Related papers: People infer recursive visual concepts from just a…
When a human undertakes a test, their responses likely follow a pattern: if they answered an easy question $(2 \times 3)$ incorrectly, they would likely answer a more difficult one $(2 \times 3 \times 4)$ incorrectly; and if they answered a…
Learning how to model complex scenes in a modular way with recombinable components is a pre-requisite for higher-order reasoning and acting in the physical world. However, current generative models lack the ability to capture the inherently…
Higher-level cognition depends on the ability to learn models of the world. We can characterize this at the computational level as a structure-learning problem with the goal of best identifying the prevailing causal relationships among a…
Causal thinking enables humans to understand not just what is seen, but why it happens. To replicate this capability in modern AI systems, we introduce the task of visual causal discovery. It requires models to infer cause-and-effect…
This is a preliminary version of visual interpretation integrating multiple sensors in SUCCESSOR, an intelligent, model-based vision system. We pursue a thorough integration of hierarchical Bayesian inference with comprehensive physical…
Current theories of perception suggest that the brain represents features of the world as probability distributions, but can such uncertain foundations provide the basis for everyday vision? Perceiving objects and scenes requires knowing…
We design new visual illusions by finding "adversarial examples" for principled models of human perception -- specifically, for probabilistic models, which treat vision as Bayesian inference. To perform this search efficiently, we design a…
Visual understanding goes well beyond object recognition. With one glance at an image, we can effortlessly imagine the world beyond the pixels: for instance, we can infer people's actions, goals, and mental states. While this task is easy…
*Concept-based explanations* offer a promising approach for explaining the predictions of deep neural networks in terms of high-level, human-understandable concepts. However, existing methods either do not establish a causal connection…
Recently, there has been extensive research on the capabilities of biologically plausible algorithms. In this work, we show how one of such algorithms, called predictive coding, is able to perform causal inference tasks. First, we show how…
Deep neural networks are complex and opaque. As they enter application in a variety of important and safety critical domains, users seek methods to explain their output predictions. We develop an approach to explaining deep neural networks…
We present an empirical analysis of the state-of-the-art systems for referring expression recognition -- the task of identifying the object in an image referred to by a natural language expression -- with the goal of gaining insight into…
Causal inference is central to many areas of artificial intelligence, including complex reasoning, planning, knowledge-base construction, robotics, explanation, and fairness. An active community of researchers develops and enhances…
Making sense of the world and acting in it relies on building simplified mental representations that abstract away aspects of reality. This principle of cognitive mapping is universal to agents with limited resources. Living organisms,…
How do we imagine visual objects and combine them to create new forms? To answer this question, we need to explore the cognitive, computational and neural mechanisms underlying imagery and creativity. The body of research on deep learning…
While perception tasks such as visual object recognition and text understanding play an important role in human intelligence, the subsequent tasks that involve inference, reasoning and planning require an even higher level of intelligence.…
We study the problem of computer-assisted teaching with explanations. Conventional approaches for machine teaching typically only provide feedback at the instance level e.g., the category or label of the instance. However, it is intuitive…
A Bayesian network is a graphical model that encodes probabilistic relationships among variables of interest. When used in conjunction with statistical techniques, the graphical model has several advantages for data analysis. One, because…
Artificial Intelligence systems cannot yet match human abilities to apply knowledge to situations that vary from what they have been programmed for, or trained for. In visual object recognition methods of inference exploiting top-down…
Motivated by the Gestalt pattern theory, and the Winograd Challenge for language understanding, we design synthetic experiments to investigate a deep learning algorithm's ability to infer simple (at least for human) visual concepts, such as…