Combining neural networks and symbolic inference in a hybrid cognitive architecture
Oleg Sychev · Procedia Computer Science · 2021
Recently, there has been a big progress in developing artificial deep-learning neural networks and large-scale knowledge graphs. However, the results in these two research fields have serious drawbacks. The solutions offered by neural networks remain unstable and prone to adversarial attacks: while the percentage of correct answers increases, the incorrect answers often contain glaring errors. Large knowledge graphs contain a lot of facts but little knowledge; they are mostly used for information search and retrieval. The ability to reason conclusions on them is limited, and the majority of modern research turns to approximate methods like neural networks and graph embeddings to draw conclusions and use the accumulated knowledge. In this work, I propose a hybrid cognitive architecture inspired by the observable features of human thinking. Pruning obviously wrong solutions seems to be more natural for human symbolic reasoning than making far-fetched strict logical conclusions, while generating new ideas is often intuitive. So a hybrid cognitive architecture can employ generative neural networks as a sort of "intuition" (generating possible solutions) and symbolic inference as a control contour to verify and filter the generated solutions, weeding out dangerous and wrong ideas. This requires creating knowledge graphs containing negative information: the information of what cannot happen or should not be done and why. The problems of creating negative knowledge graphs are discussed. Hybrid cognitive systems using the proposed architecture will be a lot more trustworthy as they will have a system of human-verifiable rules that ensures avoiding the worst errors which can be used in many fields from decision making to natural-language parsing.