We introduce an online active exploration algorithm for data-efficiently learning an abstract symbolic model of an environment. Our algorithm is divided into two parts: the first part quickly generates an intermediate Bayesian symbolic model from the data that the agent has collected so far, which the agent can then use along with the second part to guide its future exploration towards regions of the state space that the model is uncertain about. We show that our algorithm outperforms random and greedy exploration policies on two different computer game domains. The first domain is an Asteroids-inspired game with complex dynamics but basic logical structure. The second is the Treasure Game, with simpler dynamics but more complex logical structure.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) methods are the most widely used techniques to generate distributional representations of the symbolic Knowledge Bases (KBs). These methods embed any given KB into a vector space by exploiting statistical similarities among its entities and predicates but without any guarantee of preserving the underlying logical structure of the KB. This, in turn, results in poor performance of logical reasoning tasks that are solved using such distributional representations. We present a novel approach called Embed2Reason (E2R) that embeds a symbolic KB into a vector space in a logical structure preserving manner. This approach is inspired by the theory of Quantum Logic. Such an embedding allows answering membership based complex logical reasoning queries with impressive accuracy improvements over popular SRL baselines.

We introduce an online active exploration algorithm for data-efficiently learning an abstract symbolic model of an environment. Our algorithm is divided into two parts: the first part quickly generates an intermediate Bayesian symbolic model from the data that the agent has collected so far, which the agent can then use along with the second part to guide its future exploration towards regions of the state space that the model is uncertain about. We show that our algorithm outperforms random and greedy exploration policies on two different computer game domains. The first domain is an Asteroids-inspired game with complex dynamics but basic logical structure. The second is the Treasure Game, with simpler dynamics but more complex logical structure.

Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions provided are not consistent with how LMs are trained, process information, and generate new tokens. To illustrate this incommensurability we assume the view that transformer-based LMs implement an \textit{implicit} finite-order Markov kernel mapping contexts to conditional token distributions. In this view, reasoning-like outputs correspond to statistical regularities and approximate statistical invariances in the learned kernel rather than the implementation of explicit logical mechanisms. This view is illustrative of the claim that LMs are "statistical pattern matchers"" and not genuine reasoners and provides a perspective that clarifies why reasoning-like outputs arise in LMs without any guarantees of logical consistency. This distinction is fundamental to how epistemic uncertainty is evaluated in LMs. We invite a discussion on the importance of how the computational processes of the systems we build and analyze in NLP research are described.

Documents are a common way to store and share information, with tables being an important part of many documents. However, there is no real common understanding of how to model documents and tables in particular. Because of this lack of standardization, most scientific approaches have their own way of modeling documents and tables, leading to a variety of different data structures and formats that are not directly compatible. Furthermore, most data models focus on either the spatial or the semantic structure of a document, neglecting the other aspect. To address this, we developed S2Doc, a flexible data structure for modeling documents and tables that combines both spatial and semantic information in a single format. It is designed to be easily extendable to new tasks and supports most modeling approaches for documents and tables, including multi-page documents. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first approach of its kind to combine all these aspects in a single format.

Convincing someone of the truth value of a premise requires understanding and articulating the core logical structure of the argument which proves or disproves the premise. Understanding the logical structure of an argument refers to understanding the underlying "reasons" which make up the proof or disproof of the premise - as a function of the "logical atoms" in the argument. While it has been shown that transformers can "chain" rules to derive simple arguments, the challenge of articulating the "reasons" remains. Not only do current approaches to chaining rules suffer in terms of their interpretability, they are also quite constrained in their ability to accommodate extensions to theoretically equivalent reasoning tasks - a model trained to chain rules cannot support abduction or identify contradictions. In this work we suggest addressing these shortcomings by identifying an intermediate representation (which we call the Representation of the Logical Structure (RLS) of the argument) that possesses an understanding of the logical structure of a natural language argument - the logical atoms in the argument and the rules incorporating them. Given the logical structure, reasoning is deterministic and easy to compute. Therefore, our approach supports all forms of reasoning that depend on the logical structure of the natural language argument, including arbitrary depths of reasoning, on-the-fly mistake rectification and interactive discussion with respect to an argument. We show that we can identify and extract the logical structure of natural language arguments in three popular reasoning datasets with high accuracies, thus supporting explanation generation and extending the reasoning capabilities significantly.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities in familiar contexts, but struggle when the context conflicts with their parametric knowledge. To investigate this phenomenon, we introduce CounterLogic, a dataset containing 1,800 examples across 9 logical schemas, explicitly designed to evaluate logical reasoning through counterfactual (hypothetical knowledge-conflicting) scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of 11 LLMs across 6 different datasets reveals a consistent performance degradation, with accuracies dropping by 27% on average when reasoning through counterfactual information. We propose Self-Segregate, a prompting method enabling metacognitive awareness (explicitly identifying knowledge conflicts) before reasoning. Our method dramatically narrows the average performance gaps from 27% to just 11%, while significantly increasing the overall accuracy (+7.5%). We discuss the implications of these findings and draw parallels to human cognitive processes, particularly on how humans disambiguate conflicting information during reasoning tasks. Our findings offer practical insights for understanding and enhancing LLMs reasoning capabilities in real-world applications, especially where models must logically reason independently of their factual knowledge.

While significant progress has been made with dual- and bi-encoder dense retrievers, they often struggle on queries with logical connectives, a use case that is often overlooked yet important in downstream applications. Current dense retrievers struggle with such queries, such that the retrieved results do not respect the logical constraints implied in the queries. To address this challenge, we introduce LogiCoL, a logically-informed contrastive learning objective for dense retrievers. LogiCoL builds upon in-batch supervised contrastive learning, and learns dense retrievers to respect the subset and mutually-exclusive set relation between query results via two sets of soft constraints expressed via t-norm in the learning objective. We evaluate the effectiveness of LogiCoL on the task of entity retrieval, where the model is expected to retrieve a set of entities in Wikipedia that satisfy the implicit logical constraints in the query. We show that models trained with LogiCoL yield improvement both in terms of retrieval performance and logical consistency in the results. We provide detailed analysis and insights to uncover why queries with logical connectives are challenging for dense retrievers and why LogiCoL is most effective.