Feature construction can contribute to comprehensibility and performance of machine learning models. Unfortunately, it usually requires exhaustive search in the attribute space or time-consuming human involvement to generate meaningful features. We propose a novel heuristic approach for reducing the search space based on aggregation of instance-based explanations of predictive models. The proposed Explainable Feature Construction (EFC) methodology identifies groups of co-occurring attributes exposed by popular explanation methods, such as IME and SHAP. We empirically show that reducing the search to these groups significantly reduces the time of feature construction using logical, relational, Cartesian, numerical, and threshold num-of-N and X-of-N constructive operators. An analysis on 10 transparent synthetic datasets shows that EFC effectively identifies informative groups of attributes and constructs relevant features. Using 30 real-world classification datasets, we show significant improvements in classification accuracy for several classifiers and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed feature construction even for large datasets. Finally, EFC generated interpretable features on a real-world problem from the financial industry, which were confirmed by a domain expert.

Self-adaptive software can assess and modify its behavior when the assessment indicates that the program is not performing as intended or when improved functionality or performance is available. Since the mid-1960s, the subject of system adaptivity has been extensively researched, and during the last decade, many application areas and technologies involving self-adaptation have gained prominence. All of these efforts have in common the introduction of self-adaptability through software. Thus, it is essential to investigate systematic software engineering methods to create self-adaptive systems that may be used across different domains. The primary objective of this research is to summarize current advances in awareness requirements for adaptive strategies based on an examination of state-of-the-art methods described in the literature. This paper presents a review of self-adaptive systems in the context of requirement awareness and summarizes the most common methodologies applied. At first glance, it gives a review of the previous surveys and works about self-adaptive systems. Afterward, it classifies the current self-adaptive systems based on six criteria. Then, it presents and evaluates the most common self-adaptive approaches. Lastly, an evaluation among the self-adaptive models is conducted based on four concepts (requirements description, monitoring, relationship, dependency/impact, and tools).

We address two bottlenecks for concise QBF encodings of maker-breaker positional games, like Hex and Tic-Tac-Toe. Our baseline is a QBF encoding with explicit variables for board positions and an explicit representation of winning configurations. The first improvement is inspired by lifted planning and avoids variables for explicit board positions, introducing a universal quantifier representing a symbolic board state. The second improvement represents the winning configurations implicitly, exploiting their structure. The paper evaluates the size of several encodings, depending on board size and game depth. It also reports the performance of QBF solvers on these encodings. We evaluate the techniques on Hex instances and also apply them to Harary's Tic-Tac-Toe. In particular, we study scalability to 19$\times$19 boards, played in human Hex tournaments.

How language models process complex input that requires multiple steps of inference is not well understood. Previous research has shown that information about intermediate values of these inputs can be extracted from the activations of the models, but it is unclear where that information is encoded and whether that information is indeed used during inference. We introduce a method for analyzing how a Transformer model processes these inputs by focusing on simple arithmetic problems and their intermediate values. To trace where information about intermediate values is encoded, we measure the correlation between intermediate values and the activations of the model using principal component analysis (PCA). Then, we perform a causal intervention by manipulating model weights. This intervention shows that the weights identified via tracing are not merely correlated with intermediate values, but causally related to model predictions. Our findings show that the model has a locality to certain intermediate values, and this is useful for enhancing the interpretability of the models.

Open-world novelty--a sudden change in the mechanics or properties of an environment--is a common occurrence in the real world. Novelty adaptation is an agent's ability to improve its policy performance post-novelty. Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods assume that the world is a closed, fixed process. Consequentially, RL policies adapt inefficiently to novelties. To address this, we introduce WorldCloner, an end-to-end trainable neuro-symbolic world model for rapid novelty adaptation. WorldCloner learns an efficient symbolic representation of the pre-novelty environment transitions, and uses this transition model to detect novelty and efficiently adapt to novelty in a single-shot fashion. Additionally, WorldCloner augments the policy learning process using imagination-based adaptation, where the world model simulates transitions of the post-novelty environment to help the policy adapt. By blending ''imagined'' transitions with interactions in the post-novelty environment, performance can be recovered with fewer total environment interactions. Using environments designed for studying novelty in sequential decision-making problems, we show that the symbolic world model helps its neural policy adapt more efficiently than model-based and model-based neural-only reinforcement learning methods.

