new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Jul 30

Symbolic Semantic Segmentation and Interpretation of COVID-19 Lung Infections in Chest CT volumes based on Emergent Languages

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has resulted in a pandemic crippling the a breadth of services critical to daily life. Segmentation of lung infections in computerized tomography (CT) slices could be be used to improve diagnosis and understanding of COVID-19 in patients. Deep learning systems lack interpretability because of their black box nature. Inspired by human communication of complex ideas through language, we propose a symbolic framework based on emergent languages for the segmentation of COVID-19 infections in CT scans of lungs. We model the cooperation between two artificial agents - a Sender and a Receiver. These agents synergistically cooperate using emergent symbolic language to solve the task of semantic segmentation. Our game theoretic approach is to model the cooperation between agents unlike Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The Sender retrieves information from one of the higher layers of the deep network and generates a symbolic sentence sampled from a categorical distribution of vocabularies. The Receiver ingests the stream of symbols and cogenerates the segmentation mask. A private emergent language is developed that forms the communication channel used to describe the task of segmentation of COVID infections. We augment existing state of the art semantic segmentation architectures with our symbolic generator to form symbolic segmentation models. Our symbolic segmentation framework achieves state of the art performance for segmentation of lung infections caused by COVID-19. Our results show direct interpretation of symbolic sentences to discriminate between normal and infected regions, infection morphology and image characteristics. We show state of the art results for segmentation of COVID-19 lung infections in CT.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 22, 2020

Towards Emergent Language Symbolic Semantic Segmentation and Model Interpretability

Recent advances in methods focused on the grounding problem have resulted in techniques that can be used to construct a symbolic language associated with a specific domain. Inspired by how humans communicate complex ideas through language, we developed a generalized Symbolic Semantic (S^2) framework for interpretable segmentation. Unlike adversarial models (e.g., GANs), we explicitly model cooperation between two agents, a Sender and a Receiver, that must cooperate to achieve a common goal. The Sender receives information from a high layer of a segmentation network and generates a symbolic sentence derived from a categorical distribution. The Receiver obtains the symbolic sentences and co-generates the segmentation mask. In order for the model to converge, the Sender and Receiver must learn to communicate using a private language. We apply our architecture to segment tumors in the TCGA dataset. A UNet-like architecture is used to generate input to the Sender network which produces a symbolic sentence, and a Receiver network co-generates the segmentation mask based on the sentence. Our Segmentation framework achieved similar or better performance compared with state-of-the-art segmentation methods. In addition, our results suggest direct interpretation of the symbolic sentences to discriminate between normal and tumor tissue, tumor morphology, and other image characteristics.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 18, 2020

Speech-to-LaTeX: New Models and Datasets for Converting Spoken Equations and Sentences

Conversion of spoken mathematical expressions is a challenging task that involves transcribing speech into a strictly structured symbolic representation while addressing the ambiguity inherent in the pronunciation of equations. Although significant progress has been achieved in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and language models (LM), the problem of converting spoken mathematics into LaTeX remains underexplored. This task directly applies to educational and research domains, such as lecture transcription or note creation. Based on ASR post-correction, prior work requires 2 transcriptions, focuses only on isolated equations, has a limited test set, and provides neither training data nor multilingual coverage. To address these issues, we present the first fully open-source large-scale dataset, comprising over 66,000 human-annotated audio samples of mathematical equations and sentences in both English and Russian, drawn from diverse scientific domains. In addition to the ASR post-correction models and few-shot prompting, we apply audio language models, demonstrating comparable character error rate (CER) results on the MathSpeech benchmark (28% vs. 30%) for the equations conversion. In contrast, on the proposed S2L-equations benchmark, our models outperform the MathSpeech model by a substantial margin of more than 40 percentage points, even after accounting for LaTeX formatting artifacts (27% vs. 64%). We establish the first benchmark for mathematical sentence recognition (S2L-sentences) and achieve an equation CER of 40%. This work lays the groundwork for future advances in multimodal AI, with a particular focus on mathematical content recognition.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025 2

A Neural Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning Framework for Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Text

Pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in image retrieval from text. However, their performance drops drastically when confronted with linguistically complex texts that they struggle to comprehend. Inspired by the Divide-and-Conquer algorithm and dual-process theory, in this paper, we regard linguistically complex texts as compound proposition texts composed of multiple simple proposition sentences and propose an end-to-end Neural Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning framework, dubbed NDCR. It contains three main components: 1) Divide: a proposition generator divides the compound proposition text into simple proposition sentences and produces their corresponding representations, 2) Conquer: a pretrained VLMs-based visual-linguistic interactor achieves the interaction between decomposed proposition sentences and images, 3) Combine: a neural-symbolic reasoner combines the above reasoning states to obtain the final solution via a neural logic reasoning approach. According to the dual-process theory, the visual-linguistic interactor and neural-symbolic reasoner could be regarded as analogical reasoning System 1 and logical reasoning System 2. We conduct extensive experiments on a challenging image retrieval from contextual descriptions data set. Experimental results and analyses indicate NDCR significantly improves performance in the complex image-text reasoning problem. Code link: https://github.com/YunxinLi/NDCR.

