Probabilistic Abduction for Visual Abstract Reasoning via Learning Rules in Vector-Symbolic Architectures

Abstract

Abstract reasoning is a cornerstone of human intelligence, and replicating it with artificial intelligence (AI) presents an ongoing challenge. This study focuses on efficiently solving Raven's progressive matrices (RPM), a visual test for assessing abstract reasoning abilities, by using distributed computation and operators provided by vector-symbolic architectures (VSA). Instead of hard-coding the rule formulations associated with RPMs, our approach can learn the VSA rule formulations (hence the name Learn-VRF) with just one pass through the training data. Yet, our approach, with compact parameters, remains transparent and interpretable. Learn-VRF yields accurate predictions on I-RAVEN's in-distribution data, and exhibits strong out-of-distribution capabilities concerning unseen attribute-rule pairs, significantly outperforming pure connectionist baselines including large language models. Our code is available at https://github.com/IBM/learn-vector-symbolic-architectures-rule-formulations.

Cite

Text

Hersche et al. "Probabilistic Abduction for Visual Abstract Reasoning via Learning Rules in Vector-Symbolic Architectures." NeurIPS 2023 Workshops: MATH-AI, 2023.

Markdown

[Hersche et al. "Probabilistic Abduction for Visual Abstract Reasoning via Learning Rules in Vector-Symbolic Architectures." NeurIPS 2023 Workshops: MATH-AI, 2023.](https://mlanthology.org/neuripsw/2023/hersche2023neuripsw-probabilistic/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{hersche2023neuripsw-probabilistic,
  title     = {{Probabilistic Abduction for Visual Abstract Reasoning via Learning Rules in Vector-Symbolic Architectures}},
  author    = {Hersche, Michael and di Stefano, Francesco and Hofmann, Thomas and Sebastian, Abu and Rahimi, Abbas},
  booktitle = {NeurIPS 2023 Workshops: MATH-AI},
  year      = {2023},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neuripsw/2023/hersche2023neuripsw-probabilistic/}
}