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 Logic & Formal Reasoning


Stress Propagation in Human-Robot Teams Based on Computational Logic Model

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mission teams are exposed to the emotional toll of life and death decisions. These are small groups of specially trained people supported by intelligent machines for dealing with stressful environments and scenarios. We developed a composite model for stress monitoring in such teams of human and autonomous machines. This modelling aims to identify the conditions that may contribute to mission failure. The proposed model is composed of three parts: 1) a computational logic part that statically describes the stress states of teammates; 2) a decision part that manifests the mission status at any time; 3) a stress propagation part based on standard Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) paradigm. In contrast to the approaches such as agent-based, random-walk and game models, the proposed model combines various mechanisms to satisfy the conditions of stress propagation in small groups. Our core approach involves data structures such as decision tables and decision diagrams. These tools are adaptable to human-machine teaming as well.


Learning Probabilistic Temporal Safety Properties from Examples in Relational Domains

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Many recent publications report on methods for achieving safety in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where temporal logic (safety) specifications must be satisfied [1-4]. However, it is typically assumed that 1) the safety specification is given, and 2) that the states in the underlying MDP are unstructured. In this paper, we are interested in 1) learning the safety specification from examples, and 2) working with relational MDPs. More specifically, in our learning setting we assume that there is a domain expert who is presented with a set of system states E, a probability threshold ฮฑ and a step-bound k (number of action executions). If the expert believes that the system, starting in s E will perform actions that lead to a dangerous temporal situation within k steps with probability at least ฮฑ, then she will label s as dangerous, else, as safe. Now, given this set E of labeled states, we want to learn a compact temporal logic formula summarizing the expert's advice. There are at least three reasons to infer a property (expressed as a temporal logic formula) from an expert's advice. Firstly, to obtain a concise, human-interpretable expression of some aspects of the domain [5-7], secondly, to verify a system's control behavior (policy) w.r.t. a set of (safety) standards [6, 8] and thirdly, to use the (safety) property to devise strategies for the system or agent to avoid undesirable situations [8-10]. Furthermore, we consider systems that can be modelled as relational MDPs (RMDPs).


Lifted Inference with Linear Order Axiom

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We consider the task of weighted first-order model counting (WFOMC) used for probabilistic inference in the area of statistical relational learning. Given a formula $\phi$, domain size $n$ and a pair of weight functions, what is the weighted sum of all models of $\phi$ over a domain of size $n$? It was shown that computing WFOMC of any logical sentence with at most two logical variables can be done in time polynomial in $n$. However, it was also shown that the task is $\texttt{#}P_1$-complete once we add the third variable, which inspired the search for extensions of the two-variable fragment that would still permit a running time polynomial in $n$. One of such extension is the two-variable fragment with counting quantifiers. In this paper, we prove that adding a linear order axiom (which forces one of the predicates in $\phi$ to introduce a linear ordering of the domain elements in each model of $\phi$) on top of the counting quantifiers still permits a computation time polynomial in the domain size. We present a new dynamic programming-based algorithm which can compute WFOMC with linear order in time polynomial in $n$, thus proving our primary claim.


Generating Sequences by Learning to Self-Correct

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Sequence generation applications require satisfying semantic constraints, such as ensuring that programs are correct, using certain keywords, or avoiding undesirable content. Language models, whether fine-tuned or prompted with few-shot demonstrations, frequently violate these constraints, and lack a mechanism to iteratively revise their outputs. Moreover, some powerful language models are of extreme scale or inaccessible, making it inefficient, if not infeasible, to update their parameters for task-specific adaptation. We present Self-Correction, an approach that decouples an imperfect base generator (an off-the-shelf language model or supervised sequence-to-sequence model) from a separate corrector that learns to iteratively correct imperfect generations. To train the corrector, we propose an online training procedure that can use either scalar or natural language feedback on intermediate imperfect generations. We show that Self-Correction improves upon the base generator in three diverse generation tasks - mathematical program synthesis, lexically-constrained generation, and toxicity control - even when the corrector is much smaller than the base generator.


Explainability via Short Formulas: the Case of Propositional Logic with Implementation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We conceptualize explainability in terms of logic and formula size, giving a number of related definitions of explainability in a very general setting. Our main interest is the so-called special explanation problem which aims to explain the truth value of an input formula in an input model. The explanation is a formula of minimal size that (1) agrees with the input formula on the input model and (2) transmits the involved truth value to the input formula globally, i.e., on every model. As an important example case, we study propositional logic in this setting and show that the special explainability problem is complete for the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. We also provide an implementation of this problem in answer set programming and investigate its capacity in relation to explaining answers to the n-queens and dominating set problems.