  • 5 authors
·
May 3, 2023

Symbolic Learning Enables Self-Evolving Agents

The AI community has been exploring a pathway to artificial general intelligence (AGI) by developing "language agents", which are complex large language models (LLMs) pipelines involving both prompting techniques and tool usage methods. While language agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for many real-world tasks, a fundamental limitation of current language agents research is that they are model-centric, or engineering-centric. That's to say, the progress on prompts, tools, and pipelines of language agents requires substantial manual engineering efforts from human experts rather than automatically learning from data. We believe the transition from model-centric, or engineering-centric, to data-centric, i.e., the ability of language agents to autonomously learn and evolve in environments, is the key for them to possibly achieve AGI. In this work, we introduce agent symbolic learning, a systematic framework that enables language agents to optimize themselves on their own in a data-centric way using symbolic optimizers. Specifically, we consider agents as symbolic networks where learnable weights are defined by prompts, tools, and the way they are stacked together. Agent symbolic learning is designed to optimize the symbolic network within language agents by mimicking two fundamental algorithms in connectionist learning: back-propagation and gradient descent. Instead of dealing with numeric weights, agent symbolic learning works with natural language simulacrums of weights, loss, and gradients. We conduct proof-of-concept experiments on both standard benchmarks and complex real-world tasks and show that agent symbolic learning enables language agents to update themselves after being created and deployed in the wild, resulting in "self-evolving agents".

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 26, 2024 1

CoEvo: Continual Evolution of Symbolic Solutions Using Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative tools in artificial intelligence, capable of processing and understanding extensive human knowledge to enhance problem-solving across various domains. This paper explores the potential of LLMs to drive the discovery of symbolic solutions within scientific and engineering disciplines, where such solutions are crucial for advancing theoretical and practical applications. We propose a novel framework that utilizes LLMs in an evolutionary search methodology, augmented by a dynamic knowledge library that integrates and refines insights in an open-ended manner. This approach aims to tackle the dual challenges of efficiently navigating complex symbolic representation spaces and leveraging both existing and newly generated knowledge to foster open-ended innovation. By enabling LLMs to interact with and expand upon a knowledge library, we facilitate the continuous generation of novel solutions in diverse forms such as language, code, and mathematical expressions. Our experimental results demonstrate that this method not only enhances the efficiency of searching for symbolic solutions but also supports the ongoing discovery process, akin to human scientific endeavors. This study represents a first effort in conceptualizing the search for symbolic solutions as a lifelong, iterative process, marking a significant step towards harnessing AI in the perpetual pursuit of scientific and engineering breakthroughs. We have open-sourced our code and data, please visit https://github.com/pgg3/CoEvo for more information.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 25, 2024

IASC: Interactive Agentic System for ConLangs

We present a system that uses LLMs as a tool in the development of Constructed Languages. The system is modular in that one first creates a target phonology for the language using an agentic approach that refines its output at each step with commentary feedback on its previous attempt. Next, a set of sentences is 'translated' from their English original into a morphosyntactic markup that reflects the word order and morphosyntactic feature specifications of the desired target language, with affixes represented as morphosyntactic feature bundles. From this translated corpus, a lexicon is constructed using the phonological model and the set of morphemes (stems and affixes) extracted from the 'translated' sentences. The system is then instructed to provide an orthography for the language, using an existing script such as Latin or Cyrillic. Finally, the system writes a brief grammatical handbook of the language. The system can also translate further sentences into the target language. Our goal is twofold. First, we hope that these tools will be fun to use for creating artificially constructed languages. Second, we are interested in exploring what LLMs 'know' about language-not what they know about any particular language or linguistic phenomenon, but how much they know about and understand language and linguistic concepts. As we shall see, there is a fairly wide gulf in capabilities both among different LLMs and among different linguistic specifications, with it being notably easier for systems to deal with more common patterns than rarer ones. An additional avenue that we explore is the application of our approach to translating from high-resource into low-resource languages. While the results so far are mostly negative, we provide some evidence that an improved version of the present system could afford some real gains in such tasks. https://github.com/SakanaAI/IASC

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 20, 2025

Can Large Language Models Understand Symbolic Graphics Programs?

Assessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is often challenging, in part, because it is hard to find tasks to which they have not been exposed during training. We take one step to address this challenge by turning to a new task: focusing on symbolic graphics programs, which are a popular representation for graphics content that procedurally generates visual data. LLMs have shown exciting promise towards program synthesis, but do they understand symbolic graphics programs? Unlike conventional programs, symbolic graphics programs can be translated to graphics content. Here, we characterize an LLM's understanding of symbolic programs in terms of their ability to answer questions related to the graphics content. This task is challenging as the questions are difficult to answer from the symbolic programs alone -- yet, they would be easy to answer from the corresponding graphics content as we verify through a human experiment. To understand symbolic programs, LLMs may need to possess the ability to imagine how the corresponding graphics content would look without directly accessing the rendered visual content. We use this task to evaluate LLMs by creating a large benchmark for the semantic understanding of symbolic graphics programs. This benchmark is built via program-graphics correspondence, hence requiring minimal human efforts. We evaluate current LLMs on our benchmark to elucidate a preliminary assessment of their ability to reason about visual scenes from programs. We find that this task distinguishes existing LLMs and models considered good at reasoning perform better. Lastly, we introduce Symbolic Instruction Tuning (SIT) to improve this ability. Specifically, we query GPT4-o with questions and images generated by symbolic programs. Such data are then used to finetune an LLM. We also find that SIT data can improve the general instruction following ability of LLMs.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024 2

Towards a Neural Lambda Calculus: Neurosymbolic AI Applied to the Foundations of Functional Programming

Over the last decades, deep neural networks based-models became the dominant paradigm in machine learning. Further, the use of artificial neural networks in symbolic learning has been seen as increasingly relevant recently. To study the capabilities of neural networks in the symbolic AI domain, researchers have explored the ability of deep neural networks to learn mathematical constructions, such as addition and multiplication, logic inference, such as theorem provers, and even the execution of computer programs. The latter is known to be too complex a task for neural networks. Therefore, the results were not always successful, and often required the introduction of biased elements in the learning process, in addition to restricting the scope of possible programs to be executed. In this work, we will analyze the ability of neural networks to learn how to execute programs as a whole. To do so, we propose a different approach. Instead of using an imperative programming language, with complex structures, we use the Lambda Calculus (λ-Calculus), a simple, but Turing-Complete mathematical formalism, which serves as the basis for modern functional programming languages and is at the heart of computability theory. We will introduce the use of integrated neural learning and lambda calculi formalization. Finally, we explore execution of a program in λ-Calculus is based on reductions, we will show that it is enough to learn how to perform these reductions so that we can execute any program. Keywords: Machine Learning, Lambda Calculus, Neurosymbolic AI, Neural Networks, Transformer Model, Sequence-to-Sequence Models, Computational Models

