A hallmark of human cognition is the ability to continually acquire and distill observations of the world into meaningful, predictive theories. In this paper we present a new mechanism for logical theory acquisition which takes a set of observed facts and learns to extract from them a set of logical rules and a small set of core facts which together entail the observations. Our approach is neuro-symbolic in the sense that the rule pred- icates and core facts are given dense vector representations. The rules are applied to the core facts using a soft unification procedure to infer additional facts. After k steps of forward inference, the consequences are compared to the initial observations and the rules and core facts are then encouraged towards representations that more faithfully generate the observations through inference. Our approach is based on a novel neural forward-chaining differentiable rule induction network. The rules are interpretable and learned compositionally from their predicates, which may be invented. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on a variety of ILP rule induction and domain theory learning datasets.

Automated game design has remained a key challenge within the field of Game AI. In this paper, we introduce a method for recombining existing games to create new games through a process called conceptual expansion. Prior automated game design approaches have relied on hand-authored or crowd-sourced knowledge, which limits the scope and applications of such systems. Our approach instead relies on machine learning to learn approximate representations of games. Our approach recombines knowledge from these learned representations to create new games via conceptual expansion. We evaluate this approach by demonstrating the ability for the system to recreate existing games. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first machine learning-based automated game design system.

Argumentation is a non-monotonic process. This reflects the fact that argumentation involves uncertain information, and so new information can cause a change in the conclusions drawn. However, the base logic does not need to be non-monotonic. Indeed, most proposals for structured argumentation use a monotonic base logic (e.g. some form of modus ponens with a rule-based language, or classical logic). Nonetheless, there are issues in capturing defeasible reasoning in argumentation including choice of base logic and modelling of defeasible knowledge. And there are insights and tools to be harnessed for research in non-monontonic logics. We consider some of these issues in this paper.

Most work in machine reading focuses on question answering problems where the answer is directly expressed in the text to read. However, many real-world question answering problems require the reading of text not because it contains the literal answer, but because it contains a recipe to derive an answer together with the reader's background knowledge. One example is the task of interpreting regulations to answer "Can I...?" or "Do I have to...?" questions such as "I am working in Canada. Do I have to carry on paying UK National Insurance?" after reading a UK government website about this topic. This task requires both the interpretation of rules and the application of background knowledge. It is further complicated due to the fact that, in practice, most questions are underspecified, and a human assistant will regularly have to ask clarification questions such as "How long have you been working abroad?" when the answer cannot be directly derived from the question and text. In this paper, we formalise this task and develop a crowd-sourcing strategy to collect 32k task instances based on real-world rules and crowd-generated questions and scenarios. We analyse the challenges of this task and assess its difficulty by evaluating the performance of rule-based and machine-learning baselines. We observe promising results when no background knowledge is necessary, and substantial room for improvement whenever background knowledge is needed.

In this blog post, I am going to unfold some reasonably technical ideas pertinent most directly to the fourth point in the list: How to make meta-learning work in reality, in the context of a complex multi-algorithm cognitive architecture carrying out a variety of complicated tasks. Dr. Nil Geisweiller has recently written a research blog post describing his current work on "probabilistic inference meta-learning." In his research, he discusses using OpenCog's Probabilistic Logic Networks (PLN) framework as the base-level algorithm for meta-learning, via using pattern-mining and then PLN itself to learn patterns in large sets of PLN inference examples, to learn what sorts of inferences work better in what contexts. This gets at the crux of the meta-learning problem in an OpenCog context; it is about using PLN to help PLN learn how to reason better. This blog post is complementary to Dr. Nil's, in this post I am going to describe some work currently underway to, in effect, fuse various learning/reasoning algorithms now working separately within OpenCog so that they appear as aspects of a single unified learning/reasoning algorithm. This sort of unification provides greater elegance than a situation where there are multiple markedly distinct learning/reasoning algorithms.

