Russian Federation

Even with the relative ascendancy of sub-symbolic approaches to AI, the symbol grounding problem presents an ongoing challenge to work in artificial general intelligence. Prevailing ontology design practices typically presuppose the transparency of the relation between semantics and syntax by transcendently stipulating it extrinsic to the system, rather than providing a platform for the internal development of this relation through agents’ interactions endogenous to the system. Drawing on theoretical resources from ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory, and interactive computation, this work suggests an inversion of the symbol grounding problem in order to analyze how the symbolic regime can emerge out of causally embedded dynamical interactions within a system of autonomous intelligent agents. Under this view, syntactic-symbols come to be stabilized from other signs as constraints harnessing the dynamics of agents’ inter-actions, where the functional effects generated by such constrained dynamics give rise to an internal characterization of semantics broadly aligned with Brandom’s semantic pragmatism. Finally, ludics—a protological framework based on interactive computation—provides a formal model to concretely describe this continuity between syntax and semantics arising within and through the regulative dynamics of interactions in a multi-agent system. Accordingly, this bottom-up approach to grounding the symbolic order in dynamics could provide the conditions for artificial agents to engage in autonomous language design, thus equipping themselves with a powerful cognitive technology for intersubjective coordination and (re)structuring ontologies within a community of agents.

AGI-20

The Dynamics of Growing Symbols: A Ludics Approach to Language Design by Autonomous Agents

interactive computation

ludics

symbol grounding

dynamical systems

### Looking for Cogsci 2023? Please [click here](https://underline.io/events/405/reception) to switch to 2023 edition.


**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

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**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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CogSci 2021

The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

technical paper

The AGI conference series is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. By gathering together active researchers in the field, for presentation of results and discussion of ideas, we accelerate our progress toward our common goal.

Underline hosted the two main days of AGI 2020 on Wednesday June 24th and Thursday June 25th. Both days were **live-streamed** and you can read the full program bellow. All presentations are available for a **asynchronous viewing**. All presenters are grouped into panels. You can also hear guest talks by **Ben Goertzel** (SingularityNET), **Valery Tarasov** (Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics), **Tatiana Shavrina** (Sberbank) and **Joscha Bach** (MIT Media Lab). 

The AGI conference series is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. By gathering together active researchers in the field, for presentation of results and discussion of ideas, we accelerate our progress toward our common goal.

There are different difficulties in defining a fundamental concept; it often happens that some conditions are too strong or just surplus, and others are too weak or just lacking. There is no clearly agreed conception of intelligence, let alone artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. Still it can be significant and useful to (attempt to) elucidate the defining or possible characteristics of a fundamental concept. In the present paper we discuss the conditions of artificial general intelligence, some of which may be too strong and others of which may be too weak. Among other things, we focus upon logic, autonomy, resilience, integrity, morality, emotion, embodiment, and embeddedness, and articulate the nature of them from different conceptual points of view. And we finally discuss how to test artificial general intelligence, proposing a new kind of Turing-type tests based upon the intelligence-for-survival view. Overall, we believe that explicating the nature of artificial general intelligence arguably contributes to a deeper understanding of intelligence per se.

The Conditions of Artificial General Intelligence

Agents are designed to perform specific tasks. The agent developers define the agent’s environment, the task states, the possible actions to navigate the different states, and the sensors and effectors necessary for it to perform its task. Once trained and deployed, the agent is monitored to ensure that it performs as designed. During operations, some changes that were not foreseen in the task design might negatively impact the agent performance. In this case, the agent operator would capture the performance drop, identify possible causes, and work with the agent developer to update the agent design. This model works well in centralized environments. However, agents are increasingly deployed in decentralized, dynamic environments, where changes are not centrally coordinated. In this case, updating agent task design to accommodate unforeseen changes might require a considerable effort from the agent operators. The paper suggests an approach to enable agents to anticipate and identify deviations in their performance on their own, thus improving the process of adapting to changes. The approach introduces an additional machine learning-based component—we call information digital twin (IDT)—dedicated to predicting task changes. That is, an agent would then have two components: the original component, which focuses on finding the best actions to achieve the agent task, and the IDT, dedicated to detecting changes impacting the agent task. Considering general artificial intelligence agents—where an agent might manage different tasks in various domains—the proposed IDT might be a component that enables AGI agents to ensure their performance against changes.

