Related papers: The Symbol Grounding Problem
The paper defends the notion that semantic tagging should be viewed as more than disambiguation between senses. Instead, semantic tagging should be a first step in the interpretation process by assigning each lexical item a representation…
Human vision is able to compensate imperfections in sensory inputs from the real world by reasoning based on prior knowledge about the world. Machine learning has had a significant impact on computer vision due to its inherent ability in…
The proliferation of methods for modeling of human meaning-making constitutes a powerful class of instruments for the analysis of complex semiotic systems. However, the field lacks a general theoretical framework for describing these…
If a robotic agent wants to exploit symbolic planning techniques to achieve some goal, it must be able to properly ground an abstract planning domain in the environment in which it operates. However, if the environment is initially unknown…
We present an approach for acquiring grounded representations of words from mixed-initiative, situated interactions with a human instructor. The work focuses on the acquisition of diverse types of knowledge including perceptual, semantic,…
The field of neuro-symbolic AI aims to benefit from the combination of neural networks and symbolic systems. A cornerstone of the field is the translation or encoding of symbolic knowledge into neural networks. Although many neuro-symbolic…
This position paper argues that text embedding research should move beyond surface meaning and embrace implicit semantics as a central modeling objective. Text embeddings are a foundational component of modern NLP, underpinning a wide range…
Despite significant progress in natural language understanding, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain error-prone when performing logical reasoning, often lacking the robust mental representations that enable human-like comprehension. We…
As autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in open and uncertain settings, there is a growing need for trustworthy world models that can reliably predict future high-dimensional observations. The learned latent representations in world…
Invariant representations are core to representation learning, yet a central challenge remains: uncovering invariants that are stable and transferable without suppressing task-relevant signals. This raises fundamental questions, requiring…
How does visual information included in training affect language processing in audio- and text-based deep learning models? We explore how such visual grounding affects model-internal representations of words, and find substantially…
Classifying images with an interpretable decision-making process is a long-standing problem in computer vision. In recent years, Prototypical Part Networks has gained traction as an approach for self-explainable neural networks, due to…
Grounded understanding of natural language in physical scenes can greatly benefit robots that follow human instructions. In object manipulation scenarios, existing end-to-end models are proficient at understanding semantic concepts, but…
Semantic communication is an emerging paradigm that focuses on understanding and delivering semantics, or meaning of messages. Most existing semantic communication solutions define semantic meaning as the meaning of object labels recognized…
Deep learning approaches to natural language processing have made great strides in recent years. While these models produce symbols that convey vast amounts of diverse knowledge, it is unclear how such symbols are grounded in data from the…
Many task domains require robots to interpret and act upon natural language commands which are given by people and which refer to the robot's physical surroundings. Such interpretation is known variously as the symbol grounding problem,…
This paper presents a formal, categorical framework for analysing how humans and large language models (LLMs) transform content into truth-evaluated propositions about a state space of possible worlds W , in order to argue that LLMs do not…
We propose a symbolic generative task description language and a corresponding inference engine capable of representing arbitrary multimodal tasks as structured symbolic flows. Unlike conventional generative models that rely on large-scale…
Symbolic perturbations offer a novel approach for influencing neural representations without requiring direct modification of model parameters. The recursive regeneration of symbolic structures introduces structured variations in latent…
We present a visually grounded model of speech perception which projects spoken utterances and images to a joint semantic space. We use a multi-layer recurrent highway network to model the temporal nature of spoken speech, and show that it…