United States

Recent  breakthroughs in AI have shown the remarkable power of deep learning and deep reinforcement learning. These developments, however, have been tied to specific tasks, and progress  in out-of-distribution generalization has been limited.  While it is assumed that these limitations can be overcome by incorporating suitable inductive biases, the notion of inductive biases itself is often left vague and does not provide meaningful guidance. In the paper, I articulate a different learning approach where representations do not emerge from  biases in a neural architecture  but are learned over a given  target language with  a known  semantics. The basic ideas are  implicit in mainstream AI where representations have been encoded in languages ranging from fragments of first-order logic to probabilistic structural causal models. The challenge is to learn from data the representations that have traditionally been crafted by hand. Generalization is then a  result of the semantics  of the language. The goals of this paper  are to make these ideas explicit, to place them in a broader context where the design of the target language is crucial, and to illustrate them in the context of learning to act and plan. For this, after a general discussion, I consider  learning representations of actions, general policies, and subgoals (&quot;intrinsic rewards&quot;). In  these cases, learning is formulated  as a combinatorial  problem  but nothing prevents the use of deep learning techniques instead. Indeed, learning representations over languages with a known semantics  provides an account of what is to be learned, while learning representations with neural nets   provides  a complementary account of how representations can be learned. The challenge and the opportunity is to bring the two  together.

AAAI 2022

Target Languages (vs. Inductive Biases) for Learning to Act and Plan

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent  breakthroughs in AI have shown the remarkable power of deep learning and deep reinforcement learning. These developments, however, have been tied to specific tasks, and progress  in out-of-distribution generalization has been limited.  While it is assumed that these limitations can be overcome by incorporating suitable inductive biases, the notion of inductive biases itself is often left vague and does not provide meaningful guidance. In the paper, I articulate a different learning approach where representations do not emerge from  biases in a neural architecture  but are learned over a given  target language with  a known  semantics. The basic ideas are  implicit in mainstream AI where representations have been encoded in languages ranging from fragments of first-order logic to probabilistic structural causal models. The challenge is to learn from data the representations that have traditionally been crafted by hand. Generalization is then a  result of the semantics  of the language. The goals of this paper  are to make these ideas explicit, to place them in a broader context where the design of the target language is crucial, and to illustrate them in the context of learning to act and plan. For this, after a general discussion, I consider  learning representations of actions, general policies, and subgoals ("intrinsic rewards"). In  these cases, learning is formulated  as a combinatorial  problem  but nothing prevents the use of deep learning techniques instead. Indeed, learning representations over languages with a known semantics  provides an account of what is to be learned, while learning representations with neural nets   provides  a complementary account of how representations can be learned. The challenge and the opportunity is to bring the two  together.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Despite the surprising power of many modern AI systems that often learn their own representations, there is significant discontent about their inscrutability and the attendant problems in their ability to interact with humans. While alternatives such as  neuro-symbolic approaches have been proposed, there is a lack of consensus on what they are about. There are often two independent motivations (i) symbols as a lingua franca for human-AI interaction and (ii) symbols as (system-produced) abstractions use in its internal reasoning. The jury is still out on whether AI systems will need to use symbols in their internal reasoning to achieve general intelligence capabilities. Whatever the answer there is, the need for (human-understandable) symbols in human-AI interaction seems quite compelling. Symbols, like emotions, may well not be sine qua non for intelligence per se, but they will be crucial for AI systems to interact with us humans--as we can neither turn off our emotions not get by without our symbols. In particular, in many human-designed domains, humans would be interested in providing explicit (symbolic) knowledge and advice--and expect machine explanations in kind. This alone requires AI systems to at least do their I/O in symbolic terms. In this blue sky paper, we argue this point of view, and discuss research directions that need to be pursued to allow for this type of human-AI interaction.

Symbols as a Lingua Franca for Bridging Human-AI Chasm for Explainable and Advisable AI Systems

The rapid development of drone technology is leading to more and more use cases being proposed. In response, regulators are drawing up drone traffic management frameworks. However, to design solutions that are efficient, fair, simple, non-manipulable, and scalable, we need market design and AI expertise. To this end, we introduce the drone traffic management problem as a new research challenge to the market design and AI communities. We present five design desiderata that we have derived from our interviews with stakeholders from the regulatory side as well as from public and private enterprises. Finally, we provide an overview of the solution space to point out possible directions for future research.

Market Design for Drone Traffic Management

We argue that the dominant approach to explainable AI for explaining image classification, annotating images with heatmaps, provides little value for users unfamiliar with deep learning. We argue that explainable AI for images should produce output like experts produce when communicating with one another, with apprentices, and with novices. We provide an expanded set of goals of explainable AI systems and propose a Turing Test for explainable AI.

