Knowledge graph (KG) based reasoning has been regarded as an effective means for the analysis of semantic networks and is of great usefulness in areas of information retrieval, recommendation, decision-making, and man-machine interaction. It is widely used in recommendation, decision-making, question-answering, search, and other fields. However, previous studies mainly used low-level knowledge in the KG for reasoning, which may result in insufficient generalization and poor robustness of reasoning. To this end, this paper proposes a new inference approach using a novel knowledge augmentation strategy to improve the generalization capability of KG. This framework extracts high-level pyramidal knowledge from low-level knowledge and applies it to reasoning in a multi-level hierarchical KG, called knowledge pyramid in this paper. We tested some medical data sets using the proposed approach, and the experimental results show that the proposed knowledge pyramid has improved the knowledge inference performance with better generalization. Especially, when there are fewer training samples, the inference accuracy can be significantly improved.

Artefact descriptions are the primary carriers of engineering design knowledge that is both an outcome and a driver of the design process. While an artefact could be described in different connotations, the design process requires a description to embody engineering design knowledge, which is expressed in the text through intricate placement of entities and relationships. As large-language models learn from all kinds of text merely as a sequence of characters/tokens, these are yet to generate text that embodies explicit engineering design facts. Existing ontological design theories are less likely to guide the large-language models whose applications are currently limited to ideation and learning purposes. In this article, we explicate engineering design knowledge as knowledge graphs from a large sample of 33,881 patent documents. We examine the constituents of these knowledge graphs to understand the linguistic and structural basis of engineering design knowledge. In terms of linguistic basis, we observe that entities and relationships could be generalised to 64 and 24 linguistic syntaxes. While relationships mainly capture attributes ('of'), structure ('in', 'with'), purpose ('to', 'for'), hierarchy ('include'), exemplification ('such as'), and behaviour ('to', 'from'), the hierarchical relationships could specifically be identified using 75 unique syntaxes. To understand the structural basis, we draw inspiration from various studies on biological/ecological networks and discover motifs from patent knowledge graphs. We identify four 3-node and four 4-node patterns that could further be converged and simplified into sequence [->...->], aggregation [->...<-], and hierarchy [<-...->]. Expected to guide large-language model based design tools, we propose few regulatory precepts for concretising abstract entities and relationships within subgraphs, while explicating hierarchical structures.

Learning world models can teach an agent how the world works in an unsupervised manner. Even though it can be viewed as a special case of sequence modeling, progress for scaling world models on robotic applications such as autonomous driving has been somewhat less rapid than scaling language models with Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT). We identify two reasons as major bottlenecks: dealing with complex and unstructured observation space, and having a scalable generative model. Consequently, we propose a novel world modeling approach that first tokenizes sensor observations with VQVAE, then predicts the future via discrete diffusion. When applied to learning world models on point cloud observations, our model reduces prior SOTA Chamfer distance by more than 65% for 1s prediction, and more than 50% for 3s prediction, across NuScenes, KITTI Odometry, and Argoverse2 datasets. Our results demonstrate that discrete diffusion on tokenized agent experience can unlock the power of GPT-like unsupervised learning for robotic agents. Figure 1: Our unsupervised world model can produce accurate near-term 1s predictions and diverse multi-future 3s predictions directly on the level of point cloud observations. World models explicitly represent the knowledge of an autonomous agent about its environment. They are defined as a generative model that predicts the next observation in an environment given past observations and the current action. Such a generative model can learn from any unlabeled agent experience, and can be used for both learning and planning in the model-based reinforcement learning framework (Sutton, 1991). This approach has excelled in domains such as Atari (Kaiser et al., 2019), robotic manipulation (Nagabandi et al., 2020), and Minecraft (Hafner et al., 2023). Learning world models can be viewed as a special case of sequence modeling on agent experience. While Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) (Brown et al., 2020) have enabled rapid progress Prediction systems in autonomous driving still require supervised learning, either on the level of bounding boxes (Luo et al., 2018), semantic segmentation (Sadat et al., 2020), or instance segmentation (Hu et al., 2021). However, just as GPT learns to understand language via next token prediction, if a world model can predict unlabeled future observations really well, it must have developed a general understanding of the scene including geometry and dynamics.

Predicting the future location of mobile objects reinforces location-aware services with proactive intelligence and helps businesses and decision-makers with better planning and near real-time scheduling in different applications such as traffic congestion control, location-aware advertisements, and monitoring public health and well-being. The recent developments in the smartphone and location sensors technology and the prevalence of using location-based social networks alongside the improvements in artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques provide an excellent opportunity to exploit massive amounts of historical and real-time contextual information to recognise mobility patterns and achieve more accurate and intelligent predictions. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the next useful location prediction problem with context-awareness. First, we explain the concepts of context and context-awareness and define the next location prediction problem. Then we analyse nearly thirty studies in this field concerning the prediction method, the challenges addressed, the datasets and metrics used for training and evaluating the model, and the types of context incorporated. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, focusing on the usefulness of the predicted location and identifying the open challenges and future work on this subject by introducing two potential use cases of next location prediction in the automotive industry.

