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Landmark-Guided Knowledge for Vision-and-Language Navigation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision-and-language navigation is one of the core tasks in embodied intelligence, requiring an agent to autonomously navigate in an unfamiliar environment based on natural language instructions. However, existing methods often fail to match instructions with environmental information in complex scenarios, one reason being the lack of common-sense reasoning ability. This paper proposes a vision-and-language navigation method called Landmark-Guided Knowledge (LGK), which introduces an external knowledge base to assist navigation, addressing the misjudgment issues caused by insufficient common sense in traditional methods. Specifically, we first construct a knowledge base containing 630,000 language descriptions and use knowledge Matching to align environmental subviews with the knowledge base, extracting relevant descriptive knowledge. Next, we design a Knowledge-Guided by Landmark (KGL) mechanism, which guides the agent to focus on the most relevant parts of the knowledge by leveraging landmark information in the instructions, thereby reducing the data bias that may arise from incorporating external knowledge. Finally, we propose Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Augmentation (KGDA), which effectively integrates language, knowledge, vision, and historical information. Experimental results demonstrate that the LGK method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the R2R and REVERIE vision-and-language navigation datasets, particularly in terms of navigation error, success rate, and path efficiency.


Automatic selection of primary studies in systematic reviews with evolutionary rule-based classification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Conducting a SLR is especially useful when starting a new line of research, as it involves a detailed analysis of the research topic supported by the appropriate references. This type of secondary study should be conducted following a strict protocol to ensure quality and allow replication (Booth et al., 2016). Within the SLR process, manual and automated searches are performed to identify research papers related to the topic under review (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007). Therefore, the selection of primary studies, i.e., papers of sufficient quality and truly relevant to the topic, is one of the most important steps. It is also a time-consuming task due to potentially large search results if the queries are too open-ended or the research topic is too broad. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a way to assist researchers in this task, as well as in other stages of the SLR process (de la Torre-Lรณpez et al., 2023). The topic has gained even more relevance since the appearance of Large Language Models (LLMs) (Han et al., 2024; Galli et al., 2025). LLMs have expanded the capabilities of AI-assisted SLRs with the ability to extract information from papers, synthesise their findings and generate texts to accelerate SLR reporting.


Logic of Hypotheses: from Zero to Full Knowledge in Neurosymbolic Integration

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Neurosymbolic integration (NeSy) blends neural-network learning with symbolic reasoning. The field can be split between methods injecting hand-crafted rules into neural models, and methods inducing symbolic rules from data. We introduce Logic of Hypotheses (LoH), a novel language that unifies these strands, enabling the flexible integration of data-driven rule learning with symbolic priors and expert knowledge. LoH extends propositional logic syntax with a choice operator, which has learnable parameters and selects a subformula from a pool of options. Using fuzzy logic, formulas in LoH can be directly compiled into a differentiable computational graph, so the optimal choices can be learned via backpropagation. This framework subsumes some existing NeSy models, while adding the possibility of arbitrary degrees of knowledge specification. Moreover, the use of Goedel fuzzy logic and the recently developed Goedel trick yields models that can be discretized to hard Boolean-valued functions without any loss in performance. We provide experimental analysis on such models, showing strong results on tabular data and on the Visual Tic-Tac-Toe NeSy task, while producing interpretable decision rules.


Structured Relational Representations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Invariant representations are core to representation learning, yet a central challenge remains: uncovering invariants that are stable and transferable without suppressing task-relevant signals. This raises fundamental questions, requiring further inquiry, about the appropriate level of abstraction at which such invariants should be defined and which aspects of a system they should characterize. Interpretation of the environment relies on abstract knowledge structures to make sense of the current state, which leads to interactions, essential drivers of learning and knowledge acquisition. Interpretation operates at the level of higher-order relational knowledge; hence, we propose that invariant structures must be where knowledge resides, specifically as partitions defined by the closure of relational paths within an abstract knowledge space. These partitions serve as the core invariant representations, forming the structural substrate where knowledge is stored and learning occurs. On the other hand, inter-partition connectors enable the deployment of these knowledge partitions encoding task-relevant transitions. Thus, invariant partitions provide the foundational primitives of structured representation. We formalize the computational foundations for structured relational representations of the invariant partitions based on closed semiring, a relational algebraic structure.


Ontological foundations for contrastive explanatory narration of robot plans

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mutual understanding of artificial agents' decisions is key to ensuring a trustworthy and successful human-robot interaction. Hence, robots are expected to make reasonable decisions and communicate them to humans when needed. In this article, the focus is on an approach to modeling and reasoning about the comparison of two competing plans, so that robots can later explain the divergent result. First, a novel ontological model is proposed to formalize and reason about the differences between competing plans, enabling the classification of the most appropriate one (e.g., the shortest, the safest, the closest to human preferences, etc.). This work also investigates the limitations of a baseline algorithm for ontology-based explanatory narration. To address these limitations, a novel algorithm is presented, leveraging divergent knowledge between plans and facilitating the construction of contrastive narratives. Through empirical evaluation, it is observed that the explanations excel beyond the baseline method.