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 18, 2023

Adposition and Case Supersenses v2.6: Guidelines for English

This document offers a detailed linguistic description of SNACS (Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses; Schneider et al., 2018), an inventory of 52 semantic labels ("supersenses") that characterize the use of adpositions and case markers at a somewhat coarse level of granularity, as demonstrated in the STREUSLE corpus (https://github.com/nert-nlp/streusle/ ; version 4.5 tracks guidelines version 2.6). Though the SNACS inventory aspires to be universal, this document is specific to English; documentation for other languages will be published separately. Version 2 is a revision of the supersense inventory proposed for English by Schneider et al. (2015, 2016) (henceforth "v1"), which in turn was based on previous schemes. The present inventory was developed after extensive review of the v1 corpus annotations for English, plus previously unanalyzed genitive case possessives (Blodgett and Schneider, 2018), as well as consideration of adposition and case phenomena in Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, and German. Hwang et al. (2017) present the theoretical underpinnings of the v2 scheme. Schneider et al. (2018) summarize the scheme, its application to English corpus data, and an automatic disambiguation task. Liu et al. (2021) offer an English Lexical Semantic Recognition tagger that includes SNACS labels in its output. This documentation can also be browsed alongside corpus data on the Xposition website (Gessler et al., 2022): http://www.xposition.org/

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 7, 2017

Symbol-LLM: Leverage Language Models for Symbolic System in Visual Human Activity Reasoning

Human reasoning can be understood as a cooperation between the intuitive, associative "System-1" and the deliberative, logical "System-2". For existing System-1-like methods in visual activity understanding, it is crucial to integrate System-2 processing to improve explainability, generalization, and data efficiency. One possible path of activity reasoning is building a symbolic system composed of symbols and rules, where one rule connects multiple symbols, implying human knowledge and reasoning abilities. Previous methods have made progress, but are defective with limited symbols from handcraft and limited rules from visual-based annotations, failing to cover the complex patterns of activities and lacking compositional generalization. To overcome the defects, we propose a new symbolic system with two ideal important properties: broad-coverage symbols and rational rules. Collecting massive human knowledge via manual annotations is expensive to instantiate this symbolic system. Instead, we leverage the recent advancement of LLMs (Large Language Models) as an approximation of the two ideal properties, i.e., Symbols from Large Language Models (Symbol-LLM). Then, given an image, visual contents from the images are extracted and checked as symbols and activity semantics are reasoned out based on rules via fuzzy logic calculation. Our method shows superiority in extensive activity understanding tasks. Code and data are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/symbol_llm.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 28, 2023

A Neural-Guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for Exploring Mathematical Expressions from Data

Symbolic regression (SR) is a powerful technique for discovering the underlying mathematical expressions from observed data. Inspired by the success of deep learning, recent efforts have focused on two categories for SR methods. One is using a neural network or genetic programming to search the expression tree directly. Although this has shown promising results, the large search space poses difficulties in learning constant factors and processing high-dimensional problems. Another approach is leveraging a transformer-based model training on synthetic data and offers advantages in inference speed. However, this method is limited to fixed small numbers of dimensions and may encounter inference problems when given data is out-of-distribution compared to the synthetic data. In this work, we propose DySymNet, a novel neural-guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for SR. Instead of searching for expressions within a large search space, we explore DySymNet with various structures and optimize them to identify expressions that better-fitting the data. With a topology structure like neural networks, DySymNet not only tackles the challenge of high-dimensional problems but also proves effective in optimizing constants. Based on extensive numerical experiments using low-dimensional public standard benchmarks and the well-known SRBench with more variables, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of fitting accuracy and robustness to noise.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 24, 2023

Large Language Models are Interpretable Learners

The trade-off between expressiveness and interpretability remains a core challenge when building human-centric predictive models for classification and decision-making. While symbolic rules offer interpretability, they often lack expressiveness, whereas neural networks excel in performance but are known for being black boxes. In this paper, we show a combination of Large Language Models (LLMs) and symbolic programs can bridge this gap. In the proposed LLM-based Symbolic Programs (LSPs), the pretrained LLM with natural language prompts provides a massive set of interpretable modules that can transform raw input into natural language concepts. Symbolic programs then integrate these modules into an interpretable decision rule. To train LSPs, we develop a divide-and-conquer approach to incrementally build the program from scratch, where the learning process of each step is guided by LLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of LSPs in extracting interpretable and accurate knowledge from data, we introduce IL-Bench, a collection of diverse tasks, including both synthetic and real-world scenarios across different modalities. Empirical results demonstrate LSP's superior performance compared to traditional neurosymbolic programs and vanilla automatic prompt tuning methods. Moreover, as the knowledge learned by LSP is a combination of natural language descriptions and symbolic rules, it is easily transferable to humans (interpretable), and other LLMs, and generalizes well to out-of-distribution samples.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024

