Logic & Formal Reasoning
On Quantified Modal Theorem Proving for Modeling Ethics
Govindarajulu, Naveen Sundar, Bringsjord, Selmer, Peveler, Matthew
Second International Workshop on Automated Reasoning: Challenges, Applications, Directions, Exemplary Achievements (ARCADE 2019) EPTCS 311, 2019, pp. In the last decade, formal logics have been used to model a wide range of ethical theories and principles with the goal of using these models within autonomous systems. Logics for modeling ethical theories, and their automated reasoners, have requirements that are different from modal logics used for other purposes, e.g. for temporal reasoning. Particularly, a quantified modal logic, the deontic cognitive event calculus (DC E C), has been used to model various versions of the doctrine of double effect, akrasia, and virtue ethics. Using a fragment of DC E C, we outline these distinct characteristics and present a sketches of an algorithm that can help with some aspects proof automation forDC E C . 1 Introduction Modal logics have been used for decades to model and study a diverse set of subjects -- e.g.
Boldly Going Where No Prover Has Gone Before
I argue that the most interesting goal facing researchers in automated reasoning is being able to solve problems that cannot currently be solved by existing tools and methods. This may appear obvious, and is clearly not an original thought, but focusing on this as a primary goal allows us to examine other goals in a new light. Many successful theorem provers employ a portfolio of different methods for solving problems. This changes the landscape on which we perform our research: solving problems that can already be solved may not improve the state of the art and a method that can solve a handful of problems unsolvable by current methods, but generally performs poorly on most problems, can be very useful. We acknowledge that forcing new methods to compete against portfolio solvers can stifle innovation. However, this is only the case when comparisons are made at the level of total problems solved. We propose a movement towards focussing on unique solutions in evaluation and competitions i.e. measuring the potential contribution to a portfolio solver. This state of affairs is particularly prominent in first-order logic, which is undecidable. When reasoning in a decidable logic there can be a focus on optimising a decision procedure and measuring average solving times. But in a setting where solutions are difficult to find, average solving times lose meaning, and whilst improving the efficiency of a technique can move potential solutions within acceptable time limits, in general, complementary strategies may be more successful.
Using ConceptNet to Teach Common Sense to an Automated Theorem Prover
Schon, Claudia, Siebert, Sophie, Stolzenburg, Frieder
In recent years, numerous benchmarks for commonsense reasoning have been presented which cover different areas: the Choice of Plausible Alternatives Challenge (COP A) [17] requires causal reasoning in everyday situations, the Winograd Schema Challenge [8] addresses difficult cases of pronoun disambiguation, the TriangleCOP A Challenge [9] focuses on human relationships and emotions, and the Story Cloze Test with the ROCStories Corpora [11] focuses on the ability to determine a plausible ending for a given short story, to name just a few. In our system, we focus on the COP A challenge where each problem consists of a problem description (the premise), a question, and two answer candidates (called alternatives). See Figure 1 for an example. Most approaches tackling these problems are based on machine learning or exploit statistical properties of the natural language input (see e.g.
Intuitionistic Linear Temporal Logics
Balbiani, Philippe, Boudou, Joseph, Diรฉguez, Martรญn, Fernรกndez-Duque, David
We consider intuitionistic variants of linear temporal logic with `next', `until' and `release' based on expanding posets: partial orders equipped with an order-preserving transition function. This class of structures gives rise to a logic which we denote $\iltl$, and by imposing additional constraints we obtain the logics $\itlb$ of persistent posets and $\itlht$ of here-and-there temporal logic, both of which have been considered in the literature. We prove that $\iltl$ has the effective finite model property and hence is decidable, while $\itlb$ does not have the finite model property. We also introduce notions of bounded bisimulations for these logics and use them to show that the `until' and `release' operators are not definable in terms of each other, even over the class of persistent posets.
Synthetic Datasets for Neural Program Synthesis
Shin, Richard, Kant, Neel, Gupta, Kavi, Bender, Christopher, Trabucco, Brandon, Singh, Rishabh, Song, Dawn
The goal of program synthesis is to automatically generate programs in a particular language from corresponding specifications, e.g. input-output behavior. Many current approaches achieve impressive results after training on randomly generated I/O examples in limited domain-specific languages (DSLs), as with string transformations in RobustFill. However, we empirically discover that applying test input generation techniques for languages with control flow and rich input space causes deep networks to generalize poorly to certain data distributions; to correct this, we propose a new methodology for controlling and evaluating the bias of synthetic data distributions over both programs and specifications. We demonstrate, using the Karel DSL and a small Calculator DSL, that training deep networks on these distributions leads to improved cross-distribution generalization performance.
