Workshop description

Neuro-symbolic AI for Agent and Multi-Agent systems [NeSyMAS] Workshop

The NeSyMAS workshop forms part of the AAMAS 2023 conference taking place in London, UK on 29th May-2nd June 2023. The workshop will take place on Tuesday May 30 in the afternoon session (2-6.30pm) of the AAMAS conference.

AI has vast potential, some of which has been realised by developments in deep learning methods. However, it has become clear that these approaches have reached an impasse and that such “sub-symbolic” or “neuro-inspired” techniques only work well for certain classes of problem and are generally opaque to both analysis and understanding. “Symbolic” AI techniques, based on rules, logic and reasoning, while not as efficient as “sub-symbolic” approaches, have better behaviour in terms of transparency, explainability, verifiability and, indeed, trustworthiness. A new direction described as “neuro-symbolic” AI combines the efficiency of “sub-symbolic” AI with the transparency of “symbolic” AI. This combination potentially provides a new wave of AI systems that are both interpretable and elaboration tolerant and can integrate reasoning and learning in a very general way.

Though there is ample work on neuro-symbolic AI for competing with classical ML models, such as its use of label-free supervision and graph embeddings, there is much less on the use for agent modelling or multi-agent systems. Especially in a multi-agent context, the use of symbolic models for mental state reasoning together with low-level perception patterns or the formation of reasoning-capable representations from subsymbolic data, all represent promising areas where MAS offers a unique perspective. This workshop’s aim is thus to assemble leading-edge work in which neuro-symbolic AI approaches and MAS interact.