Symbolic Neural Generation with Applications to Lead Discovery in Drug Design

We investigate a relatively under-explored class of hybrid neurosymbolic models that integrate symbolic learning with neural reasoning to construct data generators meeting formal correctness criteria. In Symbolic Neural Generators (SNGs), symbolic learners examine logical specifications of feasible data from a small set of instances -- sometimes just one. Each specification in turn constrains the conditional information supplied to a neural-based generator, which rejects any instance violating the symbolic specification. Like other neurosymbolic approaches, SNG exploits the complementary strengths of symbolic and neural methods. The outcome of an SNG is a pair (H, X), where H is a symbolic description of feasible instances constructed from data, and X a set of generated new instances that satisfy the description. We introduce a semantics for such systems, based on the construction of appropriate base and fibre partially-ordered sets combined into an overall partial order. We implement an SNG combining a restricted form of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) with a large language model (LLM) and evaluate it on early-stage drug design. Our main interest is the description and the set of potential inhibitor molecules generated by the SNG. On benchmark problems -- where drug targets are well understood -- SNG performance is statistically comparable to state-of-the-art methods. On exploratory problems with poorly understood targets, generated molecules exhibit binding affinities on par with leading clinical candidates. Experts further find the symbolic specifications useful as preliminary filters, with several generated molecules identified as viable for synthesis and wet-lab testing.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 27, 2025

CSyMR: Benchmarking Compositional Music Information Retrieval in Symbolic Music Reasoning

Natural language information needs over symbolic music scores rarely reduce to a single step lookup. Many queries require compositional Music Information Retrieval (MIR) that extracts multiple pieces of evidence from structured notation and aggregates them to answer the question. This setting remains challenging for Large Language Models due to the mismatch between natural language intents and symbolic representations, as well as the difficulty of reliably handling long structured contexts. Existing benchmarks only partially capture these retrieval demands, often emphasizing isolated theoretical knowledge or simplified settings. We introduce CSyMR-Bench, a benchmark for compositional MIR in symbolic music reasoning grounded in authentic user scenarios. It contains 126 multiple choice questions curated from community discussions and professional examinations, where each item requires chaining multiple atomic analyses over a score to derive implicit musical evidence. To support diagnosis, we provide a taxonomy with six query intent categories and six analytical dimension tags. We further propose a tool-augmented retrieval and reasoning framework that integrates a ReAct-style controller with deterministic symbolic analysis operators built with music21. Experiments across prompting baselines and agent variants show that tool-grounded compositional retrieval consistently outperforms Large Language Model-only approaches, yielding 5-7% absolute accuracy gains, with the largest improvements on analysis-heavy categories.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 26

EPIE Dataset: A Corpus For Possible Idiomatic Expressions

Idiomatic expressions have always been a bottleneck for language comprehension and natural language understanding, specifically for tasks like Machine Translation(MT). MT systems predominantly produce literal translations of idiomatic expressions as they do not exhibit generic and linguistically deterministic patterns which can be exploited for comprehension of the non-compositional meaning of the expressions. These expressions occur in parallel corpora used for training, but due to the comparatively high occurrences of the constituent words of idiomatic expressions in literal context, the idiomatic meaning gets overpowered by the compositional meaning of the expression. State of the art Metaphor Detection Systems are able to detect non-compositional usage at word level but miss out on idiosyncratic phrasal idiomatic expressions. This creates a dire need for a dataset with a wider coverage and higher occurrence of commonly occurring idiomatic expressions, the spans of which can be used for Metaphor Detection. With this in mind, we present our English Possible Idiomatic Expressions(EPIE) corpus containing 25206 sentences labelled with lexical instances of 717 idiomatic expressions. These spans also cover literal usages for the given set of idiomatic expressions. We also present the utility of our dataset by using it to train a sequence labelling module and testing on three independent datasets with high accuracy, precision and recall scores.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 16, 2020

Natural Language Processing Methods for Symbolic Music Generation and Information Retrieval: a Survey

Several adaptations of Transformers models have been developed in various domains since its breakthrough in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This trend has spread into the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), including studies processing music data. However, the practice of leveraging NLP tools for symbolic music data is not novel in MIR. Music has been frequently compared to language, as they share several similarities, including sequential representations of text and music. These analogies are also reflected through similar tasks in MIR and NLP. This survey reviews NLP methods applied to symbolic music generation and information retrieval studies following two axes. We first propose an overview of representations of symbolic music adapted from natural language sequential representations. Such representations are designed by considering the specificities of symbolic music. These representations are then processed by models. Such models, possibly originally developed for text and adapted for symbolic music, are trained on various tasks. We describe these models, in particular deep learning models, through different prisms, highlighting music-specialized mechanisms. We finally present a discussion surrounding the effective use of NLP tools for symbolic music data. This includes technical issues regarding NLP methods and fundamental differences between text and music, which may open several doors for further research into more effectively adapting NLP tools to symbolic MIR.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 27, 2024

RSRM: Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine

In nature, the behaviors of many complex systems can be described by parsimonious math equations. Automatically distilling these equations from limited data is cast as a symbolic regression process which hitherto remains a grand challenge. Keen efforts in recent years have been placed on tackling this issue and demonstrated success in symbolic regression. However, there still exist bottlenecks that current methods struggle to break when the discrete search space tends toward infinity and especially when the underlying math formula is intricate. To this end, we propose a novel Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine (RSRM) that masters the capability of uncovering complex math equations from only scarce data. The RSRM model is composed of three key modules: (1) a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) agent that explores optimal math expression trees consisting of pre-defined math operators and variables, (2) a Double Q-learning block that helps reduce the feasible search space of MCTS via properly understanding the distribution of reward, and (3) a modulated sub-tree discovery block that heuristically learns and defines new math operators to improve representation ability of math expression trees. Biding of these modules yields the state-of-the-art performance of RSRM in symbolic regression as demonstrated by multiple sets of benchmark examples. The RSRM model shows clear superiority over several representative baseline models.

