elusive. We discuss the integration of 3D generation and embodied intelligence to enhance world simulation capabilities and propose incorporating external rule systems for improved reasoning and decision-making. Finally, we outline future research directions to address these challenges and advance the field.

In this chapter, we are interested in formalizing the reasoning of a single agent who can make observations on a dynamic system and considers actions to perform on it. Reasoning about action and change is among the first issues addressed within Artificial Intelligence (AI); especially, it was the subject of the seminal article by McCarthy and Hayes [1969]. Research in this area has been very productive until the late 1990s. Among other things, solutions to the various problems to be faced when dealing with action representation were put forward and a classification of action languages according to their expressive power was undertaken. Moreover, much progress towards the automatization of reasoning about action and change was made, for example through the design and the evaluation of algorithms implementing the reasoning processes of the main action languages and the investigation of the computational complexity of such processes. The reasons why an agent may wish to act in order to modify the current state of a dynamic system or to learn more about it are numerous.

Understanding commonsense causality is a unique mark of intelligence for humans. It helps people understand the principles of the real world better and benefits the decision-making process related to causation. For instance, commonsense causality is crucial in judging whether a defendant's action causes the plaintiff's loss in determining legal liability. Despite its significance, a systematic exploration of this topic is notably lacking. Our comprehensive survey bridges this gap by focusing on taxonomies, benchmarks, acquisition methods, qualitative reasoning, and quantitative measurements in commonsense causality, synthesizing insights from over 200 representative articles. Our work aims to provide a systematic overview, update scholars on recent advancements, provide a pragmatic guide for beginners, and highlight promising future research directions in this vital field.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are foundational structures in many AI applications, representing entities and their interrelations through triples. However, triple-based KGs lack the contextual information of relational knowledge, like temporal dynamics and provenance details, which are crucial for comprehensive knowledge representation and effective reasoning. Instead, \textbf{Context Graphs} (CGs) expand upon the conventional structure by incorporating additional information such as time validity, geographic location, and source provenance. This integration provides a more nuanced and accurate understanding of knowledge, enabling KGs to offer richer insights and support more sophisticated reasoning processes. In this work, we first discuss the inherent limitations of triple-based KGs and introduce the concept of CGs, highlighting their advantages in knowledge representation and reasoning. We then present a context graph reasoning \textbf{CGR$^3$} paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) to retrieve candidate entities and related contexts, rank them based on the retrieved information, and reason whether sufficient information has been obtained to answer a query. Our experimental results demonstrate that CGR$^3$ significantly improves performance on KG completion (KGC) and KG question answering (KGQA) tasks, validating the effectiveness of incorporating contextual information on KG representation and reasoning.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) leverage chains-of-thought (CoT) to simulate human reasoning and inference processes, achieving proficient performance in multi-hop QA. However, a gap persists between PLMs' reasoning abilities and those of humans when tackling complex problems. Psychological studies suggest a vital connection between explicit information in passages and human prior knowledge during reading. Nevertheless, current research has given insufficient attention to linking input passages and PLMs' pre-training-based knowledge from the perspective of human cognition studies. In this study, we introduce a Prompting Explicit and Implicit knowledge (PEI) framework, which uses prompts to connect explicit and implicit knowledge, aligning with human reading process for multi-hop QA. We consider the input passages as explicit knowledge, employing them to elicit implicit knowledge through unified prompt reasoning. Furthermore, our model incorporates type-specific reasoning via prompts, a form of implicit knowledge. Experimental results show that PEI performs comparably to the state-of-the-art on HotpotQA. Ablation studies confirm the efficacy of our model in bridging and integrating explicit and implicit knowledge.