Building artificial intelligence into your products, services, and processes can make you smarter, faster, and better able to compete. But building smart systems using machine learning is not like buying an accounting package or an enterprise resource planning system. That's why executives need as much training as engineers when adopting AI, said Larry Pizette, the head of of data science at Amazon's Machine Learning Solutions Lab, in the latest edition of The AI Show from VentureBeat. It's also key to understanding the major mistakes companies make when they're kicking off AI projects. "The part that I think gets missed frequently is teaching the business folks, because people always think about the data scientists and the software developers learning about these skills," said Pizette.

In this work we target the problem of provably computing the equivalence between two programs represented as dataflow graphs. To this end, we formalize the problem of equivalence between two programs as finding a set of semantics-preserving rewrite rules from one into the other, such that after the rewrite the two programs are structurally identical, and therefore trivially equivalent. We then develop the first graph-to-sequence neural network system for program equivalence, trained to produce such rewrite sequences from a carefully crafted automatic example generation algorithm. We extensively evaluate our system on a rich multi-type linear algebra expression language, using arbitrary combinations of 100+ graph-rewriting axioms of equivalence. Our system outputs via inference a correct rewrite sequence for 96% of the 10,000 program pairs isolated for testing, using 30-term programs. And in all cases, the validity of the sequence produced and therefore the provable assertion of program equivalence is computable, in negligible time.

Although there has been great progress in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few years, many of us remember the AI winter in the 1990s, which resulted from overinflated promises by developers and unnaturally high expectations from end users. Now, industry insiders, such as Facebook head of AI Jerome Pesenti, are predicting that AI will soon hit another wall--this time due to the lack of semantic understanding. "Deep learning and current AI, if you are really honest, has a lot of limitations," said Pesenti. "We are very, very far from human intelligence, and there are some criticisms that are valid: It can propagate human biases, it's not easy to explain, it doesn't have common sense, it's more on the level of pattern matching than robust semantic understanding." Other computer scientists believe that AI is currently facing a "reproducibility crisis" because many complex machine-learning algorithms are a "black box" and cannot be easily reproduced.

When I try to introduce the concept of AI DApps, I often find that it is particularly difficult when people lack an accurate grasp of what machine learning is. There is an overwhelming amount of information online about machine learning targeted toward audiences with different levels of technical expertise. In this series, I introduce machine learning at different technical levels, with the aim of providing a basic framework that helps you understand machine learning, regardless of your background, starting at the highest level. In traditional programming, programmers write programs, which are made of lines of code that instruct computers to perform certain tasks. For example, a programmer can write a program to detect whether the word "book" exists in a news article.

We present the Multi-value Rule Set (MRS) for interpretable classification with feature efficient presentations. Compared to rule sets built from single-value rules, MRS adopts a more generalized form of association rules that allows multiple values in a condition. Rules of this form are more concise than classical single-value rules in capturing and describing patterns in data. Our formulation also pursues a higher efficiency of feature utilization, which reduces possible cost in data collection and storage. We propose a Bayesian framework for formulating an MRS model and develop an efficient inference method for learning a maximum a posteriori, incorporating theoretically grounded bounds to iteratively reduce the search space and improve the search efficiency.

This paper considers the learning of Boolean rules in either disjunctive normal form (DNF, OR-of-ANDs, equivalent to decision rule sets) or conjunctive normal form (CNF, AND-of-ORs) as an interpretable model for classification. An integer program is formulated to optimally trade classification accuracy for rule simplicity. Column generation (CG) is used to efficiently search over an exponential number of candidate clauses (conjunctions or disjunctions) without the need for heuristic rule mining. This approach also bounds the gap between the selected rule set and the best possible rule set on the training data. To handle large datasets, we propose an approximate CG algorithm using randomization.

Lifted inference rules exploit symmetries for fast reasoning in statistical rela-tional models. Computational complexity of these rules is highly dependent onthe choice of the constraint language they operate on and therefore coming upwith the right kind of representation is critical to the success of lifted inference.In this paper, we propose a new constraint language, called setineq, which allowssubset, equality and inequality constraints, to represent substitutions over the vari-ables in the theory. Our constraint formulation is strictly more expressive thanexisting representations, yet easy to operate on. We reformulate the three mainlifting rules: decomposer, generalized binomial and the recently proposed singleoccurrence for MAP inference, to work with our constraint representation. Exper-iments on benchmark MLNs for exact and sampling based inference demonstratethe effectiveness of our approach over several other existing techniques.

Fraud detection is essential in financial services, with the potential of greatly reducing criminal activities and saving considerable resources for businesses and customers. We address online fraud detection, which consists of classifying incoming transactions as either legitimate or fraudulent in real-time. Modern fraud detection systems consist of a machine learning model and rules defined by human experts. Often, the rules performance degrades over time due to concept drift, especially of adversarial nature. Furthermore, they can be costly to maintain, either because they are computationally expensive or because they send transactions for manual review. We propose ARMS, an automated rules management system that evaluates the contribution of individual rules and optimizes the set of active rules using heuristic search and a user-defined loss-function. It complies with critical domain-specific requirements, such as handling different actions (e.g., accept, alert, and decline), priorities, blacklists, and large datasets (i.e., hundreds of rules and millions of transactions). We use ARMS to optimize the rule-based systems of two real-world clients. Results show that it can maintain the original systems' performance (e.g., recall, or false-positive rate) using only a fraction of the original rules (~ 50% in one case, and ~ 20% in the other).

On the tray is an assortment of shapes: Some cubes, others spheres. The shapes are made from a variety of different materials and represent an assortment of sizes. In total there are, perhaps, eight objects. My question: "Looking at the objects, are there an equal number of large things and metal spheres?" The fact that it sounds as if it is is proof positive of just how simple it actually is.

AI has long pursued the goal of having systems reason over *explicitly provided* knowledge, but building suitable representations has proved challenging. Here we explore whether transformers can similarly learn to reason (or emulate reasoning), but using rules expressed in language, thus bypassing a formal representation. We provide the first demonstration that this is possible, and characterize the extent of this capability. To do this, we use a collection of synthetic datasets that test increasing levels of reasoning complexity (number of rules, presence of negation, and depth of chaining). We find transformers appear to learn rule-based reasoning with high (99%) accuracy on these datasets, and in a way that generalizes to test data requiring substantially deeper chaining than in the training data (95%+ scores). We also demonstrate that the models transfer well to two hand-authored rulebases, and to rulebases paraphrased into more natural language. These findings are significant as it suggests a new role for transformers, namely as a limited "soft theorem prover" operating over explicit theories in language. This in turn suggests new possibilities for explainability, correctability, and counterfactual reasoning in question-answering. All datasets and a live demo are available at http://rule-reasoning.apps.allenai.org/