  • 3 authors
·
May 23, 2023

Neurosymbolic AI -- Why, What, and How

Humans interact with the environment using a combination of perception - transforming sensory inputs from their environment into symbols, and cognition - mapping symbols to knowledge about the environment for supporting abstraction, reasoning by analogy, and long-term planning. Human perception-inspired machine perception, in the context of AI, refers to large-scale pattern recognition from raw data using neural networks trained using self-supervised learning objectives such as next-word prediction or object recognition. On the other hand, machine cognition encompasses more complex computations, such as using knowledge of the environment to guide reasoning, analogy, and long-term planning. Humans can also control and explain their cognitive functions. This seems to require the retention of symbolic mappings from perception outputs to knowledge about their environment. For example, humans can follow and explain the guidelines and safety constraints driving their decision-making in safety-critical applications such as healthcare, criminal justice, and autonomous driving. This article introduces the rapidly emerging paradigm of Neurosymbolic AI combines neural networks and knowledge-guided symbolic approaches to create more capable and flexible AI systems. These systems have immense potential to advance both algorithm-level (e.g., abstraction, analogy, reasoning) and application-level (e.g., explainable and safety-constrained decision-making) capabilities of AI systems.

  • 3 authors
·
May 1, 2023

FLARE: Faithful Logic-Aided Reasoning and Exploration

Modern Question Answering (QA) and Reasoning approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly use prompting techniques, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), assuming the resulting generation will have a more granular exploration and reasoning over the question space and scope. However, such methods struggle with generating outputs that are faithful to the intermediate chain of reasoning produced by the model. On the other end of the spectrum, neuro-symbolic methods such as Faithful CoT (F-CoT) propose to combine LLMs with external symbolic solvers. While such approaches boast a high degree of faithfulness, they usually require a model trained for code generation and struggle with tasks that are ambiguous or hard to formalise strictly. We introduce Faithful Logic-Aided Reasoning and Exploration (\ours), a novel interpretable approach for traversing the problem space using task decompositions. We use the LLM to plan a solution, soft-formalise the query into facts and predicates using a logic programming code and simulate that code execution using an exhaustive multi-hop search over the defined space. Our method allows us to compute the faithfulness of the reasoning process w.r.t. the generated code and analyse the steps of the multi-hop search without relying on external solvers. Our methods achieve SOTA results on 7 out of 9 diverse reasoning benchmarks. We also show that model faithfulness positively correlates with overall performance and further demonstrate that {\ours} allows pinpointing the decisive factors sufficient for and leading to the correct answer with optimal reasoning during the multi-hop search.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024 2

Shaping Schema via Language Representation as the Next Frontier for LLM Intelligence Expanding

Although natural language is the default medium for Large Language Models (LLMs), its limited expressive capacity creates a profound bottleneck for complex problem-solving. While recent advancements in AI have relied heavily on scaling, merely internalizing knowledge does not guarantee its effective application. Defining language representation as the linguistic and symbolic constructs used to map and model the real world, this paper argues that shaping schemas through advanced language representation is the next frontier for expanding LLM intelligence. We posit that an LLM's knowledge activation and organization -- its schema -- depends heavily on the structural and symbolic sophistication of the language used to represent a given task. This paper contributes both a formalization of this claim and the empirical evidence to support it. With a new formalization, we present multiple lines of evidence to support our position: Firstly, we review recent empirical practices and emerging methodologies that demonstrate the substantial performance gains achievable through deliberate language representation design, even without modifying model parameters or scale. Secondly, we conduct controlled experiments showing that LLM performance and its internal feature activations vary under different language representations of the same underlying task. Together, these findings highlight language representation design as a promising direction for future research.

  • 6 authors
·
May 9 1

Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT

We investigate the mathematical capabilities of ChatGPT by testing it on publicly available datasets, as well as hand-crafted ones, and measuring its performance against other models trained on a mathematical corpus, such as Minerva. We also test whether ChatGPT can be a useful assistant to professional mathematicians by emulating various use cases that come up in the daily professional activities of mathematicians (question answering, theorem searching). In contrast to formal mathematics, where large databases of formal proofs are available (e.g., the Lean Mathematical Library), current datasets of natural-language mathematics, used to benchmark language models, only cover elementary mathematics. We address this issue by introducing a new dataset: GHOSTS. It is the first natural-language dataset made and curated by working researchers in mathematics that (1) aims to cover graduate-level mathematics and (2) provides a holistic overview of the mathematical capabilities of language models. We benchmark ChatGPT on GHOSTS and evaluate performance against fine-grained criteria. We make this new dataset publicly available to assist a community-driven comparison of ChatGPT with (future) large language models in terms of advanced mathematical comprehension. We conclude that contrary to many positive reports in the media (a potential case of selection bias), ChatGPT's mathematical abilities are significantly below those of an average mathematics graduate student. Our results show that ChatGPT often understands the question but fails to provide correct solutions. Hence, if your goal is to use it to pass a university exam, you would be better off copying from your average peer!

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 31, 2023

SymTorch: Symbolic Distillation of Neural Networks

What mathematical functions do neural network components learn? Symbolic distillation addresses this question by expressing neural network components with interpretable, closed-form mathematical expressions that expose the functional structure learned during training. We develop symbolic distillation as a systematic, architecture-agnostic methodology, and release our approach as the open-source SymTorch package - a PySR-powered library built natively for the PyTorch ecosystem. Applying this methodology across diverse architectures, we find that SymTorch is successful in the automated discovery of physical laws. Specifically, our approach (1) recovers pairwise interaction forces from graph neural networks trained on empirical n-body observations, (2) distills the exact closed-form PDE/ODE solutions of multiple physical systems, including the value of constants, from physics-informed neural networks trained on sparse data, and (3) uncovers the chaotic dynamics of the Lorenz system from high-dimensional data, ultimately outperforming the base neural network on downstream prediction tasks. We further demonstrate the utility of our framework for model interpretability by providing an optimized implementation of SLIME - a symbolic extension to the LIME explainability method. SLIME consistently outperforms LIME across predictive metrics across eight popular classification and regression benchmarks, while still providing an interpretable local symbolic model. Lastly, we investigate replacing transformer MLP layers with symbolic surrogates: replacing 1-7 layers with symbolic approximations yields 2-19\% throughput improvements and up to 18.7\% VRAM reduction, with the resulting hybrid models lying on the Pareto front of throughput versus perplexity among open-source LLMs of comparable scale.

