Despite the surprising power of many modern AI systems that often learn their own representations, there is significant discontent about their inscrutability and the attendant problems in their ability to interact with humans. While alternatives such as neuro-symbolic approaches have been proposed, there is a lack of consensus on what they are about. There are often two independent motivations (i) symbols as a lingua franca for human-AI interaction and (ii) symbols as (system-produced) abstractions use in its internal reasoning. The jury is still out on whether AI systems will need to use symbols in their internal reasoning to achieve general intelligence capabilities. Whatever the answer there is, the need for (human-understandable) symbols in human-AI interaction seems quite compelling. Symbols, like emotions, may well not be sine qua non for intelligence per se, but they will be crucial for AI systems to interact with us humans--as we can neither turn off our emotions not get by without our symbols. In particular, in many human-designed domains, humans would be interested in providing explicit (symbolic) knowledge and advice--and expect machine explanations in kind. This alone requires AI systems to at least do their I/O in symbolic terms. In this blue sky paper, we argue this point of view, and discuss research directions that need to be pursued to allow for this type of human-AI interaction.
As more and more complex AI systems are introduced into our day-to-day lives, it becomes important that everyday users can work and interact with such systems with relative ease. Orchestrating such interactions require the system to be capable of providing explanations and rationale for its decisions and be able to field queries about alternative decisions. A significant hurdle to allowing for such explanatory dialogue could be the mismatch between the complex representations that the systems use to reason about the task and the terms in which the user may be viewing the task. This paper introduces methods that can be leveraged to provide contrastive explanations in terms of user-specified concepts for deterministic sequential decision-making settings where the system dynamics may be best represented in terms of black box simulators. We do this by assuming that system dynamics can at least be partly captured in terms of symbolic planning models, and we provide explanations in terms of these models. We implement this method using a simulator for a popular Atari game (Montezuma's Revenge) and perform user studies to verify whether people would find explanations generated in this form useful.
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