Neuro-Symbolic Procedural Semantics for Reasoning-Intensive Visual Dialogue Tasks

Lara Verheyen, Jérôme Botoko Ekila, Jens Nevens, Paul Van Eecke, Katrien Beuls

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference paper

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach to visual dialogue that is based on neuro-symbolic procedural semantics. The approach builds further on earlier work on procedural semantics for visual question answering and expands it on the one hand with neuro-symbolic reasoning operations, and on the other hand with mechanisms that handle the challenges that are inherent to dialogue, in particular the incremental nature of the information that is conveyed. Concretely, we introduce (i) the use of a conversation memory as a data structure that explicitly and incrementally represents the information that is expressed during the subsequent turns of a dialogue, and (ii) the design of a neuro-symbolic procedural semantic representation that is grounded in both visual input and the conversation memory. We validate the methodology using the reasoning- intensive MNIST Dialog and CLEVR-Dialog benchmark challenges and achieve a question-level accuracy of 99.8% and 99.2% respectively. The methodology presented in this paper responds to the growing interest in the field of artificial intelligence in solving tasks that involve both low-level perception and high-level reasoning using a combination of neural and symbolic techniques.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Subtitle of host publicationECAI 2023
PublisherIOS Press
Pages2419-2426
Number of pages8
Volume372
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-64368-437-6
ISBN (Print)978-1-64368-436-9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence - ECAI 2023 - Kraków, Poland
Duration: 30 Sept 20234 Oct 2023
Conference number: 26
https://ecai2023.eu/

Publication series

NameFrontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications

Conference

Conference26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence - ECAI 2023
Abbreviated titleECAI 2023
Country/TerritoryPoland
CityKraków
Period30/09/234/10/23
Internet address

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The research reported on in this paper received funding from the EU’s H2020 RIA programme under grant agreement no. 951846 (MUHAI), from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) through a postdoctoral grant awarded to PVE (grant no. 76929) and from the Flemish Government under the ‘Flanders AI Research Program’.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors.

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