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Explaining Math Word Problem Solvers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automated math word problem solvers based on neural networks have successfully managed to obtain 70-80\% accuracy in solving arithmetic word problems. However, it has been shown that these solvers may rely on superficial patterns to obtain their equations. In order to determine what information math word problem solvers use to generate solutions, we remove parts of the input and measure the model's performance on the perturbed dataset. Our results show that the model is not sensitive to the removal of many words from the input and can still manage to find a correct answer when given a nonsense question. This indicates that automatic solvers do not follow the semantic logic of math word problems, and may be overfitting to the presence of specific words.


Defining data science: a new field of inquiry

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data Systems Laboratory, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Harvard University, Cambridge, MA USA =============DRAFT July 12, 2023 ====================== Data science is not a science. It is a research with which to define, unify, and evolve data paradigm. We benefits - the basis of a comprehensive soluWon have yet to understand and define it. Modern data science is in its infancy. Emerging 1. Challenges defining data science slowly since 1962 and rapidly since 2000, data 1.1. Due to its problem solving techniques is rare. Science and value, power, and scope of applicability, it is modern scienWfic analyses emerged 400 years ago emerging in over 40 disciplines, hundreds of and interpreWvism and interpreWvist analysis 200 research areas, and tens of thousands of years ago. While convenWonal data science is as applicaWons. Yet we are just beginning to old as mathemaWcs, AI-based data science is in its understand and define it. Tukey's 1962 vision of exploratory data publicaWons contain myriad definiWons of data analysis[20][21] brought renewed a`enWon to science and data science problem solving. Aaer its infancy, many definiWons are independent, 2000, machine learning-based data science led to applicaWon-specific, mutually incomplete, a fundamentally new, inscrutable field of inquiry redundant, or inconsistent, hence so is data that we are just beginning to understand. This has led to calls and a data science journal[31] for the data science for a unifying framework to guide unificaWon. An community to achieve such a definiWon. This paper provides candidate definiWons for What is such a unifying framework? How do you essenWal data science arWfacts that are required define a fundamentally new field of inquiry? For to discuss such a definiWon. They are based on the this we look to science, our currently most classical research paradigm concept[15] consisWng powerful knowledge discovery paradigm. of a philosophy of data science, the data science problem solving paradigm, and the six component 1.2. ACM lists 200+ data science journals. This required paradigms that were and Aristotle (384-322 BC)) then in terms of accepted by scienWsts to guide the unificaWon of scienWfic models, theories, and the scienWfic the myriad definiWons based on established method by Francis Bacon [Novum Organum 1620] results.


NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present NormBank, a knowledge bank of 155k situational norms. This resource is designed to ground flexible normative reasoning for interactive, assistive, and collaborative AI systems. Unlike prior commonsense resources, NormBank grounds each inference within a multivalent sociocultural frame, which includes the setting (e.g., restaurant), the agents' contingent roles (waiter, customer), their attributes (age, gender), and other physical, social, and cultural constraints (e.g., the temperature or the country of operation). In total, NormBank contains 63k unique constraints from a taxonomy that we introduce and iteratively refine here. Constraints then apply in different combinations to frame social norms. Under these manipulations, norms are non-monotonic - one can cancel an inference by updating its frame even slightly. Still, we find evidence that neural models can help reliably extend the scope and coverage of NormBank. We further demonstrate the utility of this resource with a series of transfer experiments.


Eliminating Unintended Stable Fixpoints for Hybrid Reasoning Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A wide variety of nonmonotonic semantics can be expressed as approximators defined under AFT (Approximation Fixpoint Theory). Using traditional AFT theory, it is not possible to define approximators that rely on information computed in previous iterations of stable revision. However, this information is rich for semantics that incorporate classical negation into nonmonotonic reasoning. In this work, we introduce a methodology resembling AFT that can utilize priorly computed upper bounds to more precisely capture semantics. We demonstrate our framework's applicability to hybrid MKNF (minimal knowledge and negation as failure) knowledge bases by extending the state-of-the-art approximator.


Boosting Language Models Reasoning with Chain-of-Knowledge Prompting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

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.


A Model to Support Collective Reasoning: Formalization, Analysis and Computational Assessment

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

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.


Outline, Then Details: Syntactically Guided Coarse-To-Fine Code Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

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.


Large Language Models Perform Diagnostic Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

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.


MinT: Boosting Generalization in Mathematical Reasoning via Multi-View Fine-Tuning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

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.


A Study of Situational Reasoning for Traffic Understanding

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

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.