Related papers: When intuition fails in assessing conditional risk…
We propose a new dataset for evaluating question answering models with respect to their capacity to reason about beliefs. Our tasks are inspired by theory-of-mind experiments that examine whether children are able to reason about the…
This note is concerned with a formal analysis of the problem of non-monotonic reasoning in intelligent systems, especially when the uncertainty is taken into account in a quantitative way. A firm connection between logic and probability is…
Two types of approximation to the paradoxical Russell Set are presented, one approximating it from below, one from above. It is shown that any lower approximation gives rise to a better approximation containing it, and that any upper…
Prior work finds a diversity paradox: diversity breeds innovation, and yet, underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this…
The paradoxes of thermodynamics and statistical physics are unavoidable in the study of physical paradoxes because of their importance at the time they came to be as well as the frequency of their appearance in historical studies of…
It is often reported in forecast combination literature that a simple average of candidate forecasts is more robust than sophisticated combining methods. This phenomenon is usually referred to as the "forecast combination puzzle". Motivated…
In 1957, Lindley published "A statistical paradox" in Biometrika, revealing a fundamental conflict between frequentist and Bayesian inference as sample size approaches infinity. We present a new paradox of a different kind: a conflict…
Learning with hidden variables is a central challenge in probabilistic graphical models that has important implications for many real-life problems. The classical approach is using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. This…
Many undergraduate students of engineering and the exact sciences have difficulty with their mathematics courses due to insufficient proficiency in what we in this paper have termed clear thinking. We believe that this lack of proficiency…
We study the performance of general dynamic matching models. This model is defined by a connected graph, where nodes represent the class of items and the edges the compatibilities between items. Items of different classes arrive one by one…
Modern physics is founded on two mainstays: mathematical modelling and empirical verification. These two assumptions are prerequisite for the objectivity of scientific discourse. Here we show, however, that they are contradictory, leading…
The friendship paradox states that your friends have on average more friends than you have. Does the paradox "hold" for other individual characteristics like income or happiness? To address this question, we generalize the friendship…
Considerable attention has been given to the problem of non-monotonic reasoning in a belief function framework. Earlier work (M. Ginsberg) proposed solutions introducing meta-rules which recognized conditional independencies in a…
Emotions are intimately tied to motivation and the adaptation of behavior, and many animal species show evidence of emotions in their behavior. Therefore, emotions must be related to powerful mechanisms that aid survival, and, emotions must…
The legacy of Post-Modernism is renewed attention to the issues of knowledge production. Now that post-modernism is out of fashion, the emphasis is no longer on the "cursed" questions formulated by its adepts. The main issue is no longer…
We address the task of explaining the effects of perturbations in procedural text, an important test of process comprehension. Consider a passage describing a rabbit's life-cycle: humans can easily explain the effect on the rabbit…
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems can now reliably solve many standard tasks used in introductory physics courses, producing correct equations, graphs, and explanations. While this capability is often framed as an opportunity…
Initially proposed by Martin Gardner in the 1950s, the famous two-children problem is often presented as a paradox in probability theory. A relatively recent variant of this paradox states that, while in a two-children family for which at…
Standard imitation learning can fail when the expert demonstrators have different sensory inputs than the imitating agent. This is because partial observability gives rise to hidden confounders in the causal graph. In previous work, to work…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…