Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We introduce Slot Attention Argumentation for Case-Based Reasoning (SAA-CBR), a novel neuro-symbolic pipeline for image classification that integrates object-centric learning via a neural Slot Attention (SA) component with symbolic reasoning conducted by Abstract Argumentation for Case-Based Reasoning (AA-CBR). We explore novel integrations of AA-CBR with the neural component, including feature combination strategies, casebase reduction via representative samples, novel count-based partial orders, a One-Vs-Rest strategy for extending AA-CBR to multi-class classification, and an application of Supported AA-CBR, a bipolar variant of AA-CBR. We demonstrate that SAA-CBR is an effective classifier on the CLEVR-Hans datasets, showing competitive performance against baseline models.

We introduce ALARB, a dataset and suite of tasks designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) within the Arabic legal domain. While existing Arabic benchmarks cover some knowledge-intensive tasks such as retrieval and understanding, substantial datasets focusing specifically on multistep reasoning for Arabic LLMs, especially in open-ended contexts, are lacking. The dataset comprises over 13K commercial court cases from Saudi Arabia, with each case including the facts presented, the reasoning of the court, the verdict, as well as the cited clauses extracted from the regulatory documents. We define a set of challenging tasks leveraging this dataset and reflecting the complexity of real-world legal reasoning, including verdict prediction, completion of reasoning chains in multistep legal arguments, and identification of relevant regulations based on case facts. We benchmark a representative selection of current open and closed Arabic LLMs on these tasks and demonstrate the dataset's utility for instruction tuning. Notably, we show that instruction-tuning a modest 12B parameter model using ALARB significantly enhances its performance in verdict prediction and Arabic verdict generation, reaching a level comparable to that of GPT-4o.

How can we generate samples from a conditional distribution that we never fully observe? This question arises across a broad range of applications in both modern machine learning and classical statistics, including image post-processing in computer vision, approximate posterior sampling in simulation-based inference, and conditional distribution modeling in complex data settings. In such settings, compared with unconditional sampling, additional feature information can be leveraged to enable more adaptive and efficient sampling. Building on this, we introduce Conditional Generator using MMD (CGMMD), a novel framework for conditional sampling. Unlike many contemporary approaches, our method frames the training objective as a simple, adversary-free direct minimization problem. A key feature of CGMMD is its ability to produce conditional samples in a single forward pass of the generator, enabling practical one-shot sampling with low test-time complexity. We establish rigorous theoretical bounds on the loss incurred when sampling from the CGMMD sampler, and prove convergence of the estimated distribution to the true conditional distribution. In the process, we also develop a uniform concentration result for nearest-neighbor based functionals, which may be of independent interest. Finally, we show that CGMMD performs competitively on synthetic tasks involving complex conditional densities, as well as on practical applications such as image denoising and image super-resolution.

We present the Bayesian Case Model (BCM), a general framework for Bayesian case-based reasoning (CBR) and prototype classification and clustering. BCM brings the intuitive power of CBR to a Bayesian generative framework. The BCM learns prototypes, the ``quintessential observations that best represent clusters in a dataset, by performing joint inference on cluster labels, prototypes and important features. Simultaneously, BCM pursues sparsity by learning subspaces, the sets of features that play important roles in the characterization of the prototypes. The prototype and subspace representation provides quantitative benefits in interpretability while preserving classification accuracy. Human subject experiments verify statistically significant improvements to participants' understanding when using explanations produced by BCM, compared to those given by prior art.

Humans quickly learn new concepts from a small number of examples. Replicating this capacity with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems has proven to be challenging. When it comes to learning subjective tasks-where there is an evident scarcity of data-this capacity needs to be recreated. In this work, we propose an intuitive human-agent teaching architecture in which the human can teach an agent how to perform a task by providing demonstrations, i.e., examples. To have an intuitive interaction, we argue that the agent should be able to learn incrementally from a few single examples. To allow for this, our objective is to broaden the agent's task understanding using domain knowledge. Then, using a learning method to enable the agent to learn efficiently from a limited number of examples. Finally, to optimize how human can select the most representative and less redundant examples to provide the agent with. We apply our proposed method to the subjective task of ingredient substitution, where the agent needs to learn how to substitute ingredients in recipes based on human examples. We replicate human input using the Recipe1MSubs dataset. In our experiments, the agent achieves half its task performance after only 100 examples are provided, compared to the complete training set of 50k examples. We show that by providing examples in strategic order along with a learning method that leverages external symbolic knowledge, the agent can generalize more efficiently.

We prove ratio-consistency of the jackknife variance estimator, and certain variants, for a broad class of generalized U-statistics whose variance is asymptotically dominated by their Hájek projection, with the classical fixed-order case recovered as a special instance. This Hájek projection dominance condition unifies and generalizes several criteria in the existing literature, placing the simple nonparametric jackknife on the same footing as the infinitesimal jackknife in the generalized setting. As an illustration, we apply our result to the two-scale distributional nearest-neighbor regression estimator, obtaining consistent variance estimates under substantially weaker conditions than previously required.

Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding is a decision rule of text generation, which selects the hypothesis that maximizes the expected utility and robustly generates higher-quality texts than maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding. However, it depends on sample texts drawn from the text generation model; thus, it is difficult to find a hypothesis that correctly captures the knowledge or information of out-of-domain. To tackle this issue, we propose case-based decision-theoretic (CBDT) decoding, another method to estimate the expected utility using examples of domain data. CBDT decoding not only generates higher-quality texts than MAP decoding, but also the combination of MBR and CBDT decoding outperformed MBR decoding in seven domain De--En and Ja$\leftrightarrow$En translation tasks and image captioning tasks on MSCOCO and nocaps datasets.