skip to main content


Title: Neural-Symbolic Inference for Robust Autoregressive Graph Parsing via Compositional Uncertainty Quantification
Pre-trained seq2seq models excel at graph semantic parsing with rich annotated data, but generalize worse to out-of-distribution (OOD) and long-tail examples. In comparison, symbolic parsers under-perform on population-level metrics, but exhibit unique strength in OOD and tail generalization. In this work, we study compositionality-aware approach to neural-symbolic inference informed by model confidence, performing fine-grained neural-symbolic reasoning at subgraph level (i.e., nodes and edges) and precisely targeting subgraph components with high uncertainty in the neural parser. As a result, the method combines the distinct strength of the neural and symbolic approaches in capturing different aspects of the graph prediction, leading to well-rounded generalization performance both across domains and in the tail. We empirically investigate the approach in the English Resource Grammar (ERG) parsing problem on a diverse suite of standard in-domain and seven OOD corpora. Our approach leads to 35.26% and 35.60% error reduction in aggregated SMATCH score over neural and symbolic approaches respectively, and 14% absolute accuracy gain in key tail linguistic categories over the neural model, outperforming prior state-of-art methods that do not account for compositionality or uncertainty.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2040727
NSF-PAR ID:
10403509
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Page Range / eLocation ID:
4759–4776
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Humans have the remarkable ability to recognize and acquire novel visual concepts in a zero-shot manner. Given a high-level, symbolic description of a novel concept in terms of previously learned visual concepts and their relations, humans can recognize novel concepts without seeing any examples. Moreover, they can acquire new concepts by parsing and communicating symbolic structures using learned visual concepts and relations. Endowing these capabilities in machines is pivotal in improving their generalization capability at inference time. We introduced Zero-shot Concept Recognition and Acquisition (ZeroC), a neuro-symbolic architecture that can recognize and acquire novel concepts in a zero-shot way. ZeroC represents concepts as graphs of constituent concept models (as nodes) and their relations (as edges). To allow inference time composition, we employed energy-based models (EBMs) to model concepts and relations. We designed ZeroC architecture so that it allows a one-to-one mapping between a symbolic graph structure of a concept and its corresponding EBM, which for the first time, allows acquiring new concepts, communicating its graph structure, and applying it to classification and detection tasks (even across domains) at inference time. We introduced algorithms for learning and inference with ZeroC. We evaluated ZeroC on a challenging grid-world dataset which is designed to probe zero-shot concept recognition and acquisition, and demonstrated its capability. 
    more » « less
  2. Node classification is of great importance among various graph mining tasks. In practice, real-world graphs generally follow the long-tail distribution, where a large number of classes only consist of limited labeled nodes. Although Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant improvements in node classification, their performance decreases substantially in such a few-shot scenario. The main reason can be attributed to the vast generalization gap between meta-training and meta-test due to the task variance caused by different node/class distributions in meta-tasks (i.e., node-level and class-level variance). Therefore, to effectively alleviate the impact of task variance, we propose a task-adaptive node classification framework under the few-shot learning setting. Specifically, we first accumulate meta-knowledge across classes with abundant labeled nodes. Then we transfer such knowledge to the classes with limited labeled nodes via our proposed task-adaptive modules. In particular, to accommodate the different node/class distributions among meta-tasks, we propose three essential modules to perform node-level, class-level, and task-level adaptations in each meta-task, respectively. In this way, our framework can conduct adaptations to different meta-tasks and thus advance the model generalization performance on meta-test tasks. Extensive experiments on four prevalent node classification datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework over the state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is provided at https://github.com/SongW-SW/TENT https://github.com/SongW-SW/TENT. 
    more » « less
  3. We present Seq2Parse, a language-agnostic neurosymbolic approach to automatically repairing parse errors. Seq2Parse is based on the insight that Symbolic Error Correcting (EC) Parsers can, in principle, synthesize repairs, but, in practice, are overwhelmed by the many error-correction rules that are not relevant to the particular program that requires repair. In contrast, Neural approaches are fooled by the large space of possible sequence level edits, but can precisely pinpoint the set of EC-rules that are relevant to a particular program. We show how to combine their complementary strengths by using neural methods to train a sequence classifier that predicts the small set of relevant EC-rules for an ill-parsed program, after which, the symbolic EC-parsing algorithm can make short work of generating useful repairs. We train and evaluate our method on a dataset of 1,100,000 Python programs, and show that Seq2Parse is accurate and efficient : it can parse 94% of our tests within 2.1 seconds, while generating the exact user fix in 1 out 3 of the cases; and useful : humans perceive both Seq2Parse-generated error locations and repairs to be almost as good as human-generated ones in a statistically-significant manner. 
    more » « less
  4. Video-language models (VLMs), large models pre-trained on numerous but noisy video-text pairs from the internet, have revolutionized activity recognition through their remarkable generalization and open-vocabulary capabilities. While complex human activities are often hierarchical and compositional, most existing tasks for evaluating VLMs focus only on high-level video understanding, making it difficult to accurately assess and interpret the ability of VLMs to understand complex and fine-grained human activities. Inspired by the recently proposed MOMA framework, we define activity graphs as a single universal representation of human activities that encompasses video understanding at the activity, sub10 activity, and atomic action level. We redefine activity parsing as the overarching task of activity graph generation, requiring understanding human activities across all three levels. To facilitate the evaluation of models on activity parsing, we introduce MOMA-LRG (Multi-Object Multi-Actor Language-Refined Graphs), a large dataset of complex human activities with activity graph annotations that can be readily transformed into natural language sentences. Lastly, we present a model-agnostic and lightweight approach to adapting and evaluating VLMs by incorporating structured knowledge from activity graphs into VLMs, addressing the individual limitations of language and graphical models. We demonstrate a strong performance on activity parsing and few-shot video classification, and our framework is intended to foster future research in the joint modeling of videos, graphs, and language. 
    more » « less
  5. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a powerful tool for machine learning on graphs. GNNs combine node feature information with the graph structure by recursively passing neural messages along edges of the input graph. However, incorporating both graph structure and feature information leads to complex models and explaining predictions made by GNNs remains unsolved. Here we propose GNNEXPLAINER, the first general, model-agnostic approach for providing interpretable explanations for predictions of any GNN-based model on any graph-based machine learning task. Given an instance, GNNEXPLAINER identifies a compact subgraph structure and a small subset of node features that have a crucial role in GNN’s prediction. Further, GNNEXPLAINER can generate consistent and concise explanations for an entire class of instances. We formulate GNNEXPLAINER as an optimization task that maximizes the mutual information between a GNN’s prediction and distribution of possible subgraph structures. Experiments on synthetic and real-world graphs show that our approach can identify important graph structures as well as node features, and outperforms alternative baseline approaches by up to 43.0% in explanation accuracy. GNNEXPLAINER provides a variety of benefits, from the ability to visualize semantically relevant structures to interpretability, to giving insights into errors of faulty GNNs. 
    more » « less