The potential of Vision-Language Models (\textsc{vlm}s) often remains underutilized in handling complex text-based problems, particularly when these problems could benefit from visual representation. Resonating with humans' ability to solve complex text-based problems by (1) creating a visual diagram from the problem and (2) deducing what steps they need to take to solve it, we propose \textsc{Self-Imagine}. We leverage a single Vision-Language Model (\textsc{vlm}) to generate a structured representation of the question using HTML, then render the HTML as an image, and finally use the same \vlm to answer the question using both the question and the image. Our approach does not require any additional training data or training. We evaluate our approach in three mathematics tasks and nine general-purpose reasoning tasks using state-of-the-art \textsc{vlm}. Our approach boosts the performance of \textsc{vlm} on all math tasks (\gsm: +4.62\%; \asdiv: +4.49\%; \svamp: +9.30\%) and the majority of the general-purpose reasoning tasks by 0.4\% to 13.20\% while achieving comparable performance in other tasks. Code and data at https://github.com/snat1505027/self-imagine .

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a general artificial intelligence benchmark that poses difficulties for pure machine learning methods due to its requirement for fluid intelligence with a focus on reasoning and abstraction. In this work, we introduce an ARC solver, Generalized Planning for Abstract Reasoning (GPAR). It casts an ARC problem as a generalized planning (GP) problem, where a solution is formalized as a planning program with pointers. We express each ARC problem using the standard Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) coupled with external functions representing object-centric abstractions. We show how to scale up GP solvers via domain knowledge specific to ARC in the form of restrictions over the actions model, predicates, arguments and valid structure of planning programs. Our experiments demonstrate that GPAR outperforms the state-of-the-art solvers on the object-centric tasks of the ARC, showing the effectiveness of GP and the expressiveness of PDDL to model ARC problems. The challenges provided by the ARC benchmark motivate research to advance existing GP solvers and understand new relations with other planning computational models. Code is available at github.com/you68681/GPAR.

Design patterns (DPs) are recognised as a good practice in software development. However, the lack of appropriate documentation often hampers traceability, and their benefits are blurred among thousands of lines of code. Automatic methods for DP detection have become relevant but are usually based on the rigid analysis of either software metrics or specific properties of the source code. We propose GEML, a novel detection approach based on evolutionary machine learning using software properties of diverse nature. Firstly, GEML makes use of an evolutionary algorithm to extract those characteristics that better describe the DP, formulated in terms of human-readable rules, whose syntax is conformant with a context-free grammar. Secondly, a rule-based classifier is built to predict whether new code contains a hidden DP implementation. GEML has been validated over five DPs taken from a public repository recurrently adopted by machine learning studies. Then, we increase this number up to 15 diverse DPs, showing its effectiveness and robustness in terms of detection capability. An initial parameter study served to tune a parameter setup whose performance guarantees the general applicability of this approach without the need to adjust complex parameters to a specific pattern. Finally, a demonstration tool is also provided.

The Tactician's Web is a platform offering a large web of strongly interconnected, machine-checked, formal mathematical knowledge conveniently packaged for machine learning, analytics, and proof engineering. Built on top of the Coq proof assistant, the platform exports a dataset containing a wide variety of formal theories, presented as a web of definitions, theorems, proof terms, tactics, and proof states. Theories are encoded both as a semantic graph (rendered below) and as human-readable text, each with a unique set of advantages and disadvantages. Proving agents may interact with Coq through the same rich data representation and can be automatically benchmarked on a set of theorems. Tight integration with Coq provides the unique possibility to make agents available to proof engineers as practical tools.

Service robots are integrating more and more into our daily lives to help us with various tasks. In such environments, robots frequently face new objects while working in the environment and need to learn them in an open-ended fashion. Furthermore, such robots must be able to recognize a wide range of object categories. In this paper, we present a lifelong ensemble learning approach based on multiple representations to address the few-shot object recognition problem. In particular, we form ensemble methods based on deep representations and handcrafted 3D shape descriptors. To facilitate lifelong learning, each approach is equipped with a memory unit for storing and retrieving object information instantly. The proposed model is suitable for open-ended learning scenarios where the number of 3D object categories is not fixed and can grow over time. We have performed extensive sets of experiments to assess the performance of the proposed approach in offline, and open-ended scenarios. For the evaluation purpose, in addition to real object datasets, we generate a large synthetic household objects dataset consisting of 27000 views of 90 objects. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on online few-shot 3D object recognition tasks, as well as its superior performance over the state-of-the-art open-ended learning approaches. Furthermore, our results show that while ensemble learning is modestly beneficial in offline settings, it is significantly beneficial in lifelong few-shot learning situations. Additionally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in both simulated and real-robot settings, where the robot rapidly learned new categories from limited examples.

The ability to perceive and reason about individual objects and their interactions is a goal to be achieved for building intelligent artificial systems. State-of-the-art approaches use a feedforward encoder to extract object embeddings and a latent graph neural network to model the interaction between these object embeddings. However, the feedforward encoder can not extract {\it object-centric} representations, nor can it disentangle multiple objects with similar appearance. To solve these issues, we introduce {\it Slot Structured World Models} (SSWM), a class of world models that combines an {\it object-centric} encoder (based on Slot Attention) with a latent graph-based dynamics model. We evaluate our method in the Spriteworld benchmark with simple rules of physical interaction, where Slot Structured World Models consistently outperform baselines on a range of (multi-step) prediction tasks with action-conditional object interactions. All code to reproduce paper experiments is available from \url{https://github.com/JonathanCollu/Slot-Structured-World-Models}.