Google's Area 120 incubator today launched Tables, a work-tracking tool with IFTTT-like automation features and support for Google products, including Google Groups, Google Sheets, and more. Currently in beta in the U.S., Tables automates actions like collating data, checking multiple sources of data, and pasting data into other docs for handoff. "Tracking work with existing tech solutions meant building a custom in-house solution or purchasing an off-the-shelf product, but these options are time-consuming, inflexible, and expensive," Tables general manager Tim Gleason explained in a blog post. "Tables helps teams track work and automate tasks to save time and supercharge collaboration -- without any coding required." Using Tables, teams can program bots to schedule recurring email reminders when tasks are overdue, message a Slack or Google Chat room when new form submissions are received, or move a task to someone else's work queue when the status changes.

The problem of knowledge graph (KG) reasoning has been widely explored by traditional rule-based systems and more recently by knowledge graph embedding methods. While logical rules can capture deterministic behavior in a KG they are brittle and mining ones that infer facts beyond the known KG is challenging. Probabilistic embedding methods are effective in capturing global soft statistical tendencies and reasoning with them is computationally efficient. While embedding representations learned from rich training data are expressive, incompleteness and sparsity in real-world KGs can impact their effectiveness. We aim to leverage the complementary properties of both methods to develop a hybrid model that learns both high-quality rules and embeddings simultaneously. Our method uses a cross feedback paradigm wherein, an embedding model is used to guide the search of a rule mining system to mine rules and infer new facts. These new facts are sampled and further used to refine the embedding model. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method over other competitive standalone and hybrid baselines. We also show its efficacy in a sparse KG setting and finally explore the connection with negative sampling.

Black-box artificial intelligence (AI) induction methods such as deep reinforcement learning (DRL) are increasingly being used to find optimal policies for a given control task. Although policies represented using a black-box AI are capable of efficiently executing the underlying control task and achieving optimal closed-loop performance -- controlling the agent from initial time step until the successful termination of an episode, the developed control rules are often complex and neither interpretable nor explainable. In this paper, we use a recently proposed nonlinear decision-tree (NLDT) approach to find a hierarchical set of control rules in an attempt to maximize the open-loop performance for approximating and explaining the pre-trained black-box DRL (oracle) agent using the labelled state-action dataset. Recent advances in nonlinear optimization approaches using evolutionary computation facilitates finding a hierarchical set of nonlinear control rules as a function of state variables using a computationally fast bilevel optimization procedure at each node of the proposed NLDT. Additionally, we propose a re-optimization procedure for enhancing closed-loop performance of an already derived NLDT. We evaluate our proposed methodologies on four different control problems having two to four discrete actions. In all these problems our proposed approach is able to find simple and interpretable rules involving one to four non-linear terms per rule, while simultaneously achieving on par closed-loop performance when compared to a trained black-box DRL agent. The obtained results are inspiring as they suggest the replacement of complicated black-box DRL policies involving thousands of parameters (making them non-interpretable) with simple interpretable policies. Results are encouraging and motivating to pursue further applications of proposed approach in solving more complex control tasks.

We propose two algorithms for interpretation and boosting of tree-based ensemble methods. Both algorithms make use of mathematical programming models that are constructed with a set of rules extracted from an ensemble of decision trees. The objective is to obtain the minimum total impurity with the least number of rules that cover all the samples. The first algorithm uses the collection of decision trees obtained from a trained random forest model. Our numerical results show that the proposed rule covering approach selects only a few rules that could be used for interpreting the random forest model. Moreover, the resulting set of rules closely matches the accuracy level of the random forest model. Inspired by the column generation algorithm in linear programming, our second algorithm uses a rule generation scheme for boosting decision trees. We use the dual optimal solutions of the linear programming models as sample weights to obtain only those rules that would improve the accuracy. With a computational study, we observe that our second algorithm performs competitively with the other well-known boosting methods. Our implementations also demonstrate that both algorithms can be trivially coupled with the existing random forest and decision tree packages.

