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While interpretability methods identify a model's learned concepts, they overlook the relationships between concepts that make up its abstractions and inform its ability to generalize to new data. To assess whether models' have learned…
Conceptual abstraction and analogy-making are key abilities underlying humans' abilities to learn, reason, and robustly adapt their knowledge to new domains. Despite of a long history of research on constructing AI systems with these…
Discussion of AI alignment (alignment between humans and AI systems) has focused on value alignment, broadly referring to creating AI systems that share human values. We argue that before we can even attempt to align values, it is…
To build intelligent machine learning systems, there are two broad approaches. One approach is to build inherently interpretable models, as endeavored by the growing field of causal representation learning. The other approach is to build…
We discuss philosophical issues concerning the notion of cognition basing ourselves in experimental results in cognitive sciences, especially in computer simulations of cognitive systems. There have been debates on the "proper" approach for…
Machine learning models increasingly function as representational systems, yet the philosoph- ical assumptions underlying their internal structures remain largely unexamined. This paper develops a structuralist decision framework for…
The symbolism, connectionism and behaviorism approaches of artificial intelligence have achieved a lot of successes in various tasks, while we still do not have a clear definition of "intelligence" with enough consensus in the community…
The last decade has seen huge progress in the development of advanced machine learning models; however, those models are powerless unless human users can interpret them. Here we show how the mind's construction of concepts and meaning can…
A plausible definition of "reasoning" could be "algebraically manipulating previously acquired knowledge in order to answer a new question". This definition covers first-order logical inference or probabilistic inference. It also includes…
Mechanistic interpretability (MI) aims to explain how neural networks work by uncovering their underlying mechanisms. As the field grows in influence, it is increasingly important to examine not just models themselves, but the assumptions,…
There has been a gap between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. In this paper, we identify three key elements forming human intelligence, and suggest that abstraction learning combines these elements and is thus a way to bridge…
Cognition is a core part of and a common topic among philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, AI, and cognitive science. Through a mechanistic lens, I propose a framework of defining, modeling, and analyzing cognition mechanisms.…
A long-held objective in AI is to build systems that understand concepts in a humanlike way. Setting aside the difficulty of building such a system, even trying to evaluate one is a challenge, due to present-day AI's relative opacity and…
We review, for a general audience, a variety of recent experiments on extracting structure from machine-learning mathematical data that have been compiled over the years. Focusing on supervised machine-learning on labeled data from…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
Brain science and artificial intelligence have made great progress toward the understanding and engineering of the human mind. The progress has accelerated significantly since the turn of the century thanks to new methods for probing the…
Machine learning is usually defined in behaviourist terms, where external validation is the primary mechanism of learning. In this paper, I argue for a more holistic interpretation in which finding more probable, efficient and abstract…
Analogy is core to human cognition. It allows us to solve problems based on prior experience, it governs the way we conceptualize new information, and it even influences our visual perception. The importance of analogy to humans has made it…
Working with causal models at different levels of abstraction is an important feature of science. Existing work has already considered the problem of expressing formally the relation of abstraction between causal models. In this paper, we…
Concepts play a pivotal role in various human cognitive functions, including learning, reasoning and communication. However, there is very little work on endowing machines with the ability to form and reason with concepts. In particular,…