Collaborative Research: CompCog: Achieving Analogical Reasoning via Human and Machine Learning

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Despite recent advances in artificial intelligence, humans remain unmatched in their ability to think creatively. Intelligent machines can use massive data to learn to identify patterns that are similar to learned examples, but people can use very small amounts of data to discover deep similarities between situations that are superficially very different (e.g., engineers have devised a cooling system for buildings using principles adapted from termite mounds). This type of creative thinking depends on analogy: the ability to find and exploit resemblances based on relations among entities, rather than solely on superficial appearances. The present investigation aims to show how relations can be learned from examples (in the form of either texts or pictures) and then used to reason by analogy. The work integrates recent advances in machine learning with more human-like learning mechanisms. Improved analogy models will increase the power of computer-based information retrieval, allowing both text and pictures to serve as retrieval cues to search large databases for items that are analogous in relational structure. The large analogy datasets generated for the project will be made publically available. More flexible search engines will help to automate creative tasks such as engineering design. Identifying the computational basis for relation learning and analogical reasoning will guide development of artificial intelligence systems by providing more efficient learning mechanisms. The research team is integrating research and education activities by using this project as a training opportunity in interdisciplinary research, encompassing psychology, statistics, computer science and mathematics. The research will integrate advanced computational approaches with behavioral experiments on human relation learning and analogical reasoning, using both texts and pictures as inputs. The work is guided by cognitive theory on learning and reasoning, and exploits recent advances in the field of machine vision. The project includes the creation and validation of multiple databases of analogy problems. Experiments will be performed to establish human performance levels in a variety of tasks. Computational models will be developed by synergizing big-data learning through deep networks with small-data learning through Bayesian modeling. Models will be evaluated by comparison with human benchmarks. By addressing issues that arise in reasoning from natural inputs such as texts and pictures, the models to be developed will generalize to situations that people encounter in their daily life.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.