“Compositional Reasoning in Language and Vision with Neuro-Symbolic AI”
Recent research indicates that large language models lack consistent reliability in tasks requiring complex reasoning. While they may impress us with fluently written articles prompted by user input, they can easily disappoint by displaying shortcomings in basic reasoning skills, such as the functional understanding of ‘left is the opposite of right’, let alone grounding such concepts in diverse real-world situations involving perception and action. To address real-world problems, computational models often need to involve multiple interdependent learners, along with significant levels of composition and reasoning. In this talk, I will present our findings regarding reasoning challenges of LLMs and discuss how symbolic representations can leverage the capacity of neural models for compositional reasoning over complex linguistic structures, grounding language in visual perception, combining multiple modalities of information and handling uncertainty. I will highlight our efforts in Neurosymbolic modeling and introduce DomiKnowS, our developed library that facilitates such modeling. The DomiKnowS framework exploits both symbolic and sub-symbolic representations to solve complex, AI-complete problems and seamlessly integrates symbolic and logical knowledge into deep models through various underlying algorithms.
Parisa Kordjamshidi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing, multimodal reasoning across vision and language, and neuro-symbolic learning. She received her Ph.D. from KU Leuven and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER, Amazon Faculty Research, and Fulbright Scholar Awards, and her research team received the NAACL 2025 Outstanding Research Paper Award. Dr. Kordjamshidi serves as Associate Editor of JAIR, Co-editor in chief of ARR, Action Editor for TACL and has held roles in organization committe of major conferences including ACL, NAACL, EACL, EMNLP, ECML-PKDD, and AAAI. Currently, she is a Visiting Associate Professor at UCLA.