A Study of the Learnability of Relational Properties (Model Counting Meets Machine Learning)
Usman, Muhammad, Wang, Wenxi, Wang, Kaiyuan, Vasic, Marko, Vikalo, Haris, Khurshid, Sarfraz
Relational properties, e.g., the connectivity structure of nodes in a distributed system, have many applications in software design and analysis. However, such properties often have to be written manually, which can be costly and error-prone. This paper introduces the MCML approach for empirically studying the learnability of a key class of such properties that can be expressed in the well-known software design language Alloy. A key novelty of MCML is quantification of the performance of and semantic differences among trained machine learning (ML) models, specifically decision trees, with respect to entire input spaces (up to a bound on the input size), and not just for given training and test datasets (as is the common practice). MCML reduces the quantification problems to the classic complexity theory problem of model counting, and employs state-of-the-art approximate and exact model counters for high efficiency. The results show that relatively simple ML models can achieve surprisingly high performance (accuracy and F1 score) at learning relational properties when evaluated in the common setting of using training and test datasets -- even when the training dataset is much smaller than the test dataset -- indicating the seeming simplicity of learning these properties. However, the use of MCML metrics based on model counting shows that the performance can degrade substantially when tested against the whole (bounded) input space, indicating the high complexity of precisely learning these properties, and the usefulness of model counting in quantifying the true accuracy.
ADD-Lib: Decision Diagrams in Practice
Gossen, Frederik, Murtovi, Alnis, Zweihoff, Philip, Steffen, Bernhard
In the paper, we present the ADD-Lib, our efficient and easy to use framework for Algebraic Decision Diagrams (ADDs). The focus of the ADD-Lib is not so much on its efficient implementation of individual operations, which are taken by other established ADD frameworks, but its ease and flexibility, which arise at two levels: the level of individual ADD-tools, which come with a dedicated user-friendly web-based graphical user interface, and at the meta level, where such tools are specified. Both levels are described in the paper: the meta level by explaining how we can construct an ADD-tool tailored for Random Forest refinement and evaluation, and the accordingly generated Web-based domain-specific tool, which we also provide as an artifact for cooperative experimentation. In particular, the artifact allows readers to combine a given Random Forest with their own ADDs regarded as expert knowledge and to experience the corresponding effect.
Stochastic Fairness and Language-Theoretic Fairness in Planning on Nondeterministic Domains
Aminof, Benjamin, De Giacomo, Giuseppe, Rubin, Sasha
We address two central notions of fairness in the literature of planning on nondeterministic fully observable domains. The first, which we call stochastic fairness, is classical, and assumes an environment which operates probabilistically using possibly unknown probabilities. The second, which is language-theoretic, assumes that if an action is taken from a given state infinitely often then all its possible outcomes should appear infinitely often (we call this state-action fairness). While the two notions coincide for standard reachability goals, they diverge for temporally extended goals. This important difference has been overlooked in the planning literature, and we argue has led to confusion in a number of published algorithms which use reductions that were stated for state-action fairness, for which they are incorrect, while being correct for stochastic fairness. We remedy this and provide an optimal sound and complete algorithm for solving state-action fair planning for LTL/LTLf goals, as well as a correct proof of the lower bound of the goal-complexity (our proof is general enough that it provides new proofs also for the no-fairness and stochastic-fairness cases). Overall, we show that stochastic fairness is better behaved than state-action fairness.
A Paraconsistent ASP-like Language with Tractable Model Generation
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is nowadays a dominant rule-based knowledge representation tool. Though existing ASP variants enjoy efficient implementations, generating an answer set remains intractable. The goal of this research is to define a new \asp-like rule language, 4SP, with tractable model generation. The language combines ideas of ASP and a paraconsistent rule language 4QL. Though 4SP shares the syntax of \asp and for each program all its answer sets are among 4SP models, the new language differs from ASP in its logical foundations, the intended methodology of its use and complexity of computing models. As we show in the paper, 4QL can be seen as a paraconsistent counterpart of ASP programs stratified with respect to default negation. Although model generation of well-supported models for 4QL programs is tractable, dropping stratification makes both 4QL and ASP intractable. To retain tractability while allowing non-stratified programs, in 4SP we introduce trial expressions interlacing programs with hypotheses as to the truth values of default negations. This allows us to develop a~model generation algorithm with deterministic polynomial time complexity. We also show relationships among 4SP, ASP and 4QL.
r/MachineLearning - [R] Write, Execute, Assess: Program Synthesis with a REPL (NeurIPS2019)
Abstract: We present a neural program synthesis approach integrating components which write, execute, and assess code to navigate the search space of possible programs. We equip the search process with an interpreter or a read-eval-print-loop (REPL), which immediately executes partially written programs, exposing their semantics. The REPL addresses a basic challenge of program synthesis: tiny changes in syntax can lead to huge changes in semantics. We train a pair of models, a policy that proposes the new piece of code to write, and a value function that assesses the prospects of the code written so-far. At test time we can combine these models with a Sequential Monte Carlo algorithm.