Expert-Informed, User-Centric Explanations for Machine Learning

Common sense has always been of interest in AI, but has rarely taken center stage.  Despite its mention in one of John McCarthy's earliest papers and years of work by dedicated researchers, arguably no AI system with a serious amount of general common sense has ever emerged.  Why is that?  What's missing?  Examples of AI systems' failures of common sense abound, and they point to AI's frequent focus on expertise as the cause.  Those attempting to break the brittleness barrier, even in the context of modern deep learning, have tended to invest their energy in large numbers of small bits of commonsense knowledge.  But all the commonsense knowledge fragments in the world don't add up to a system that actually demonstrates common sense in a human-like way.  We advocate examining common sense from a broader perspective than in the past.  Common sense is more complex than it has been taken to be and is worthy of its own scientific exploration.

Toward a New Science of Common Sense

AI is increasingly used to aid decision-making about the allocation of scarce societal resources, for example housing for homeless people, organs for transplantation, and food donations. Recently, there have been several proposals for how to design objectives for these systems that attempt to achieve some combination of fairness, efficiency, incentive compatibility, and satisfactory aggregation of stakeholder preferences. This paper lays out possible roles and opportunities for AI in this domain, arguing for a closer engagement with the political philosophy literature on local justice, which provides a framework for thinking about how societies have over time framed objectives for such allocation problems. It also discusses how we may be able to integrate into this framework the opportunities and risks opened up by the ubiquity of data and the availability of algorithms that can use them to make accurate predictions about the future.

Local Justice and the Algorithmic Allocation of Scarce Societal Resources

Many present and future problems associated with artificial intelligence are not due to its limitations, but to our poor assessment of its behaviour. Our evaluation procedures produce aggregated performance metrics that lack detail and quantified uncertainty about the following question: how will an AI system, with a particular profile \pi, behave for a new problem, characterised by a particular situation \mu? Instead of just aggregating test results, we can use machine learning methods to fully capitalise on this evaluation information. In this paper, we introduce the concept of an assessor model, \hat{R}(r|\pi,\mu), a conditional probability estimator trained on test data. We discuss how these assessors can be built by using information of the full system-problem space and illustrate a broad range of applications that derive from varied inferences and aggregations from \hat{R}. Building good assessor models will change the predictive and explanatory power of AI evaluation and will lead to new research directions for building and using them. We propose accompanying every deployed AI system with its own assessor.

Training on the Test Set: Mapping the System-Problem Space in AI

The ubiquity of recommender systems has increased the need for higher-bandwidth, natural and efficient communication with users. This need is increasingly filled by recommenders that support natural language interaction, often conversationally. Given the inherent semantic subjectivity present in natural language, we argue that modeling subjective attributes in recommenders is a critical, yet understudied, avenue of AI research. We propose a novel framework for understanding different forms of subjectivity, examine various recommender tasks that will benefit from a systematic treatment of subjective attributes, and outline a number of research challenges.

Subjective Attributes in Conversational Recommendation Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

In this paper, I pose a major challenge for AI researchers: to develop
systems that learn in a human-like manner. I briefly review the
history of machine learning, noting that early work made close contact
with results from cognitive psychology but that this is no longer the
case. I identify seven characteristics of human behavior that, if
reproduced, would offer better ways to acquire expertise than
statistical induction over massive training sets. I illustrate these
points with two domains - mathematics and driving - where people
are effective learners and review systems that address them. In
closing, I suggest ways to encourage more research on human-like
learning.

The Computational Gauntlet of Human-Like Learning

This paper focuses on a dynamic aspect of responsible autonomy, namely, to make intelligent agents be responsible at run time. That is, it considers settings where decision making by agents impinges upon the outcomes perceived by other agents. For an agent to act responsibly, it must accommodate the desires and other attitudes of its users and, through other agents, of their users.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of consent, its benefits and misuses, and how understanding consent can help achieve responsible autonomy. Second, it outlines challenges for AI (in particular, for agents and multiagent systems) that merit investigation to form as a basis for modeling consent in multiagent systems and applying consent to achieve responsible autonomy.

Consent as a Foundation for Responsible Autonomy

The deployment of systems of artificial intelligence (AI) in high-risk settings warrants the need for trustworthy AI. This crucial requirement is highlighted by recent EU guidelines and regulations, but also by recommendations from OECD and UNESCO, among several other examples. One critical premise of trustworthy AI involves the necessity of finding explanations that offer reliable guarantees of soundness. This paper argues that the best known eXplainable AI (XAI) approaches fail to provide sound explanations, or that alternatively find explanations which can exhibit significant redundancy. The solution to these drawbacks are explanation approaches that offer formal guarantees of rigor. These formal explanations are not only sound but guarantee irredundancy. This paper summarizes the recent developments in the emerging discipline of formal XAI. The paper also outlines existing challenges for formal XAI.

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