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Teaching Machines Common Sense Reasoning

The exploration of machine common sense is not a new field. Since the early days of AI, researchers have pursued a variety of efforts to develop logic-based approaches to common sense knowledge and reasoning, as well as means of extracting and collecting commonsense knowledge from the Web. While these efforts have produced useful results, their brittleness and lack of semantic understanding have prevented the creation of a widely applicable common sense capability.

In recent years, significant progress in AI along a number of dimensions has made it possible to address this difficult challenge today. DARPA has created the Machine Common Sense (MCS) program to develop new capabilities. MCS will explore recent advances in cognitive understanding, natural language processing, deep learning, and other areas of AI research to find answers to the common sense problem.

To focus this new effort, MCS will pursue two approaches for developing and evaluating different machine common sense services. The first approach will create computational models that learn from experience and mimic the core domains of cognition as defined by developmental psychology. This includes the domains of objects (intuitive physics), places (spatial navigation), and agents (intentional actors). Researchers will seek to develop systems that think and learn as humans do in the very early stages of development, leveraging advances in the field of cognitive development to provide empirical and theoretical guidance.

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-10-11