This paper introduces corpus-guided top-down synthesis as a mechanism for synthesizing library functions that capture common functionality from a corpus of programs in a domain specific language (DSL). The algorithm builds abstractions directly from initial DSL primitives, using syntactic pattern matching of intermediate abstractions to intelligently prune the search space and guide the algorithm towards abstractions that maximally capture shared structures in the corpus. We present an implementation of the approach in a tool called Stitch and evaluate it against the state-of-the-art deductive library learning algorithm from DreamCoder. Our evaluation shows that Stitch is 3-4 orders of magnitude faster and uses 2 orders of magnitude less memory while maintaining comparable or better library quality (as measured by compressivity). We also demonstrate Stitch's scalability on corpora containing hundreds of complex programs that are intractable with prior deductive approaches and show empirically that it is robust to terminating the search procedure early -- further allowing it to scale to challenging datasets by means of early stopping.

Veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones recaps the historic Artemis I mission after the Orion capsule made a successful return to earth and outlines what this means for the lunar return program. The Habitable Worlds Observatory was announced Monday at the latest American Astronomical Society meeting, and its goal is searching for signs of life on habitable exoplanets. Space.com said on Friday that the observatory will need a powerful coronograph, which is an instrument that allows scientists to study faint objects. Mark Clampin, the director of NASA's astrophysics division, reportedly said that the agency would approach the project as if it faced a strict launch window, building on previous technology used for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as well as Webb. FILE - In this April 13, 2017, photo provided by NASA, technicians lift the mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope using a crane at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Creating autonomous robots that can actively explore the environment, acquire knowledge and learn skills continuously is the ultimate achievement envisioned in cognitive and developmental robotics. Their learning processes should be based on interactions with their physical and social world in the manner of human learning and cognitive development. Based on this context, in this paper, we focus on the two concepts of world models and predictive coding. Recently, world models have attracted renewed attention as a topic of considerable interest in artificial intelligence. Cognitive systems learn world models to better predict future sensory observations and optimize their policies, i.e., controllers. Alternatively, in neuroscience, predictive coding proposes that the brain continuously predicts its inputs and adapts to model its own dynamics and control behavior in its environment. Both ideas may be considered as underpinning the cognitive development of robots and humans capable of continual or lifelong learning. Although many studies have been conducted on predictive coding in cognitive robotics and neurorobotics, the relationship between world model-based approaches in AI and predictive coding in robotics has rarely been discussed. Therefore, in this paper, we clarify the definitions, relationships, and status of current research on these topics, as well as missing pieces of world models and predictive coding in conjunction with crucially related concepts such as the free-energy principle and active inference in the context of cognitive and developmental robotics. Furthermore, we outline the frontiers and challenges involved in world models and predictive coding toward the further integration of AI and robotics, as well as the creation of robots with real cognitive and developmental capabilities in the future.

While language models have become more capable of producing compelling language, we find there are still gaps in maintaining consistency, especially when describing events in a dynamically changing world. We study the setting of generating narratives in an open world text adventure game, where a graph representation of the underlying game state can be used to train models that consume and output both grounded graph representations and natural language descriptions and actions. We build a large set of tasks by combining crowdsourced and simulated gameplays with a novel dataset of complex actions in order to to construct such models. We find it is possible to improve the consistency of action narration models by training on graph contexts and targets, even if graphs are not present at test time. This is shown both in automatic metrics and human evaluations. We plan to release our code, the new set of tasks, and best performing models.

Semantic communication has recently attracted significant interest from both industry and academia due to its potential to transform the existing data-focused communication architecture towards a more generally intelligent and goal-oriented semantic-aware networking system. Despite its promising potential, semantic communications and semantic-aware networking are still at their infancy. Most existing works focus on transporting and delivering the explicit semantic information, e.g., labels or features of objects, that can be directly identified from the source signal. The original definition of semantics as well as recent results in cognitive neuroscience suggest that it is the implicit semantic information, in particular the hidden relations connecting different concepts and feature items that plays the fundamental role in recognizing, communicating, and delivering the real semantic meanings of messages. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel reasoning-based implicit semantic-aware communication network architecture that allows multiple tiers of CDC and edge servers to collaborate and support efficient semantic encoding, decoding, and interpretation for end-users. We introduce a new multi-layer representation of semantic information taking into consideration both the hierarchical structure of implicit semantics as well as the personalized inference preference of individual users. We model the semantic reasoning process as a reinforcement learning process and then propose an imitation-based semantic reasoning mechanism learning (iRML) solution for the edge servers to leaning a reasoning policy that imitates the inference behavior of the source user. A federated GCN-based collaborative reasoning solution is proposed to allow multiple edge servers to jointly construct a shared semantic interpretation model based on decentralized knowledge datasets.