Neural Diagrammatic Reasoning

Diagrams have been shown to be effective tools for humans to represent and reason about complex concepts. They have been widely used to represent concepts in science teaching, to communicate workflow in industries and to measure human fluid intelligence. Mechanised reasoning systems typically encode diagrams into symbolic representations that can be easily processed with rule-based expert systems. This relies on human experts to define the framework of diagram-to-symbol mapping and the set of rules to reason with the symbols. This means the reasoning systems cannot be easily adapted to other diagrams without a new set of human-defined representation mapping and reasoning rules. Moreover such systems are not able to cope with diagram inputs as raw and possibly noisy images. The need for human input and the lack of robustness to noise significantly limit the applications of mechanised diagrammatic reasoning systems. A key research question then arises: can we develop human-like reasoning systems that learn to reason robustly without predefined reasoning rules? To answer this question, I propose Neural Diagrammatic Reasoning, a new family of diagrammatic reasoning systems which does not have the drawbacks of mechanised reasoning systems. The new systems are based on deep neural networks, a recently popular machine learning method that achieved human-level performance on a range of perception tasks such as object detection, speech recognition and natural language processing. The proposed systems are able to learn both diagram to symbol mapping and implicit reasoning rules only from data, with no prior human input about symbols and rules in the reasoning tasks. Specifically I developed EulerNet, a novel neural network model that solves Euler diagram syllogism tasks with 99.5% accuracy. Experiments show that EulerNet learns useful representations of the diagrams and tasks, and is robust to noise and deformation in the input data. I also developed MXGNet, a novel multiplex graph neural architecture that solves Raven Progressive Matrices (RPM) tasks. MXGNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracies on two popular RPM datasets. In addition, I developed Discrete-AIR, an unsupervised learning architecture that learns semi-symbolic representations of diagrams without any labels. Lastly I designed a novel inductive bias module that can be readily used in today’s deep neural networks to improve their generalisation capability on relational reasoning tasks.EPSRC Studentship and Cambridge Trust Scholarshi

Backprop as Functor: A compositional perspective on supervised learning

A supervised learning algorithm searches over a set of functions $A \to B$ parametrised by a space $P$ to find the best approximation to some ideal function $f\colon A \to B$. It does this by taking examples $(a,f(a)) \in A\times B$, and updating the parameter according to some rule. We define a category where these update rules may be composed, and show that gradient descent---with respect to a fixed step size and an error function satisfying a certain property---defines a monoidal functor from a category of parametrised functions to this category of update rules. This provides a structural perspective on backpropagation, as well as a broad generalisation of neural networks.Comment: 13 pages + 4 page appendi

How Researchers Use Diagrams in Communicating Neural Network Systems

Neural networks are a prevalent and effective machine learning component, and their application is leading to significant scientific progress in many domains. As the field of neural network systems is fast growing, it is important to understand how advances are communicated. Diagrams are key to this, appearing in almost all papers describing novel systems. This paper reports on a study into the use of neural network system diagrams, through interviews, card sorting, and qualitative feedback structured around ecologically-derived examples. We find high diversity of usage, perception and preference in both creation and interpretation of diagrams, examining this in the context of existing design, information visualisation, and user experience guidelines. Considering the interview data alongside existing guidance, we propose guidelines aiming to improve the way in which neural network system diagrams are constructed.Comment: 19 pages, 6 tables, 3 figure

Dagstuhl News January - December 2000

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Extrapolatable Relational Reasoning With Comparators in Low-Dimensional Manifolds

While modern deep neural architectures generalise well when test data is sampled from the same distribution as training data, they fail badly for cases when the test data distribution differs from the training distribution even along a few dimensions. This lack of out-of-distribution generalisation is increasingly manifested when the tasks become more abstract and complex, such as in relational reasoning. In this paper we propose a neuroscience-inspired inductive-biased module that can be readily amalgamated with current neural network architectures to improve out-of-distribution (o.o.d) generalisation performance on relational reasoning tasks. This module learns to project high-dimensional object representations to low-dimensional manifolds for more efficient and generalisable relational comparisons. We show that neural nets with this inductive bias achieve considerably better o.o.d generalisation performance for a range of relational reasoning tasks. We finally analyse the proposed inductive bias module to understand the importance of lower dimension projection, and propose an augmentation to the algorithmic alignment theory to better measure algorithmic alignment with generalisation

Categorical Vector Space Semantics for Lambek Calculus with a Relevant Modality

We develop a categorical compositional distributional semantics for Lambek Calculus with a Relevant Modality !L*, which has a limited edition of the contraction and permutation rules. The categorical part of the semantics is a monoidal biclosed category with a coalgebra modality, very similar to the structure of a Differential Category. We instantiate this category to finite dimensional vector spaces and linear maps via "quantisation" functors and work with three concrete interpretations of the coalgebra modality. We apply the model to construct categorical and concrete semantic interpretations for the motivating example of !L*: the derivation of a phrase with a parasitic gap. The effectiveness of the concrete interpretations are evaluated via a disambiguation task, on an extension of a sentence disambiguation dataset to parasitic gap phrases, using BERT, Word2Vec, and FastText vectors and Relational tensors