Abstract
Current advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have achieved unprecedented impact across research communities and industry. Nevertheless, concerns around trust, safety, interpretability and accountability of AI were raised by influential thinkers. Many identified the need for well-founded knowledge representation and reasoning to be integrated with deep learning and for sound explainability. Neurosymbolic computing has been an active area of research for many years seeking to bring together robust learning in neural networks with reasoning and explainability by offering symbolic representations for neural models. In this paper, we relate recent and early research in neurosymbolic AI with the objective of identifying the most important ingredients of neurosymbolic AI systems. We focus on research that integrates in a principled way neural network-based learning with symbolic knowledge representation and logical reasoning. Finally, this review identifies promising directions and challenges for the next decade of AI research from the perspective of neurosymbolic computing, commonsense reasoning and causal explanation.
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The use of the word representation here is intended to be broader than its use in representation learning in that the choice of vector space precedes the learning of an embedding.
Several reports on the future of AI and its consequences for society have been published in the mainstream media over the past decade. These include the BBC, NY Times, The Observer and others, see e.g., https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37713629.
Both types of knowledge can exhibit imprecision and may require the modelling of uncertainty, e.g., through the use of probability theory. However, commonsense knowledge is implicit and the conclusions derived from it may need to be retracted frequently in the face of new evidence, whereas expert knowledge is expected to produce over time conclusions with high confidence.
Although knowledge extraction from large networks may not be complete, it should be sound and measurable (d’Avila Garcez et al. 2001; White and d’Avila Garcez 2019). One of the most interesting areas of recent progress addresses the emergence of symbols and their meaning from trained neural networks (Ngan et al. 2022).
The recent developments in Large Language Models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, among others is related to our point. Humans in the loop, conversing and symbolically interacting with AI systems is an avenue that received attention recently under the umbrella of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) (Zhu et al. 2023). One can classify RLHF under the taxonomy of Neurosymbolic systems, as described by Kautz (2022).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Gary Marcus, Francesca Rossi, Pascal Hitzler, Marco Gori, Kristian Kersting, Pierre Lévy, Luc de Raedt, Alessandra Russo, Kristian Kersting, Murray Shanahan, Alexander Gray, Moshe Vardi and the anonymous reviewers who helped us improve this manuscript. Luis Lamb is supported in part by CNPq and CAPES - Finance Code 001.
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Garcez, A.d., Lamb, L.C. Neurosymbolic AI: the 3rd wave. Artif Intell Rev 56, 12387–12406 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-023-10448-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-023-10448-w