  • 3 authors
·
May 10

AI for Mathematics: Progress, Challenges, and Prospects

AI for Mathematics (AI4Math) has emerged as a distinct field that leverages machine learning to navigate mathematical landscapes historically intractable for early symbolic systems. While mid-20th-century symbolic approaches successfully automated formal logic, they faced severe scalability limitations due to the combinatorial explosion of the search space. The recent integration of data-driven approaches has revitalized this pursuit. In this review, we provide a systematic overview of AI4Math, highlighting its primary focus on developing AI models to support mathematical research. Crucially, we emphasize that this is not merely the application of AI to mathematical activities; it also encompasses the development of stronger AI systems where the rigorous nature of mathematics serves as a premier testbed for advancing general reasoning capabilities. We categorize existing research into two complementary directions: problem-specific modeling, involving the design of specialized architectures for distinct mathematical tasks, and general-purpose modeling, focusing on foundation models capable of broader reasoning, retrieval, and exploratory workflows. We conclude by discussing key challenges and prospects, advocating for AI systems that go beyond facilitating formal correctness to enabling the discovery of meaningful results and unified theories, recognizing that the true value of a proof lies in the insights and tools it offers to the broader mathematical landscape.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 19

A Parallel Cross-Lingual Benchmark for Multimodal Idiomaticity Understanding

Potentially idiomatic expressions (PIEs) construe meanings inherently tied to the everyday experience of a given language community. As such, they constitute an interesting challenge for assessing the linguistic (and to some extent cultural) capabilities of NLP systems. In this paper, we present XMPIE, a parallel multilingual and multimodal dataset of potentially idiomatic expressions. The dataset, containing 34 languages and over ten thousand items, allows comparative analyses of idiomatic patterns among language-specific realisations and preferences in order to gather insights about shared cultural aspects. This parallel dataset allows to evaluate model performance for a given PIE in different languages and whether idiomatic understanding in one language can be transferred to another. Moreover, the dataset supports the study of PIEs across textual and visual modalities, to measure to what extent PIE understanding in one modality transfers or implies in understanding in another modality (text vs. image). The data was created by language experts, with both textual and visual components crafted under multilingual guidelines, and each PIE is accompanied by five images representing a spectrum from idiomatic to literal meanings, including semantically related and random distractors. The result is a high-quality benchmark for evaluating multilingual and multimodal idiomatic language understanding.

  • 78 authors
·
Feb 23

HyDRA: A Hybrid-Driven Reasoning Architecture for Verifiable Knowledge Graphs

The synergy between symbolic knowledge, often represented by Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and the generative capabilities of neural networks is central to advancing neurosymbolic AI. A primary bottleneck in realizing this potential is the difficulty of automating KG construction, which faces challenges related to output reliability, consistency, and verifiability. These issues can manifest as structural inconsistencies within the generated graphs, such as the formation of disconnected isolated islands of data or the inaccurate conflation of abstract classes with specific instances. To address these challenges, we propose HyDRA, a Hybrid-Driven Reasoning Architecture designed for verifiable KG automation. Given a domain or an initial set of documents, HyDRA first constructs an ontology via a panel of collaborative neurosymbolic agents. These agents collaboratively agree on a set of competency questions (CQs) that define the scope and requirements the ontology must be able to answer. Given these CQs, we build an ontology graph that subsequently guides the automated extraction of triplets for KG generation from arbitrary documents. Inspired by design-by-contracts (DbC) principles, our method leverages verifiable contracts as the primary control mechanism to steer the generative process of Large Language Models (LLMs). To verify the output of our approach, we extend beyond standard benchmarks and propose an evaluation framework that assesses the functional correctness of the resulting KG by leveraging symbolic verifications as described by the neurosymbolic AI framework, SymbolicAI. This work contributes a hybrid-driven architecture for improving the reliability of automated KG construction and the exploration of evaluation methods for measuring the functional integrity of its output. The code is publicly available.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 21, 2025

Counterfactual Token Generation in Large Language Models

"Sure, I am happy to generate a story for you: Captain Lyra stood at the helm of her trusty ship, the Maelstrom's Fury, gazing out at the endless sea. [...] Lyra's eyes welled up with tears as she realized the bitter truth - she had sacrificed everything for fleeting riches, and lost the love of her crew, her family, and herself." Although this story, generated by a large language model, is captivating, one may wonder -- how would the story have unfolded if the model had chosen "Captain Maeve" as the protagonist instead? We cannot know. State-of-the-art large language models are stateless -- they maintain no internal memory or state. Given a prompt, they generate a sequence of tokens as an output using an autoregressive process. As a consequence, they cannot reason about counterfactual alternatives to tokens they have generated in the past. In this work, our goal is to enhance them with this functionality. To this end, we develop a causal model of token generation that builds upon the Gumbel-Max structural causal model. Our model allows any large language model to perform counterfactual token generation at almost no cost in comparison with vanilla token generation, it is embarrassingly simple to implement, and it does not require any fine-tuning nor prompt engineering. We implement our model on Llama 3 8B-Instruct and Ministral-8B-Instruct and conduct a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of counterfactually generated text. We conclude with a demonstrative application of counterfactual token generation for bias detection, unveiling interesting insights about the model of the world constructed by large language models.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 25, 2024