'No smoking gun': Why Eaton fire report didn't name names or assign blame

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. 'No smoking gun': Why Eaton fire report didn't name names or assign blame A resident tries to defend his home from nearby flames during the Eaton fire in Altadena. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . A $2-million county report examined botched Eaton fire evacuation alerts but stopped short of naming officials or assigning individual blame.


Learning Conformal Explainers for Image Classifiers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Feature attribution methods are widely used for explaining image-based predictions, as they provide feature-level insights that can be intuitively visualized. However, such explanations often vary in their robustness and may fail to faithfully reflect the reasoning of the underlying black-box model. To address these limitations, we propose a novel conformal prediction-based approach that enables users to directly control the fidelity of the generated explanations. The method identifies a subset of salient features that is sufficient to preserve the model's prediction, regardless of the information carried by the excluded features, and without demanding access to ground-truth explanations for calibration. Four conformity functions are proposed to quantify the extent to which explanations conform to the model's predictions. The approach is empirically evaluated using five explainers across six image datasets. The empirical results demonstrate that FastSHAP consistently outperforms the competing methods in terms of both fidelity and informational efficiency, the latter measured by the size of the explanation regions. Furthermore, the results reveal that conformity measures based on super-pixels are more effective than their pixel-wise counterparts.


How People Manage Knowledge in their "Second Brains"- A Case Study with Industry Researchers Using Obsidian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

People face overwhelming information during work activities, necessitating effective organization and management strategies. Even in personal lives, individuals must keep, annotate, organize, and retrieve knowledge from daily routines. The collection of records for future reference is known as a personal knowledge base. Note-taking applications are valuable tools for building and maintaining these bases, often called a ''second brain''. This paper presents a case study on how people build and explore personal knowledge bases for various purposes. We selected the note-taking tool Obsidian and researchers from a Brazilian lab for an in-depth investigation. Our investigation reveals interesting findings about how researchers build and explore their personal knowledge bases. A key finding is that participants' knowledge retrieval strategy influences how they build and maintain their content. We suggest potential features for an AI system to support this process.


A Counterfactual Reasoning Framework for Fault Diagnosis in Robot Perception Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Perception systems provide a rich understanding of the environment for autonomous systems, shaping decisions in all downstream modules. Hence, accurate detection and isolation of faults in perception systems is important. Faults in perception systems pose particular challenges: faults are often tied to the perceptual context of the environment, and errors in their multi-stage pipelines can propagate across modules. To address this, we adopt a counterfactual reasoning approach to propose a framework for fault detection and isolation (FDI) in perception systems. As opposed to relying on physical redundancy (i.e., having extra sensors), our approach utilizes analytical redundancy with counterfactual reasoning to construct perception reliability tests as causal outcomes influenced by system states and fault scenarios. Counterfactual reasoning generates reliability test results under hypothesized faults to update the belief over fault hypotheses. We derive both passive and active FDI methods. While the passive FDI can be achieved by belief updates, the active FDI approach is defined as a causal bandit problem, where we utilize Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with upper confidence bound (UCB) to find control inputs that maximize a detection and isolation metric, designated as Effective Information (EI). The mentioned metric quantifies the informativeness of control inputs for FDI. We demonstrate the approach in a robot exploration scenario, where a space robot performing vision-based navigation actively adjusts its attitude to increase EI and correctly isolate faults caused by sensor damage, dynamic scenes, and perceptual degradation.


LoRALib: A Standardized Benchmark for Evaluating LoRA-MoE Methods

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As a parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method, low-rank adaptation (LoRA) can save significant costs in storage and computing, but its strong adaptability to a single task is often accompanied by insufficient cross-task generalization capabilities. To improve this, existing work combines LoRA with mixture-of-experts (MoE) to enhance the model's adaptability through expert modules and routing mechanisms. However, existing LoRA-MoE methods lack unified standards in models, datasets, hyperparameters, and evaluation methods, making it difficult to conduct fair comparisons between different methods. To this end, we proposed a unified benchmark named LoRALib. Specifically, we standardized datasets from $40$ downstream tasks into a unified format, fine-tuned them using the same hyperparameters and obtained $680$ LoRA modules across $17$ model architectures. Based on this LoRA library, we conduct large-scale experiments on $3$ representative LoRA-MoE methods and different LoRA selection mechanisms using the open-sourced testing tool OpenCompass. Extensive experiments show that LoRAMoE performs best, and that prioritizing LoRAs relevant to the target task can further improve the performance of MoE. We hope these findings will inspire future work. Our datasets and LoRA library are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/YaoLuzjut/LoRAOcean_dataset and https://huggingface.co/YaoLuzjut/models.