Good parameter settings are crucial to achieve high performance in many areas of artificial intelligence (AI), such as propositional satisfiability solving, AI planning, scheduling, and machine learning (in particular deep learning). Automated algorithm configuration methods have recently received much attention in the AI community since they replace tedious, irreproducible and error-prone manual parameter tuning and can lead to new state-of-the-art performance. However, practical applications of algorithm configuration are prone to several (often subtle) pitfalls in the experimental design that can render the procedure ineffective. We identify several common issues and propose best practices for avoiding them. As one possibility for automatically handling as many of these as possible, we also propose a tool called GenericWrapper4AC.

We extend description logics (DLs) with non-monotonic reasoning features. We start by investigating a notion of defeasible subsumption in the spirit of defeasible conditionals as studied by Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor in the propositional case. In particular, we consider a natural and intuitive semantics for defeasible subsumption, and investigate KLM-style syntactic properties for both preferential and rational subsumption. Our contribution includes two representation results linking our semantic constructions to the set of preferential and rational properties considered. Besides showing that our semantics is appropriate, these results pave the way for more effective decision procedures for defeasible reasoning in DLs. Indeed, we also analyse the problem of non-monotonic reasoning in DLs at the level of entailment and present an algorithm for the computation of rational closure of a defeasible ontology. Importantly, our algorithm relies completely on classical entailment and shows that the computational complexity of reasoning over defeasible ontologies is no worse than that of reasoning in the underlying classical DL ALC.

We present an environment, benchmark, and deep learning driven automated theorem prover for higher-order logic. Higher-order interactive theorem provers enable the formalization of arbitrary mathematical theories and thereby present an interesting, open-ended challenge for deep learning. We provide an open-source framework based on the HOL Light theorem prover that can be used as a reinforcement learning environment. HOL Light comes with a broad coverage of basic mathematical theorems on calculus and the formal proof of the Kepler conjecture, from which we derive a challenging benchmark for automated reasoning. We also present a deep reinforcement learning driven automated theorem prover, DeepHOL, with strong initial results on this benchmark.

We propose a novel learning paradigm for Deep Neural Networks (DNN) by using Boolean logic algebra. We first present the basic differentiable operators of a Boolean system such as conjunction, disjunction and exclusive-OR and show how these elementary operators can be combined in a simple and meaningful way to form Neural Logic Networks (NLNs). We examine the effectiveness of the proposed NLN framework in learning Boolean functions and discrete-algorithmic tasks. We demonstrate that, in contrast to the implicit learning in MLP approach, the proposed neural logic networks can learn the logical functions explicitly that can be verified and interpreted by human. In particular, we propose a new framework for learning the inductive logic programming (ILP) problems by exploiting the explicit representational power of NLN. We show the proposed neural ILP solver is capable of feats such as predicate invention and recursion and can outperform the current state of the art neural ILP solvers using a variety of benchmark tasks such as decimal addition and multiplication, and sorting on ordered list.

We describe a very large improvement of existing hammer-style proof automation over large ITP libraries by combining learning and theorem proving. In particular, we have integrated state-of-the-art machine learners into the E automated theorem prover, and developed methods that allow learning and efficient internal guidance of E over the whole Mizar library. The resulting trained system improves the real-time performance of E on the Mizar library by 70% in a single-strategy setting.

The field of geometric automated theorem provers has a long and rich history, from the early AI approaches of the 1960s, synthetic provers, to today algebraic and synthetic provers. The geometry automated deduction area differs from other areas by the strong connection between the axiomatic theories and its standard models. In many cases the geometric constructions are used to establish the theorems' statements, geometric constructions are, in some provers, used to conduct the proof, used as counter-examples to close some branches of the automatic proof. Synthetic geometry proofs are done using geometric properties, proofs that can have a visual counterpart in the supporting geometric construction. With the growing use of geometry automatic deduction tools as applications in other areas, e.g. in education, the need to evaluate them, using different criteria, is felt. Establishing a ranking among geometric automated theorem provers will be useful for the improvement of the current methods/implementations. Improvements could concern wider scope, better efficiency, proof readability and proof reliability. To achieve the goal of being able to compare geometric automated theorem provers a common test bench is needed: a common language to describe the geometric problems; a comprehensive repository of geometric problems and a set of quality measures.

We extend probabilistic action language pBC+ with the notion of utility as in decision theory. The semantics of the extended pBC+ can be defined as a shorthand notation for a decision-theoretic extension of the probabilistic answer set programming language LPMLN. Alternatively, the semantics of pBC+ can also be defined in terms of Markov Decision Process (MDP), which in turn allows for representing MDP in a succinct and elaboration tolerant way as well as to leverage an MDP solver to compute pBC+. The idea led to the design of the system pbcplus2mdp, which can find an optimal policy of a pBC+ action description using an MDP solver.

Deep learning methods capable of handling relational data have proliferated over the last years. In contrast to traditional relational learning methods that leverage first-order logic for representing such data, these deep learning methods aim at re-representing symbolic relational data in Euclidean spaces. They offer better scalability, but can only numerically approximate relational structures and are less flexible in terms of reasoning tasks supported. This paper introduces a novel framework for relational representation learning that combines the best of both worlds. This framework, inspired by the auto-encoding principle, uses first-order logic as a data representation language, and the mapping between the original and latent representation is done by means of logic programs instead of neural networks. We show how learning can be cast as a constraint optimisation problem for which existing solvers can be used. The use of logic as a representation language makes the proposed framework more accurate (as the representation is exact, rather than approximate), more flexible, and more interpretable than deep learning methods. We experimentally show that these latent representations are indeed beneficial in relational learning tasks.

The traditional ground-and-solve approach to Answer Set Programming (ASP) suffers from the grounding bottleneck, which makes large-scale problem instances unsolvable. Lazy grounding is an alternative approach that interleaves grounding with solving and thus uses space more efficiently. The limited view on the search space in lazy grounding poses unique challenges, however, and can have adverse effects on solving performance. In this paper we present a novel characterization of degrees of laziness in grounding for ASP, i.e. of compromises between lazily grounding as little as possible and the traditional full grounding upfront. We investigate how these degrees of laziness compare to each other formally as well as, by means of an experimental analysis using a number of benchmarks, in terms of their effects on solving performance. Our contributions are the introduction of a range of novel lazy grounding strategies, a formal account on their relationships and their correctness, and an investigation of their effects on solving performance. Experiments show that our approach performs significantly better than state-of-the-art lazy grounding in many cases.

The area of formal ethics is experiencing a shift from a unique or standard approach to normative reasoning, as exemplified by so-called standard deontic logic, to a variety of application-specific theories. However, the adequate handling of normative concepts such as obligation, permission, prohibition, and moral commitment is challenging, as illustrated by the notorious paradoxes of deontic logic. In this article we introduce an approach to design and evaluate theories of normative reasoning. In particular, we present a formal framework based on higher-order logic, a design methodology, and we discuss tool support. Moreover, we illustrate the approach using an example of an implementation, we demonstrate different ways of using it, and we discuss how the design of normative theories is now made accessible to non-specialist users and developers.