Neural-Symbolic Recursive Machine for Systematic Generalization

Despite the tremendous success, existing machine learning models still fall short of human-like systematic generalization -- learning compositional rules from limited data and applying them to unseen combinations in various domains. We propose Neural-Symbolic Recursive Machine (NSR) to tackle this deficiency. The core representation of NSR is a Grounded Symbol System (GSS) with combinatorial syntax and semantics, which entirely emerges from training data. Akin to the neuroscience studies suggesting separate brain systems for perceptual, syntactic, and semantic processing, NSR implements analogous separate modules of neural perception, syntactic parsing, and semantic reasoning, which are jointly learned by a deduction-abduction algorithm. We prove that NSR is expressive enough to model various sequence-to-sequence tasks. Superior systematic generalization is achieved via the inductive biases of equivariance and recursiveness embedded in NSR. In experiments, NSR achieves state-of-the-art performance in three benchmarks from different domains: SCAN for semantic parsing, PCFG for string manipulation, and HINT for arithmetic reasoning. Specifically, NSR achieves 100% generalization accuracy on SCAN and PCFG and outperforms state-of-the-art models on HINT by about 23%. Our NSR demonstrates stronger generalization than pure neural networks due to its symbolic representation and inductive biases. NSR also demonstrates better transferability than existing neural-symbolic approaches due to less domain-specific knowledge required.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 4, 2022

SURFACEBENCH: Can Self-Evolving LLMs Find the Equations of 3D Scientific Surfaces?

Equation discovery from data is a core challenge in machine learning for science, requiring the recovery of concise symbolic expressions that govern complex physical and geometric phenomena. Recent approaches with large language models (LLMs) show promise in symbolic regression, but their success often hinges on memorized formulas or overly simplified functional forms. Existing benchmarks exacerbate this limitation: they focus on scalar functions, ignore domain grounding, and rely on brittle string-matching based metrics that fail to capture scientific equivalence. We introduce SurfaceBench, first comprehensive benchmark for symbolic surface discovery. SurfaceBench comprises 183 tasks across 15 categories of symbolic complexity, spanning explicit, implicit, and parametric equation representation forms. Each task includes ground-truth equations, variable semantics, and synthetically sampled three dimensional data. Unlike prior SR datasets, our tasks reflect surface-level structure, resist LLM memorization through novel symbolic compositions, and are grounded in scientific domains such as fluid dynamics, robotics, electromagnetics, and geometry. To evaluate equation discovery quality, we pair symbolic checks with geometry-aware metrics such as Chamfer and Hausdorff distances, capturing both algebraic fidelity and spatial reconstruction accuracy. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art frameworks, while occasionally successful on specific families, struggle to generalize across representation types and surface complexities. SurfaceBench thus establishes a challenging and diagnostic testbed that bridges symbolic reasoning with geometric reconstruction, enabling principled benchmarking of progress in compositional generalization, data-driven scientific induction, and geometry-aware reasoning with LLMs. We release the code here: https://github.com/Sanchit-404/surfacebench

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 13, 2025

SymbolicAI: A framework for logic-based approaches combining generative models and solvers

We introduce SymbolicAI, a versatile and modular framework employing a logic-based approach to concept learning and flow management in generative processes. SymbolicAI enables the seamless integration of generative models with a diverse range of solvers by treating large language models (LLMs) as semantic parsers that execute tasks based on both natural and formal language instructions, thus bridging the gap between symbolic reasoning and generative AI. We leverage probabilistic programming principles to tackle complex tasks, and utilize differentiable and classical programming paradigms with their respective strengths. The framework introduces a set of polymorphic, compositional, and self-referential operations for data stream manipulation, aligning LLM outputs with user objectives. As a result, we can transition between the capabilities of various foundation models endowed with zero- and few-shot learning capabilities and specialized, fine-tuned models or solvers proficient in addressing specific problems. In turn, the framework facilitates the creation and evaluation of explainable computational graphs. We conclude by introducing a quality measure and its empirical score for evaluating these computational graphs, and propose a benchmark that compares various state-of-the-art LLMs across a set of complex workflows. We refer to the empirical score as the "Vector Embedding for Relational Trajectory Evaluation through Cross-similarity", or VERTEX score for short. The framework codebase and benchmark are linked below.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 1, 2024 5

Towards LogiGLUE: A Brief Survey and A Benchmark for Analyzing Logical Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models

Logical reasoning is fundamental for humans yet presents a substantial challenge in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. Initially, researchers used Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) systems that did not scale and required non trivial manual effort. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated the ability to overcome various limitations of formal Knowledge Representation (KR) systems. Consequently, there is a growing interest in using LLMs for logical reasoning via natural language. This work strives to understand the proficiency of LLMs in logical reasoning by offering a brief review of the latest progress in this area; with a focus on the logical reasoning datasets, tasks, and the methods adopted to utilize LLMs for reasoning. To offer a thorough analysis, we have compiled a benchmark titled LogiGLUE. This includes 24 varied datasets encompassing deductive, abductive, and inductive reasoning. We have standardized these datasets into Seq2Seq tasks to facilitate straightforward training and evaluation for future research. Utilizing LogiGLUE as a foundation, we have trained an instruction fine tuned language model, resulting in LogiT5. We study single task training, multi task training, and a chain of thought knowledge distillation fine tuning technique to assess the performance of model across the different logical reasoning categories. By this comprehensive process, we aim to shed light on the capabilities and potential pathways for enhancing logical reasoning proficiency in LLMs, paving the way for more advanced and nuanced developments in this critical field.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 1, 2023

EGG-SR: Embedding Symbolic Equivalence into Symbolic Regression via Equality Graph