Towards an Understanding of Long-Tailed Runtimes of SLS Algorithms

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The satisfiability problem is one of the most famous problems in computer science. Its NP-completeness has been used to argue that SAT is intractable. However, there have been tremendous advances that allow SAT solvers to solve instances with millions of variables. A particularly successful paradigm is stochastic local search. In most cases, there are different ways of formulating the underlying problem. While it is known that this has an impact on the runtime of solvers, finding a helpful formulation is generally non-trivial. The recently introduced GapSAT solver [Lorenz and W\"orz 2020] demonstrated a successful way to improve the performance of an SLS solver on average by learning additional information which logically entails from the original problem. Still, there were cases in which the performance slightly deteriorated. This justifies in-depth investigations into how learning logical implications affects runtimes for SLS. In this work, we propose a method for generating logically equivalent problem formulations, generalizing the ideas of GapSAT. This allows a rigorous mathematical study of the effect on the runtime of SLS solvers. If the modification process is treated as random, Johnson SB distributions provide a perfect characterization of the hardness. Since the observed Johnson SB distributions approach lognormal distributions, our analysis also suggests that the hardness is long-tailed. As a second contribution, we theoretically prove that restarts are useful for long-tailed distributions. This implies that additional restarts can further refine all algorithms employing above mentioned modification technique. Since the empirical studies compellingly suggest that the runtime distributions follow Johnson SB distributions, we investigate this property theoretically. We succeed in proving that the runtimes for Sch\"oning's random walk algorithm are approximately Johnson SB.


Computing Parameterized Invariants of Parameterized Petri Nets

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A fundamental advantage of Petri net models is the possibility to automatically compute useful system invariants from the syntax of the net. Classical techniques used for this are place invariants, P-components, siphons or traps. Recently, Bozga et al. have presented a novel technique for the \emph{parameterized} verification of safety properties of systems with a ring or array architecture. They show that the statement \enquote{for every instance of the parameterized Petri net, all markings satisfying the linear invariants associated to all the P-components, siphons and traps of the instance are safe} can be encoded in \acs{WS1S} and checked using tools like MONA. However, while the technique certifies that this infinite set of linear invariants extracted from P-components, siphons or traps are strong enough to prove safety, it does not return an explanation of this fact understandable by humans. We present a CEGAR loop that constructs a \emph{finite} set of \emph{parameterized} P-components, siphons or traps, whose infinitely many instances are strong enough to prove safety. For this we design parameterization procedures for different architectures.


Join-Chain Network: A Logical Reasoning View of the Multi-head Attention in Transformer

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Developing neural architectures that are capable of logical reasoning has become increasingly important for a wide range of applications (e.g., natural language processing). Towards this grand objective, we propose a symbolic reasoning architecture that chains many join operators together to model output logical expressions. In particular, we demonstrate that such an ensemble of join-chains can express a broad subset of ''tree-structured'' first-order logical expressions, named FOET, which is particularly useful for modeling natural languages. To endow it with differentiable learning capability, we closely examine various neural operators for approximating the symbolic join-chains. Interestingly, we find that the widely used multi-head self-attention module in transformer can be understood as a special neural operator that implements the union bound of the join operator in probabilistic predicate space. Our analysis not only provides a new perspective on the mechanism of the pretrained models such as BERT for natural language understanding but also suggests several important future improvement directions.


Theory Research in India: 2019โ€“2022

Communications of the ACM

The deep connections between logic and automata theory have led to extensive applications in formal specification and verification of systems. In recent years, research has focused on extensibility of such techniques to infinite-state systems. Logic has also been the ground for foundational research, revisiting classical model theory from computational perspectives. This has led to results in Skolem Lรถwenheim theorems in the finite, synthesis of Boolean functions and Skolem functions, definability in first-order theories of graphs, algebraic characterizations, block products of algebraic structures, and decidable fragments of first-order modal logics. The last few years has been a productive period for research in the field of computational complexity in India. The topics in which significant research has been done include algebraic complexity theory, communication complexity, research on codes and expanders arising out of connections to probabilistically checkable proofs, and the dynamic complexity of reachability. Notably, in July 2021, a break-through was achieved in the field of algebraic complexity, showing the first superpolynomial lower bounds against constant-depth arithmetic circuits over fields of characteristic zero or large characteristic.


Impactful Research and Tooling for Program Correctness

Communications of the ACM

In 2020, poor-quality software systems led to financial losses of approximately USD 2.08 trillion in the U.S. alone.19 Formal methods, such as bounded model checking (BMC), help to improve software quality, but they often fail to scale to the size and complexity of software.