The projects that we have developed for UC Berkeley’s introductory artificial intelligence (AI) course teach foundational concepts using the classic video game Pac-Man. There are four project topics: state-space search, multi-agent search, probabilistic inference, and reinforcement learning. Each project requires students to implement general-purpose AI algorithms and then to inject domain knowledge about the Pac- Man environment using search heuristics, evaluation functions, and feature functions. We have found that the Pac-Man theme adds consistency to the course, as well as tapping in to students’ excitement about video games.

Providing cognitive assistance in smart homes is a field of research that receives a lot of attention lately. In order to give adequate assistance at the opportune moment, we need to recognize the observed behavior when the patient carries out some activities in a smart home. To address this challenging issue, we present a formal activity recognition framework based on possibility theory. We present initial results from an implementation of this possibilistic recognition approach in a smart home laboratory.

Learning, which aims at combining probabilistic graphical Markov networks have proved to be a very useful tool to models with first order logics representations. The represent probability distributions over large domains (see work that we present in this paper has been motivated by for instance, Chapter 8 in (Bishop 2006)). A Markov Network Markov Logic Networks (MLN), introduced in (Richardson is an undirected graphical model, where variables are and Domingos 2006). A Markov Logic Network is defined represented by nodes and features on subsets of variables by a set of weighted first-order formulas.

The starting point is an ongoing effort to structure underlying intelligent behavior, whether intended reconstruct cognitive architectures from the ground up via as models of human intelligence and/or implementations of graphical models (Koller and Friedman 2009), with the artificial intelligence (Langley, Laird and Rogers 2009). A aim of understanding existing architectures better, basic cognitive architecture may comprise memories, exploring the overall space of architectures, and decision algorithms, learning mechanisms, and some developing new and improved architectures (Rosenbloom means of interacting with external environments.

The architectural approach to AI focuses on the fixed structure underlying intelligence. Applying it to statistical relational AI should further stimulate the application of statistical relational techniques across AI, while focusing research on their commonalities, (in)compatibilities and integration. It could also yield new architectures that are simpler yet more comprehensive than today’s best.

We argue that probabilistic programming with undirected models, in order to scale up, needs to open up. That is, instead of focusing on minimal sets of generic building blocks such as universal quantification or logical connectives, languages should grow to include specific building blocks for as many uses cases as necessary. This can not only lead to more concise models, but also to more efficient inference if we use methods that can exploit building-block specific sub-routines. As embodiment of this paradigm we present , a platform for implementing probabilistic programming languages that grow.

In this paper, we introduce Bayesian Abductive Logic Programs (BALPs), a new formalism that integrates Bayesian Logic Programs (BLPs) and Abductive Logic Programming (ALP) for abductive reasoning. Like BLPs, BALPs also combine first-order logic and Bayesian networks. However, unlike BLPs that use logical deduction to construct Bayes nets, BALPs employ logical abduction. As a result, BALPs are more suited for solving problems like plan/activity recognition and diagnosis that require abductive reasoning. First, we present the necessary enhancements to BLPs in order to support logical abduction. Next, we apply BALPs to the task of plan recognition and demonstrate its efficacy on two data sets. We also compare the performance of BALPs with several existing approaches for abduction.

A new method is proposed for compiling causal independencies into Markov logic networks. A Markov logic network can be viewed as compactly representing a factorization of a joint probability into the multiplication of a set of factors guided by logical formulas. We present a notion of causal independence that enables one to further factorize the factors into a combination of even smaller factors and consequently obtain a finer-grain factorization of the joint probability. The causal independence lets us specify the factor in terms of weighted, directed clauses and an associative and commutative operator, such as "or", "sum" or "max", on the contribution of the variables involved in the factors, hence combining both undirected and directed knowledge.

Learning the relational structure of a domain is a fundamental problem in statistical relational learning. The deep transfer algorithm of Davis and Domingos attempts to improve structure learning in Markov logic networks by harnessing the power of transfer learning, using the second-order structural regularities of a source domain to bias the structure search process in a target domain. We propose that the clique-scoring process which discovers these second-order regularities constitutes a novel standalone method for learning the structure of Markov logic networks, and that this fact, rather than the transfer of structural knowledge across domains, accounts for much of the performance benefit observed via the deep transfer process. This claim is supported by experiments in which we find that clique scoring within a single domain often produces results equaling or surpassing the performance of deep transfer incorporating external knowledge, and also by explicit algorithmic similarities between deep transfer and other structure learning techniques.

Exploiting ontologies for efficient inference is one of the most widely studied topics in knowledge representation and reasoning. The use of ontologies for probabilistic inference, however, is much less developed. A number of algorithms for lifted inference in first-order probabilistic languages have been proposed, but their scalability is limited by the combinatorial explosion in the sets of objects that need to be considered. We propose a coarse-to-fine inference approach that leverages a class hierarchy to combat this problem. Starting at the highest level, our approach performs inference at successively finer grains, pruning low-probability atoms before refining. We provide bounds on the error incurred by this approach relative to full ground inference as a function of the pruning threshold. We also show how to learn parameters in a coarse-to-fine manner to maximize the opportunities for pruning during inference. Experiments on link prediction and biomolecular event prediction tasks show our method can greatly improve the scalability of lifted probabilistic inference.