CS Colloquium: Distinguished Speaker Series: Leslie Valiant (Harvard)

Distinguished speaker: Leslie Valiant
https://people.seas.harvard.edu/~valiant/
How to Augment Supervised Learning with Reasoning
Supervised learning is a cognitive phenomenon that has proved amenable both to theoretical analysis and exploitation as a technology. However, not all of cognition can be accounted for directly by supervised learning. The question we ask here is whether one can build on the success of machine learning to address the broader goals of artificial intelligence. We regard reasoning as the major component of cognition that needs to be added. We suggest that the central challenge therefore is to unify the formulation of these two phenomena, learning and reasoning, into a single framework with a common semantics. In such a framework one would aim to learn rules with the same success that predicates can be learned by means of machine learning, and, at the same time, to reason with the rules with guarantees analogous to those of standard logic. We discuss how Robust Logic fulfills the role of such a theoretical framework. We also discuss the challenges of testing this experimentally on a significant scale, for tasks where one hopes to exceed the performance offered by learning alone.