Detecting small sets of relevant patterns from a given dataset is a central challenge in data mining. The relevance of a pattern is based on user-provided criteria; typically, all patterns that satisfy certain criteria are considered relevant. Rule-based languages like Answer Set Programming (ASP) seem well-suited for specifying such criteria in a form of constraints. Although progress has been made, on the one hand, on solving individual mining problems and, on the other hand, developing generic mining systems, the existing methods either focus on scalability or on generality. In this paper we make steps towards combining local (frequency, size, cost) and global (various condensed representations like maximal, closed, skyline) constraints in a generic and efficient way. We present a hybrid approach for itemset, sequence and graph mining which exploits dedicated highly optimized mining systems to detect frequent patterns and then filters the results using declarative ASP. To further demonstrate the generic nature of our hybrid framework we apply it to a problem of approximately tiling a database. Experiments on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method and computational gains for itemset, sequence and graph mining, as well as approximate tiling.

Artificial intelligence, defined as intelligence exhibited by machines, has many applications in today's society. More specifically, it is Weak AI, the form of A.I. where programs are developed to perform specific tasks, that is being utilized for a wide range of activities including medical diagnosis, electronic trading, robot control, and remote sensing. AI has been used to develop and advance numerous fields and industries, including finance, healthcare, education, transportation, and more. AI for Good is a movement in which institutions are employing AI to tackle some of the world's greatest economic and social challenges. For example, the University of Southern California launched the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society, with the goal of using AI to address socially relevant problems such as homelessness. At Stanford, researchers are using AI to analyze satellite images to identify which areas have the highest poverty levels.[1] The Air Operations Division (AOD) uses AI for the rule based expert systems. The AOD has use for artificial intelligence for surrogate operators for combat and training simulators, mission management aids, support systems for tactical decision making, and post processing of the simulator data into symbolic summaries.[2]

It is conventional wisdom in machine learning and data mining that logical models such as rule sets are more interpretable than other models, and that among such rule-based models, simpler models are more interpretable than more complex ones. In this position paper, we question this latter assumption by focusing on one particular aspect of interpretability, namely the plausibility of models. Roughly speaking, we equate the plausibility of a model with the likeliness that a user accepts it as an explanation for a prediction. In particular, we argue that, all other things being equal, longer explanations may be more convincing than shorter ones, and that the predominant bias for shorter models, which is typically necessary for learning powerful discriminative models, may not be suitable when it comes to user acceptance of the learned models. To that end, we first recapitulate evidence for and against this postulate, and then report the results of an evaluation in a crowd-sourcing study based on about 3.000 judgments. The results do not reveal a strong preference for simple rules, whereas we can observe a weak preference for longer rules in some domains. We then relate these results to well-known cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy, the representative heuristic, or the recogition heuristic, and investigate their relation to rule length and plausibility.

The traditional insurance business model is going to fundamentally and permanently change from what was invented in the Lloyd's coffee shop in 1668 and which has been the basis of insurance ever since: Risk Mitigation via Indemnity and minimising interactions with customers. The next 10 years will see unprecedented change in the insurance industry. Traditional insurance companies selling and servicing the old style product model are being replaced by IT enabled, risk management companies selling profitable, long term contracts for valuable services delivered as RMAAS (risk management as a service). The experience of other industries offers a stark warning to the insurance industry: banks suffering death by a thousand cuts from tech companies in payments, cards, lending and now open banking, show the way it will go. Even software is sprinting to a cloud based, software as a service (SAAS) model.

Companies are using AI to prevent and detect everything from routine employee theft to insider trading. Many banks and large corporations employ artificial intelligence to detect and prevent fraud and money laundering. Social media companies use machine learning to block illicit content such as child pornography. Businesses are constantly experimenting with new ways to use artificial intelligence for better risk management and faster, more responsive fraud detection -- and even to predict and prevent crimes. While today's basic technology is not necessarily revolutionary, the algorithms it uses and the results they can produce are.