A hallmark feature of vertebrate brain organization is ordered topography, wherein sets of neuronal connections preserve the relative organization of cells between two regions. Although topography is often found in projections from peripheral sense organs to the brain, it also seems to participate in the anatomical and functional organization of higher brain centers, for reasons that are poorly...

This paper develops an inductive theory of predictive common sense reasoning. The theory provides the basis for an integrated solution to the three traditional problems of reasoning about change; the frame, qualification, and ramification problems. The theory is also capable of representing non-deterministic events, and it provides a means for stating defeasible preferences over the outcomes of...

A challenge for any case-based reasoning system is how to acquire the cases with which to reason. Here we explore acquiring cases via natural language instruction by a person. We show how, using microstories (1-3 sentence stories) expressed in simplified English syntax, small cases – called common sense units – can be incrementally added to improve analogical reasoning performance.

In this paper we explore the use of visual commonsense knowledge and other kinds of knowledge (such as domain knowledge, background knowledge, linguistic knowledge) for scene understanding. In particular, we combine visual processing with techniques from natural language understanding (especially semantic parsing), common-sense reasoning and knowledge representation and reasoning to improve vis...

Two threads of research have been pursued in parallel in logic and artificial intelligence. On the one hand, in artificial intelligence, logic-based theories have been developed to study and formalize belief change and the so-called “common sense reasoning”, i.e. the actual reasoning of humans. On the other hand, in logic, substructural logics, i.e. logics lacking some of the structural rules o...

A large number of common sense assertions such as prototypical properties, obligation, possibility, nonmonotonic rules, can be expressed using conditional logics. They are precisely under the lights because of their great representation power for common sense notions. But representation is only the half of the work: reasoning is also needed. Furthermore, non-monotonic reasoning necessites both ...

Default logic is one of the most prominent formalizations of common-sense reasoning. It allows \jumping to conclusions" in case that not all relevant information is known. However, theoretical complexity results imply that default logic is (in the worst case) computationally harder than classical logic. This somehow contradicts our intuition about common-sense reasoning: default rules should he...

The development of a formal logic for reasoning about change has proven to be surprisingly dif-cult. Furthermore, the logics that have been developed have found surprisingly little application in those elds, such as Qualitative Reasoning, that are concerned with building programs that emulate human common-sense reasoning about change. In this paper, we argue that a basic tenet of qualitative re...

One of the central problems of artificial intelligence is capturing the breadth and flexibility of human common sense reasoning. One way to evaluate common sense is to use versions of human tests that rely on everyday reasoning. The Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test consists of everyday reasoning problems posed via pictures and is used to evaluate technicians. This test is challenging becau...

Pratt and Third’s syllogistic fragments of English can be used to capture, in addition to syllogistic reasoning, many other kinds of common sense reasoning, and, in particular (i) knowledge base consistency and (ii) knowledge base query answering, modulo their FO semantic representations. We show how difficult, in terms of semantic (computational) complexity and data complexity (i.e., computati...