{"pk":29881,"title":"Generating new concepts with hybrid neuro-symbolic models","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Human conceptual knowledge supports the ability to generatenovel yet highly structured concepts, and the form of this con-ceptual knowledge is of great interest to cognitive scientists.One tradition has emphasized structured knowledge, view-ing concepts as embedded in intuitive theories or organizedin complex symbolic knowledge structures. A second tradi-tion has emphasized statistical knowledge, viewing conceptualknowledge as an emerging from the rich correlational structurecaptured by training neural networks and other statistical mod-els. In this paper, we explore a synthesis of these two traditionsthrough a novel neuro-symbolic model for generating new con-cepts. Using simple visual concepts as a testbed, we bring to-gether neural networks and symbolic probabilistic programsto learn a generative model of novel handwritten characters.Two alternative models are explored with more generic neuralnetwork architectures. We compare each of these three mod-els for their likelihoods on held-out character classes and forthe quality of their productions, finding that our hybrid modellearns the most convincing representation and generalizes fur-ther from the training observations.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Categories and concepts; neural networks; com-positionality; causality; generative models"}],"section":"Poster Session 2","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6079r2br","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Reuben","middle_name":"","last_name":"Feinman","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""},{"first_name":"Brenden","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Lake","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29881/galley/19735/download/"}]}