Knowledge graph completion aims to predict the new links in given entities among the knowledge graph (KG). Most mainstream embedding methods focus on fact triplets contained in the given KG, however, ignoring the rich background information provided by logic rules driven from knowledge base implicitly. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a general framework, named EM-RBR(embedding and rule-based reasoning), capable of combining the advantages of reasoning based on rules and the state-of-the-art models of embedding. EM-RBR aims to utilize relational background knowledge contained in rules to conduct multi-relation reasoning link prediction rather than superficial vector triangle linkage in embedding models. By this way, we can explore relation between two entities in deeper context to achieve higher accuracy. In experiments, we demonstrate that EM-RBR achieves better performance compared with previous models on FB15k, WN18 and our new dataset FB15k-R. We make the implementation of EM-RBR available at https://github.com/1173710224/link-prediction-with-rule-based-reasoning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides many opportunities to improve private and public life. Discovering patterns and structures in large troves of data in an automated manner is a core component of data science, and currently drives applications in diverse areas such as computational biology, law and finance. However, such a highly positive impact is coupled with significant challenges: how do we understand the decisions suggested by these systems in order that we can trust them? In this report, we focus specifically on data-driven methods -- machine learning (ML) and pattern recognition models in particular -- so as to survey and distill the results and observations from the literature. The purpose of this report can be especially appreciated by noting that ML models are increasingly deployed in a wide range of businesses. However, with the increasing prevalence and complexity of methods, business stakeholders in the very least have a growing number of concerns about the drawbacks of models, data-specific biases, and so on. Analogously, data science practitioners are often not aware about approaches emerging from the academic literature, or may struggle to appreciate the differences between different methods, so end up using industry standards such as SHAP. Here, we have undertaken a survey to help industry practitioners (but also data scientists more broadly) understand the field of explainable machine learning better and apply the right tools. Our latter sections build a narrative around a putative data scientist, and discuss how she might go about explaining her models by asking the right questions.

When humans read or listen, they make implicit commonsense inferences that frame their understanding of what happened and why. As a step toward AI systems that can build similar mental models, we introduce GLUCOSE, a large-scale dataset of implicit commonsense causal knowledge, encoded as causal mini-theories about the world, each grounded in a narrative context. To construct GLUCOSE, we drew on cognitive psychology to identify ten dimensions of causal explanation, focusing on events, states, motivations, and emotions. Each GLUCOSE entry includes a story-specific causal statement paired with an inference rule generalized from the statement. This paper details two concrete contributions: First, we present our platform for effectively crowdsourcing GLUCOSE data at scale, which uses semi-structured templates to elicit causal explanations. Using this platform, we collected 440K specific statements and general rules that capture implicit commonsense knowledge about everyday situations. Second, we show that existing knowledge resources and pretrained language models do not include or readily predict GLUCOSE's rich inferential content. However, when state-of-the-art neural models are trained on this knowledge, they can start to make commonsense inferences on unseen stories that match humans' mental models.

This paper takes a first step towards a critical thinking curriculum for neural auto-regressive language models. We introduce a synthetic text corpus of deductively valid arguments, and use this artificial argument corpus to train and evaluate GPT-2. Significant transfer learning effects can be observed: Training a model on a few simple core schemes allows it to accurately complete conclusions of different, and more complex types of arguments, too. The language models seem to connect and generalize the core argument schemes in a correct way. Moreover, we obtain consistent and promising results for the GLUE and SNLI benchmarks. The findings suggest that there might exist a representative sample of paradigmatic instances of good reasoning that will suffice to acquire general reasoning skills and that might form the core of a critical thinking curriculum for language models.

It is non-trivial to design engaging and balanced sets of game rules. Modern chess has evolved over centuries, but without a similar recourse to history, the consequences of rule changes to game dynamics are difficult to predict. AlphaZero provides an alternative in silico means of game balance assessment. It is a system that can learn near-optimal strategies for any rule set from scratch, without any human supervision, by continually learning from its own experience. In this study we use AlphaZero to creatively explore and design new chess variants. There is growing interest in chess variants like Fischer Random Chess, because of classical chess's voluminous opening theory, the high percentage of draws in professional play, and the non-negligible number of games that end while both players are still in their home preparation. We compare nine other variants that involve atomic changes to the rules of chess. The changes allow for novel strategic and tactical patterns to emerge, while keeping the games close to the original. By learning near-optimal strategies for each variant with AlphaZero, we determine what games between strong human players might look like if these variants were adopted. Qualitatively, several variants are very dynamic. An analytic comparison show that pieces are valued differently between variants, and that some variants are more decisive than classical chess. Our findings demonstrate the rich possibilities that lie beyond the rules of modern chess.

Emergent Insight: We all are recipients of the untiring work of artificial intelligence but we don't take time to acknowledge it. Industrial businesses certainly are leveraging the powerful technology as noted in this post by Michael Sharp at Metrology News. In your company tasks and objectives, take a moment to consider how rules-based AI or machine learning can improve productivity, safety or more. Machines, devices and computers usually take over tasks that are mundane and laborious and don't really require a human to do. Why not let AI do the work and switch the human employees to more satisfying roles?