Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has delivered success on complex reasoning tasks, which aims at designing a simple prompt like ``Let's think step by step'' or multiple in-context exemplars with well-designed rationales to elicit Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate intermediate reasoning steps. However, the generated rationales often come with mistakes, making unfactual and unfaithful reasoning chains. To mitigate this brittleness, we propose a novel Chain-of-Knowledge (CoK) prompting, where we aim at eliciting LLMs to generate explicit pieces of knowledge evidence in the form of structure triple. This is inspired by our human behaviors, i.e., we can draw a mind map or knowledge map as the reasoning evidence in the brain before answering a complex question. Benefiting from CoK, we additionally introduce a F^2-Verification method to estimate the reliability of the reasoning chains in terms of factuality and faithfulness. For the unreliable response, the wrong evidence can be indicated to prompt the LLM to rethink. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can further improve the performance of commonsense, factual, symbolic, and arithmetic reasoning tasks.

In this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes two drawbacks of existing approaches. First, our model does not assume that participants agree on the structure of the debate. It does this by allowing participants to express their opinion about all aspects of the debate. Second, our model does not assume that participants' opinions are rational, an assumption that significantly limits current approaches. Instead, we define a weaker notion of rationality that characterises coherent opinions, and we consider different scenarios based on the coherence of individual opinions and the level of consensus. We provide a formal analysis of different opinion aggregation functions that compute a collective decision based on the individual opinions and the debate structure. In particular, we demonstrate that aggregated opinions can be coherent even if there is a lack of consensus and individual opinions are not coherent. We conclude with an empirical evaluation demonstrating that collective opinions can be computed efficiently for real-sized debates.

For a complicated algorithm, its implementation by a human programmer usually starts with outlining a rough control flow followed by iterative enrichments, eventually yielding carefully generated syntactic structures and variables in a hierarchy. However, state-of-the-art large language models generate codes in a single pass, without intermediate warm-ups to reflect the structured thought process of "outline-then-detail". Inspired by the recent success of chain-of-thought prompting, we propose ChainCoder, a program synthesis language model that generates Python code progressively, i.e. from coarse to fine in multiple passes. We first decompose source code into layout frame components and accessory components via abstract syntax tree parsing to construct a hierarchical representation. We then reform our prediction target into a multi-pass objective, each pass generates a subsequence, which is concatenated in the hierarchy. Finally, a tailored transformer architecture is leveraged to jointly encode the natural language descriptions and syntactically aligned I/O data samples. Extensive evaluations show that ChainCoder outperforms state-of-the-arts, demonstrating that our progressive generation eases the reasoning procedure and guides the language model to generate higher-quality solutions. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/ChainCoder.

We explore the extension of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to medical reasoning for the task of automatic diagnosis. Motivated by doctors' underlying reasoning process, we present Diagnostic-Reasoning CoT (DR-CoT). Empirical results demonstrate that by simply prompting large language models trained only on general text corpus with two DR-CoT exemplars, the diagnostic accuracy improves by 15% comparing to standard prompting. Moreover, the gap reaches a pronounced 18% in out-domain settings. Our findings suggest expert-knowledge reasoning in large language models can be elicited through proper promptings.

Reasoning in mathematical domains remains a significant challenge for relatively small language models (LMs). Many current methods focus on specializing LMs in mathematical reasoning and rely heavily on knowledge distillation from powerful but inefficient large LMs (LLMs). In this work, we explore a new direction that avoids over-reliance on LLM teachers, introducing a multi-view fine-tuning method that efficiently exploits existing mathematical problem datasets with diverse annotation styles. Our approach uniquely considers the various annotation formats as different "views" and leverages them in training the model. By postpending distinct instructions to input questions, models can learn to generate solutions in diverse formats in a flexible manner. Experimental results show that our strategy enables a LLaMA-7B model to outperform prior approaches that utilize knowledge distillation, as well as carefully established baselines. Additionally, the proposed method grants the models promising generalization ability across various views and datasets, and the capability to learn from inaccurate or incomplete noisy data. We hope our multi-view training paradigm could inspire future studies in other machine reasoning domains.

