Current multimodal models leveraging contrastive learning often face limitations in developing fine-grained conceptual understanding. This is due to random negative samples during pretraining, causing almost exclusively very dissimilar concepts to be compared in the loss function. Consequently, the models struggle with fine-grained semantic differences. To address this problem, we introduce a novel pretraining method incorporating synthetic hard negative text examples. The hard negatives permute terms corresponding to visual concepts, leading to a more fine-grained visual and textual concept alignment. Further, we introduce InpaintCOCO, a new challenging dataset for assessing the fine-grained alignment of colors, objects, and sizes in vision-language models. We created the dataset using generative inpainting from COCO images by changing the visual concepts so that the images no longer match their original captions. Our results show significant improvements in fine-grained concept understanding across a wide range of vision-language datasets, including our InpaintCOCO dataset.

One of the main challenges in the area of Neuro-Symbolic AI is to perform logical reasoning in the presence of both neural and symbolic data. This requires combining heterogeneous data sources such as knowledge graphs, neural model predictions, structured databases, crowd-sourced data, and many more. To allow for such reasoning, we generalise the standard rule-based language Datalog with existential rules (commonly referred to as tuple-generating dependencies) to the fuzzy setting, by allowing for arbitrary t-norms in the place of classical conjunctions in rule bodies. The resulting formalism allows us to perform reasoning about data associated with degrees of uncertainty while preserving computational complexity results and the applicability of reasoning techniques established for the standard Datalog setting. In particular, we provide fuzzy extensions of Datalog chases which produce fuzzy universal models and we exploit them to show that in important fragments of the language, reasoning has the same complexity as in the classical setting.

Defeasible reasoning is a kind of reasoning where some generalisations may not be valid in all circumstances, that is general conclusions may fail in some cases. Various formalisms have been developed to model this kind of reasoning, which is characteristic of common-sense contexts. However, it is not easy for a modeller to choose among these systems the one that better fits its domain from an ontological point of view. In this paper we first propose a framework based on the notions of exceptionality and defeasibility in order to be able to compare formalisms and reveal their ontological commitments. Then, we apply this framework to compare four systems, showing the differences that may occur from an ontological perspective.

Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) is a well-established field that seeks to provide factual answers to natural language (NL) questions by leveraging knowledge graphs (KGs). However, existing KGQA datasets suffer from two significant limitations: (1) no existing KGQA dataset requires commonsense reasoning to arrive at an answer and (2) existing KGQA datasets focus on popular entities for which large language models (LLMs) can directly answer without hallucinating and without leveraging the KG. In this work, we seek a novel KGQA dataset that supports commonsense reasoning and focuses on long-tail entities (e.g., non-mainstream and recent entities) where LLMs frequently hallucinate, and thus create the need for novel methodologies that leverage the KG for factual and attributable commonsense inference. We create a novel Commonsense Reasoning (CR) and Long-Tail (LT) KGQA dataset with two subtasks -- question answering and claim verification -- that address both limitations (1) and (2). We construct CR-LT-KGQA by building extensions to existing reasoning datasets StrategyQA and CREAK over Wikidata. While existing KGQA methods are not applicable due to their lack of commonsense inference support, baseline evaluation of LLMs on CR-LT KGQA demonstrate a high rate of hallucination. Thus, CR-LT KGQA poses significant challenges for hallucination-prone LLMs, hence paving the way for future commonsense KGQA research to provide accurate and factual answers for long-tail entities in the era of LLMs.

