Natural scenes contain many layers of part-subpart structure, and distributions over them are thus naturally represented by stochastic image grammars, with one production per decomposition of a part. Unfortunately, in contrast to language grammars, where the number of possible split points for a production A \rightarrow BC is linear in the length of A, in an image there are an exponential number of ways to split a region into subregions. This makes parsing intractable and requires image grammars to be severely restricted in practice, for example by allowing only rectangular regions. In this paper, we address this problem by associating with each production a submodular Markov random field whose labels are the subparts and whose labeling segments the current object into these subparts. We call the result a submodular field grammar (SFG).

As machine learning becomes more widely used in practice, we need new methods to build complex intelligent systems that integrate learning with existing software, and with domain knowledge encoded as rules. As a case study, we present such a system that learns to parse Newtonian physics problems in textbooks. This system, Nuts&Bolts, learns a pipeline process that incorporates existing code, pre-learned machine learning models, and human engineered rules. It jointly trains the entire pipeline to prevent propagation of errors, using a combination of labelled and unlabelled data. Our approach achieves a good performance on the parsing task, outperforming the simple pipeline and its variants.

This paper proposes a semantic parsing method for dialog-based QA over a large-scale knowledge base. The method significantly outperforms the existing state of the art on CSQA, a recently-released conversational QA dataset. One of the major novelties of this paper is breaking apart the logical forms in the dialog history into smaller subsequences, any of which can be copied over into the logical form for the current question. While I do have some concerns with the method and the writing (detailed below), overall I liked this paper and I think that some of the ideas within it could be useful more broadly for QA researchers. Detailed comments: - I found many parts of the paper to be confusing, requiring multiple reads to fully understand.

The key problem is that splitting the image into *arbitrarily-shaped* pixel regions to associate with the production rules is computationally difficult in general. This paper proposes to associate formal grammar production rules with submodular Markov random fields (MRF). The submodular structure of the associated MRF allows for fast inference for a single rule into arbitrarily-shaped subregions and a dynamic-programming-like algorithm for parsing the entire image structure. The experimental results show that the method is indeed much faster than previous methods. Pros: 1) Well-written and easy to read even though some of the details are fairly technical.

The paper proposes a deep-learning-based approach to joint prediction of future optical flow and semantic segmentation in videos. The authors evaluate the approach in a driving scenario and show that the two components - flow prediction and semantic segmentation prediction - benefit from each other. The paper is related to works of Jin et al. and Neverova et al. However, as far as I understand, both of these have not been officially published at the time of submission (and the work of Neverova et al. Detailed comment: Pros: 1) The idea seems sound: predicting segmentation and optical flow are both important tasks, and they should be mutually beneficial.

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems advance, we move towards broad AI: systems capable of performing well on diverse tasks, understanding context, and adapting rapidly to new scenarios. A central challenge for broad AI systems is to generalize over tasks in related domains and being robust to distribution shifts. Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI bridges the gap between symbolic and sub-symbolic paradigms to address these challenges, enabling adaptable, generalizable, and more interpretable systems. The development of broad AI requires advancements in domain adaptation (DA), enabling models trained on source domains to effectively generalize to unseen target domains. Traditional approaches often rely on parameter optimization and fine-tuning, which can be impractical due to high costs and risks of catastrophic forgetting. NeSy AI systems use multiple models and methods to generalize to unseen domains and maintain performance across varying conditions. We analyze common DA and NeSy approaches with a focus on deep domain-invariant learning, extending to real-world challenges such as adapting to continuously changing domains and handling large domain gaps. We showcase state-of-the-art model-selection methods for scenarios with limited samples and introduce domain-specific adaptations without gradient-based updates for cases where model tuning is infeasible. This work establishes a framework for scalable and generalizable broad AI systems applicable across various problem settings, demonstrating how symbolic reasoning and large language models can build universal computational graphs that generalize across domains and problems, contributing to more adaptable AI approaches for real-world applications.

The main idea is the use of PSL (probabilistic soft logic) as a framework to map partial estimates from multiple feedforward algorithms, along with domain specific logical rules, to parse visual diagrams from physics texts. Specifically, the pipelines use feature extractors for lines, arcs, corners, text elements, object elements (e.g.blocks in physics diagrams). These are combined along with human specified rules for groupings, high-level elements, text/figure labeling schemes along with the inference engine to produce the parse into a formal logical language. Experiments illustrate how the learned system: 1) is superior to state of the art diagram parsing scheme, 2) can utilize labelled as well as unlabelled data to achieve improved performance, 3) can handle various degrees of supervision in different parts of the pipeline and is robust, and 4) through integrative modeling of the stages in pipeline prevents error propagation. Quality, Clarity, originality, significance of the paper: The paper is well written and has extensive references to relevant literature, adequate experimentation.

Knowledge distillation leverages a teacher model to improve the training of a student model. A persistent challenge is that a better teacher does not always yield a better student, to which a common mitigation is to use additional supervision from several ``intermediate'' teachers. One empirically validated variant of this principle is progressive distillation, where the student learns from successive intermediate checkpoints of the teacher. Using sparse parity as a sandbox, we identify an implicit curriculum as one mechanism through which progressive distillation accelerates the student's learning. This curriculum is available only through the intermediate checkpoints but not the final converged one, and imparts both empirical acceleration and a provable sample complexity benefit to the student. We then extend our investigation to Transformers trained on probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs) and real-world pre-training datasets (Wikipedia and Books). Through probing the teacher model, we identify an analogous implicit curriculum where the model progressively learns features that capture longer context. Our theoretical and empirical findings on sparse parity, complemented by empirical observations on more complex tasks, highlight the benefit of progressive distillation via implicit curriculum across setups.

Grammar induction has made significant progress in recent years. However, it is not clear how the application of induced grammar could enhance practical performance in downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce an unsupervised grammar induction method for language understanding and generation. We construct a grammar parser to induce constituency structures and dependency relations, which is simultaneously trained on downstream tasks without additional syntax annotations. The induced grammar features are subsequently incorporated into Transformer as a syntactic mask to guide self-attention. We evaluate and apply our method to multiple machine translation tasks and natural language understanding tasks. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to the original Transformer and other models enhanced with external parsers. Experimental results indicate that our method is effective in both from-scratch and pre-trained scenarios. Additionally, our research highlights the contribution of explicitly modeling the grammatical structure of texts to neural network models.

Unsupervised parsing, also known as grammar induction, aims to infer syntactic structure from raw text. Recently, binary representation has exhibited remarkable information-preserving capabilities at both lexicon and syntax levels. In this paper, we explore the possibility of leveraging this capability to deduce parsing trees from raw text, relying solely on the implicitly induced grammars within models. To achieve this, we upgrade the bit-level CKY from zero-order to first-order to encode the lexicon and syntax in a unified binary representation space, switch training from supervised to unsupervised under the contrastive hashing framework, and introduce a novel loss function to impose stronger yet balanced alignment signals. Our model shows competitive performance on various datasets, therefore, we claim that our method is effective and efficient enough to acquire high-quality parsing trees from pre-trained language models at a low cost.