Symbolic regression seeks to uncover physical laws from experimental data by searching for closed-form expressions, which is an important task in AI-driven scientific discovery. Yet the exponential growth of the search space of expression renders the task computationally challenging. A promising yet underexplored direction for reducing the search space and accelerating training lies in *symbolic equivalence*: many expressions, although syntactically different, define the same function -- for example, log(x_1^2x_2^3), log(x_1^2)+log(x_2^3), and 2log(x_1)+3log(x_2). Existing algorithms treat such variants as distinct outputs, leading to redundant exploration and slow learning. We introduce EGG-SR, a unified framework that integrates symbolic equivalence into a class of modern symbolic regression methods, including Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), and Large Language Models (LLMs). EGG-SR compactly represents equivalent expressions through the proposed EGG module (via equality graphs), accelerating learning by: (1) pruning redundant subtree exploration in EGG-MCTS, (2) aggregating rewards across equivalent generated sequences in EGG-DRL, and (3) enriching feedback prompts in EGG-LLM. Theoretically, we show the benefit of embedding EGG into learning: it tightens the regret bound of MCTS and reduces the variance of the DRL gradient estimator. Empirically, EGG-SR consistently enhances a class of symbolic regression models across several benchmarks, discovering more accurate expressions within the same time limit. Project page is at: https://nan-jiang-group.github.io/egg-sr.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 7, 2025

I Spy a Metaphor: Large Language Models and Diffusion Models Co-Create Visual Metaphors

Visual metaphors are powerful rhetorical devices used to persuade or communicate creative ideas through images. Similar to linguistic metaphors, they convey meaning implicitly through symbolism and juxtaposition of the symbols. We propose a new task of generating visual metaphors from linguistic metaphors. This is a challenging task for diffusion-based text-to-image models, such as DALLcdotE 2, since it requires the ability to model implicit meaning and compositionality. We propose to solve the task through the collaboration between Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models: Instruct GPT-3 (davinci-002) with Chain-of-Thought prompting generates text that represents a visual elaboration of the linguistic metaphor containing the implicit meaning and relevant objects, which is then used as input to the diffusion-based text-to-image models.Using a human-AI collaboration framework, where humans interact both with the LLM and the top-performing diffusion model, we create a high-quality dataset containing 6,476 visual metaphors for 1,540 linguistic metaphors and their associated visual elaborations. Evaluation by professional illustrators shows the promise of LLM-Diffusion Model collaboration for this task . To evaluate the utility of our Human-AI collaboration framework and the quality of our dataset, we perform both an intrinsic human-based evaluation and an extrinsic evaluation using visual entailment as a downstream task.

  • 7 authors
·
May 24, 2023

GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their formal reasoning capabilities, particularly in mathematics. The GSM8K benchmark is widely used to assess the mathematical reasoning of models on grade-school-level questions. While the performance of LLMs on GSM8K has significantly improved in recent years, it remains unclear whether their mathematical reasoning capabilities have genuinely advanced, raising questions about the reliability of the reported metrics. To address these concerns, we conduct a large-scale study on several SOTA open and closed models. To overcome the limitations of existing evaluations, we introduce GSM-Symbolic, an improved benchmark created from symbolic templates that allow for the generation of a diverse set of questions. GSM-Symbolic enables more controllable evaluations, providing key insights and more reliable metrics for measuring the reasoning capabilities of models.Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit noticeable variance when responding to different instantiations of the same question. Specifically, the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered in the GSM-Symbolic benchmark. Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and show that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases. We hypothesize that this decline is because current LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning; they replicate reasoning steps from their training data. Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the clause doesn't contribute to the reasoning chain needed for the final answer. Overall, our work offers a more nuanced understanding of LLMs' capabilities and limitations in mathematical reasoning.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 6

Étude cognitive des processus de construction d'une requête dans un système de gestion de connaissances médicales

This article presents the Cogni-CISMeF project, which aims at improving medical information search in the CISMeF system (Catalog and Index of French-language health resources) by including a conversational agent to interact with the user in natural language. To study the cognitive processes involved during the information search, a bottom-up methodology was adopted. Experimentation has been set up to obtain human dialogs between a user (playing the role of patient) dealing with medical information search and a CISMeF expert refining the request. The analysis of these dialogs underlined the use of discursive evidence: vocabulary, reformulation, implicit or explicit expression of user intentions, conversational sequences, etc. A model of artificial agent is proposed. It leads the user in its information search by proposing to him examples, assistance and choices. This model was implemented and integrated in the CISMeF system. ---- Cet article d\'ecrit le projet Cogni-CISMeF qui propose un module de dialogue Homme-Machine \`a int\'egrer dans le syst\`eme d'indexation de connaissances m\'edicales CISMeF (Catalogue et Index des Sites M\'edicaux Francophones). Nous avons adopt\'e une d\'emarche de mod\'elisation cognitive en proc\'edant \`a un recueil de corpus de dialogues entre un utilisateur (jouant le r\^ole d'un patient) d\'esirant une information m\'edicale et un expert CISMeF af inant cette demande pour construire la requ\^ete. Nous avons analys\'e la structure des dialogues ainsi obtenus et avons \'etudi\'e un certain nombre d'indices discursifs : vocabulaire employ\'e, marques de reformulation, commentaires m\'eta et \'epilinguistiques, expression implicite ou explicite des intentions de l'utilisateur, encha\^inement conversationnel, etc. De cette analyse, nous avons construit un mod\`ele d'agent artificiel dot\'e de capacit\'es cognitives capables d'aider l'utilisateur dans sa t\^ache de recherche d'information. Ce mod\`ele a \'et\'e impl\'ement\'e et int\'egr\'e dans le syst\`eme CISMeF.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 10, 2014