We develop an algorithm to semantically parse linear ordering problems, which require a model to arrange entities using deductive reasoning. Our method takes as input a number of premises and candidate statements, parsing them to a first-order logic of an ordering domain, and then utilizes constraint logic programming to infer the truth of proposed statements about the ordering. Our semantic parser transforms Heim and Kratzer's syntax-based compositional formal semantic rules to a computational algorithm. This transformation involves introducing abstract types and templates based on their rules, and introduces a dynamic component to interpret entities within a contextual framework. Our symbolic system, the Formal Semantic Logic Inferer (FSLI), is applied to answer multiple choice questions in BIG-bench's logical_deduction multiple choice problems, achieving perfect accuracy, compared to 67.06% for the best-performing LLM (GPT-4) and 87.63% for the hybrid system Logic-LM. These promising results demonstrate the benefit of developing a semantic parsing algorithm driven by first-order logic constructs.

The new field of Explainable Planning (XAIP) has produced a variety of approaches to explain and describe the behavior of autonomous agents to human observers. Many summarize agent behavior in terms of the constraints, or ''rules,'' which the agent adheres to during its trajectories. In this work, we narrow the focus from summary to specific moments in individual trajectories, offering a ''pointwise-in-time'' view. Our novel framework, which we define on Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) rules, assigns an intuitive status to any rule in order to describe the trajectory progress at individual time steps; here, a rule is classified as active, satisfied, inactive, or violated. Given a trajectory, a user may query for status of specific LTL rules at individual trajectory time steps. In this paper, we present this novel framework, named Rule Status Assessment (RSA), and provide an example of its implementation. We find that pointwise-in-time status assessment is useful as a post-hoc diagnostic, enabling a user to systematically track the agent's behavior with respect to a set of rules.

When explaining the decisions of deep neural networks, simple stories are tempting but dangerous. Especially in computer vision, the most popular explanation approaches give a false sense of comprehension to its users and provide an overly simplistic picture. We introduce an interactive framework to understand the highly complex decision boundaries of modern vision models. It allows the user to exhaustively inspect, probe, and test a network's decisions. Across a range of case studies, we compare the power of our interactive approach to static explanation methods, showing how these can lead a user astray, with potentially severe consequences.