Intelligent Traffic Monitoring (ITMo) technologies hold the potential for improving road safety/security and for enabling smart city infrastructure. Understanding traffic situations requires a complex fusion of perceptual information with domain-specific and causal commonsense knowledge. Whereas prior work has provided benchmarks and methods for traffic monitoring, it remains unclear whether models can effectively align these information sources and reason in novel scenarios. To address this assessment gap, we devise three novel text-based tasks for situational reasoning in the traffic domain: i) BDD-QA, which evaluates the ability of Language Models (LMs) to perform situational decision-making, ii) TV-QA, which assesses LMs' abilities to reason about complex event causality, and iii) HDT-QA, which evaluates the ability of models to solve human driving exams. We adopt four knowledge-enhanced methods that have shown generalization capability across language reasoning tasks in prior work, based on natural language inference, commonsense knowledge-graph self-supervision, multi-QA joint training, and dense retrieval of domain information. We associate each method with a relevant knowledge source, including knowledge graphs, relevant benchmarks, and driving manuals. In extensive experiments, we benchmark various knowledge-aware methods against the three datasets, under zero-shot evaluation; we provide in-depth analyses of model performance on data partitions and examine model predictions categorically, to yield useful insights on traffic understanding, given different background knowledge and reasoning strategies.

Drawing from memory the face of a friend you have not seen in years is a difficult task. However, if you happen to cross paths, you would easily recognize each other. The biological memory is equipped with an impressive compression algorithm that can store the essential, and then infer the details to match perception. The Willshaw Memory is a simple abstract model for cortical computations which implements mechanisms of biological memories. Using our recently proposed sparse coding prescription for visual patterns, this model can store and retrieve an impressive amount of real-world data in a fault-tolerant manner. In this paper, we extend the capabilities of the basic Associative Memory Model by using a Multiple-Modality framework. In this setting, the memory stores several modalities (e.g., visual, or textual) of each pattern simultaneously. After training, the memory can be used to infer missing modalities when just a subset is perceived. Using a simple encoder-memory-decoder architecture, and a newly proposed iterative retrieval algorithm for the Willshaw Model, we perform experiments on the MNIST dataset. By storing both the images and labels as modalities, a single Memory can be used not only to retrieve and complete patterns but also to classify and generate new ones. We further discuss how this model could be used for other learning tasks, thus serving as a biologically-inspired framework for learning.

In the realm of software applications in the transportation industry, Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) have enjoyed widespread adoption due to their ease of use and various other benefits. With the ceaseless progress in computer performance and the rapid development of large-scale models, the possibility of programming using natural language in specified applications - referred to as Application-Specific Natural Language (ASNL) - has emerged. ASNL exhibits greater flexibility and freedom, which, in turn, leads to an increase in computational complexity for parsing and a decrease in processing performance. To tackle this issue, our paper advances a design for an intermediate representation (IR) that caters to ASNL and can uniformly process transportation data into graph data format, improving data processing performance. Experimental comparisons reveal that in standard data query operations, our proposed IR design can achieve a speed improvement of over forty times compared to direct usage of standard XML format data.

Translational research requires data at multiple scales of biological organization. Advancements in sequencing and multi-omics technologies have increased the availability of these data but researchers face significant integration challenges. Knowledge graphs (KGs) are used to model complex phenomena, and methods exist to automatically construct them. However, tackling complex biomedical integration problems requires flexibility in the way knowledge is modeled. Moreover, existing KG construction methods provide robust tooling at the cost of fixed or limited choices among knowledge representation models. PheKnowLator (Phenotype Knowledge Translator) is a semantic ecosystem for automating the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) construction of ontologically grounded KGs with fully customizable knowledge representation. The ecosystem includes KG construction resources (e.g., data preparation APIs), analysis tools (e.g., SPARQL endpoints and abstraction algorithms), and benchmarks (e.g., prebuilt KGs and embeddings). We evaluate the ecosystem by surveying open-source KG construction methods and analyzing its computational performance when constructing 12 large-scale KGs. With flexible knowledge representation, PheKnowLator enables fully customizable KGs without compromising performance or usability.

Assuming that the term 'metaverse' could be understood as a computer-based implementation of multiverse applications, we started to look in the present work for a logic that would be powerful enough to handle the situations arising both in the real and in the fictional underlying application domains. Realizing that first-order logic fails to account for the unstable behavior of even the most simpleminded information system domains, we resorted to non-conventional extensions, in an attempt to sketch a minimal composite logic strategy. The discussion was kept at a rather informal level, always trying to convey the intuition behind the theoretical notions in natural language terms, and appealing to an AI agent, namely ChatGPT, in the hope that algorithmic and common-sense approaches can be usefully combined.