Information Digital Twin—Enabling Agents to Anticipate Changes in their Tasks

I give a brief overview of the theory I have depicted in my paper called "Cognitive Machinery and Behaviours".

Cognitive Machinery and Behaviours

The ability to explain decisions made by AI systems is highly sought after, especially in domains where human lives are at stake such as medicine or autonomous vehicles. While it is often possible to approximate the input-output relations of deep neural networks with a few human-understandable rules, the discovery of the double descent phenomena suggests that such approximations do not accurately capture the mechanism by which deep neural networks work. Double descent indicates that deep neural networks typically operate by smoothly interpolating between data points rather than by extracting a few high level rules. As a result, neural networks trained on complex real world data are inherently hard to interpret and prone to failure if asked to extrapolate. To show how we might be able to trust AI despite these problems we introduce the concept of self-explaining AI. Self-explaining AIs are capable of providing a human-understandable explanation of each decision along with confidence levels for both the decision and explanation. Some difficulties with this approach along with possible solutions are sketched. Finally, we argue it is important that deep learning based systems include a "warning light" based on techniques from applicability domain analysis to warn the user if a model is asked to extrapolate outside its training distribution.

Self-explaining AI as an alternative to interpretable AI

The paper is dedicated to the use of distributed hyperdimensional vec-tors to represent sensory information in the sign-based cognitive architecture, in which the image component of a sign is encoded by a causal matrix. The hyper-dimensional representation allows us to fix the precedent dimension of the causal matrix and accumulate information in it during the interaction of the system with the environment. Due to the high dimensionality of vectors, it is possible to re-duce the representation and reasoning on the entities related to them to simple operations on vectors. In this work we show how hyperdimensional representa-tions are embedded in an existing sign formalism and provide examples of scene encoding.

Hyperdimensional Representations in Semiotic Approach to AGI

We consider a task-oriented approach to AGI, when any cognitive problem, perhaps superior to human ability, has sense given a criterion of its solution. In the frame of this approach, we consider the task of purposeful behavior in a complex probabilistic environment, where behavior is organized through self-learning. For that purpose, we suggest cognitive architecture that relies on the theory of functional systems. The architecture is based on the main notions of this theory: goal, result, anticipation of the result. The logical structure of this theory was analyzed and used for the control system of purposeful behavior development. This control system contains a hierarchy of functional systems that organizes purposeful behavior. The control system was used for modeling agents to solve the foraging task.

Logical probabilistic biologically inspired cognitive architecture

This presentation describes ideas on how to develop engineering tools based on knowledge graphs to manage a systems complexity.

Approach for development of engineering tools based on knowledge graphs and context separation

"This position paper suggests the existence of a plurality of ""general-purpose''
AGI paradigms, each specific to a domain of experience. These paradigms are studied to answer the question of which AGI will be developed first. Finally, in order to make the case for AGI based on symbolic experience, preliminary results from Semiotic AI are discussed."

Experience-specific AGI Paradigms

"A possible practical engineering approach to creation of the general artificial
intelligence is considered. The choice of approach is based on modular hierarchical representation of knowledge, where each module uses its own methods of representation and knowledge processing. Work with knowledge is done by a hierarchical multi-agent system. The description of system’s individual elements and information about the current development state are given."

The use of engineering approach in creation of artificial general intelligence

Creating Strong AI means to develop artificial intelligence to the point where the machine's intellectual capability is in a way equal to a human's. Science is definitely one of the summits of human intelligence, the other being the art. Scientific research consists in creating hypotheses that are limited applicability models (methods) implying lossy information compression. In this article, we show that this paradigm is not unique to the science and is common to the most developed areas of human activities, like business and engineering. Thus, we argue, a Strong AI should possess a capability to build such models. Still, the known tests to confirm the human-level AI do not address this consideration. Based on the above we suggest a series of six tests of rising complexity to check if AI have achieved the human-level intelligence (Explanation, Problem-setting, Refutation, New phenomenon prediction, Business creation, Theory creation), five of which are new to the AGI literature.

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The Conditions of Artificial General Intelligence

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Interaction Flexibility in Artificial Agents Teaming with Humans

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Next from AGI-20

The Conditions of Artificial General Intelligence

Similar lecture

Interaction Flexibility in Artificial Agents Teaming with Humans

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads