NPI contributes structural biases in the form of modularity, hierarchy and recursion, which are helpful to reduce sample complexity, improve generalization and increase interpretability. AlphaZero contributes powerful neural network guided search algorithms, which we augment with recursion. AlphaNPI only assumes a hierarchical program specification with sparse rewards: 1 when the program execution satisfies the specification, and 0otherwise. This specification enables us to overcome the need for strong supervision in the form of execution traces andconsequently trainNPImodels effectivelywithreinforcement learning.

We would like to thank all three reviewers for their thoughtful comments. R3 saw our approach as "very similar to the standard approach for neural We believe our model actually differs significantly from previous approaches in this regard. While our code is able to perform a "double attention" mechanism, this work does not use these features of We thank R1 and apologize for this confusion. According to R2, our paper "shows quite convincingly that neural program Our revision will report this experiment and move the discussion on the heuristics to the main text. Our approach utilizes test-time search, which R3 also suggests is a disadvantage: "The results of [the no search In that sense, our approach offers more robustness than a neural-only model would allow. The reviewers note that our model uses strong supervision in the form of a meta-grammar. In a sense, we agree with R2: "Now that this paper has shown This demonstrates both generalization and graceful degradation on grammars with 3x the number of rules vs training.

It instead learns the hierarchy of program subroutines in a curriculum fashion, adding a pre- and post-condition to each subroutine and extending the MCTS setup of AlphaZero to handle recursive subroutine calls. The paper demonstrates that the resulting formulation learns the programs in both Sorting and TowersOfHanoi domains more effectively than prior work.

Computational text phenotyping is the practice of identifying patients with certain disorders and traits from clinical notes. Rare diseases are challenging to be identified due to few cases available for machine learning and the need for data annotation from domain experts. We propose a method using ontologies and weak supervision, with recent pre-trained contextual representations from Bi-directional Transformers (e.g. BERT). The ontology-based framework includes two steps: (i) Text-to-UMLS, extracting phenotypes by contextually linking mentions to concepts in Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), with a Named Entity Recognition and Linking (NER+L) tool, SemEHR, and weak supervision with customised rules and contextual mention representation; (ii) UMLS-to-ORDO, matching UMLS concepts to rare diseases in Orphanet Rare Disease Ontology (ORDO). The weakly supervised approach is proposed to learn a phenotype confirmation model to improve Text-to-UMLS linking, without annotated data from domain experts. We evaluated the approach on three clinical datasets, MIMIC-III discharge summaries, MIMIC-III radiology reports, and NHS Tayside brain imaging reports from two institutions in the US and the UK, with annotations. The improvements in the precision were pronounced (by over 30% to 50% absolute score for Text-to-UMLS linking), with almost no loss of recall compared to the existing NER+L tool, SemEHR. Results on radiology reports from MIMIC-III and NHS Tayside were consistent with the discharge summaries. The overall pipeline processing clinical notes can extract rare disease cases, mostly uncaptured in structured data (manually assigned ICD codes). We discuss the usefulness of the weak supervision approach and propose directions for future studies.

The past two decades have witnessed the great success of the algorithmic modeling framework advocated by Breiman et al. (2001). Nevertheless, the excellent prediction performance of these black-box models rely heavily on the availability of strong supervision, i.e. a large set of accurate and exact ground-truth labels. In practice, strong supervision can be unavailable or expensive, which calls for modeling techniques under weak supervision. In this comment, we summarize the key concepts in weakly supervised learning and discuss some recent developments in the field. Using algorithmic modeling alone under a weak supervision might lead to unstable and misleading results. A promising direction would be integrating the data modeling culture into such a framework.

Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by supporting the automated analysis of legal documents. However, a shortcoming of data-driven approaches is poor explainability. We posit that in this domain useful explanations of classifier outcomes can be provided by resorting to legal rationales. We thus consider several configurations of memory-augmented neural networks where rationales are given a special role in the modeling of context knowledge. Our results show that rationales not only contribute to improve the classification accuracy, but are also able to offer meaningful, natural language explanations of otherwise opaque classifier outcomes.