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods seek to answer Natural Language questions using the relational information stored in Knowledge Graphs (KGs). With the recent advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their remarkable reasoning abilities, there is a growing trend to leverage them for KGQA. However, existing methodologies have only focused on answering factual questions, e.g., "In which city was Silvio Berlusconi's first wife born?", leaving questions involving commonsense reasoning that real-world users may pose more often, e.g., "Do I need separate visas to see the Venus of Willendorf and attend the Olympics this summer?" unaddressed. In this work, we first observe that existing LLM-based methods for KGQA struggle with hallucination on such questions, especially on queries targeting long-tail entities (e.g., non-mainstream and recent entities), thus hindering their applicability in real-world applications especially since their reasoning processes are not easily verifiable. In response, we propose Right for Right Reasons (R3), a commonsense KGQA methodology that allows for a verifiable reasoning procedure by axiomatically surfacing intrinsic commonsense knowledge of LLMs and grounding every factual reasoning step on KG triples. Through experimental evaluations across three different tasks--question answering, claim verification, and preference matching--our findings showcase R3 as a superior approach, outperforming existing methodologies and notably reducing instances of hallucination and reasoning errors.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has emerged as a promising self-supervised approach that learns by leveraging a world model. While previously limited to predicting missing parts of an input, we explore how to generalize the JEPA prediction task to a broader set of corruptions. We introduce Image World Models, an approach that goes beyond masked image modeling and learns to predict the effect of global photometric transformations in latent space. We study the recipe of learning performant IWMs and show that it relies on three key aspects: conditioning, prediction difficulty, and capacity. Additionally, we show that the predictive world model learned by IWM can be adapted through finetuning to solve diverse tasks; a fine-tuned IWM world model matches or surpasses the performance of previous self-supervised methods. Finally, we show that learning with an IWM allows one to control the abstraction level of the learned representations, learning invariant representations such as contrastive methods, or equivariant representations such as masked image modelling.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A schoolboy has completed one of his largest portraits yet by using over 1,500 Rubik's Cubes to resemble the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Henil Soni is an 11-year-old from Harwich, Essex, England, who began his infatuation with the handheld puzzle when he was just five years old, according to SWNS, the British news service. Soni, who can now solve the well-known puzzle in mere seconds, is taking his talents to a larger scale by making portraits out of the colors on the cube.

We propose a framework for robust evaluation of reasoning capabilities of language models, using functional variants of benchmarks. Models that solve a reasoning test should exhibit no difference in performance over the static version of a problem compared to a snapshot of the functional variant. We have rewritten the relevant fragment of the MATH benchmark into its functional variant MATH(), with functionalization of other benchmarks to follow. When evaluating current state-of-the-art models over snapshots of MATH(), we find a reasoning gap -- the percentage difference between the static and functional accuracies. We find reasoning gaps from 58.35% to 80.31% among the state-of-the-art closed and open weights models that perform well on static benchmarks, with the caveat that the gaps are likely to be smaller with more sophisticated prompting strategies. Here we show that models which anecdotally have good reasoning performance over real-world tasks, have quantifiable lower gaps, motivating the open problem of building "gap 0" models. Code for evaluation and new evaluation datasets, three MATH() snapshots, are publicly available at https://github.com/consequentai/fneval/.

The question "Can machines think?" and the Turing Test to assess whether machines could achieve human-level intelligence is one of the roots of AI. With the philosophical argument "I think, therefore I am", this paper challenge the idea of a "thinking machine" supported by current AIs since there is no sense of self in them. Current artificial intelligence is only seemingly intelligent information processing and does not truly understand or be subjectively aware of oneself and perceive the world with the self as human intelligence does. In this paper, we introduce a Brain-inspired and Self-based Artificial Intelligence (BriSe AI) paradigm. This BriSe AI paradigm is dedicated to coordinating various cognitive functions and learning strategies in a self-organized manner to build human-level AI models and robotic applications. Specifically, BriSe AI emphasizes the crucial role of the Self in shaping the future AI, rooted with a practical hierarchical Self framework, including Perception and Learning, Bodily Self, Autonomous Self, Social Self, and Conceptual Self. The hierarchical framework of the Self highlights self-based environment perception, self-bodily modeling, autonomous interaction with the environment, social interaction and collaboration with others, and even more abstract understanding of the Self. Furthermore, the positive mutual promotion and support among multiple levels of Self, as well as between Self and learning, enhance the BriSe AI's conscious understanding of information and flexible adaptation to complex environments, serving as a driving force propelling BriSe AI towards real Artificial General Intelligence.

With the increase in the availability of Building Information Models (BIM) and (semi-) automatic tools to generate BIM from point clouds, we propose a world model architecture and algorithms to allow the use of the semantic and geometric knowledge encoded within these models to generate maps for robot localization and navigation. When heterogeneous robots are deployed within an environment, maps obtained from classical SLAM approaches might not be shared between all agents within a team of robots, e.g. due to a mismatch in sensor type, or a difference in physical robot dimensions. Our approach extracts the 3D geometry and semantic description of building elements (e.g. material, element type, color) from BIM, and represents this knowledge in a graph. Based on queries on the graph and knowledge of the skills of the robot, we can generate skill-specific maps that can be used during the execution of localization or navigation tasks. The approach is validated with data from complex build environments and integrated into existing navigation frameworks.