Matthew A. Kelly

Alexander Ororbia, Mary Alexandria Kelly

Over the last few years, large neural generative models, capable of synthesizing semantically rich passages of text or producing complex images, have recently emerged as a popular representation of what has come to be known as ``generative artificial intelligence'' (generative AI). Beyond opening the door to new opportunities as well as challenges for the domain of statistical machine learning, the rising popularity of generative AI brings with it interesting questions for Cognitive Science, which seeks to discover the nature of the processes that underpin minds and brains as well as to understand how such functionality might be acquired and instantianted in biological (or artificial) substrate. With this goal in mind, we argue that a promising research program lies in the crafting of cognitive architectures, a long-standing tradition of the field, cast fundamentally in terms of neuro-mimetic generative building blocks. Concretely, we discuss the COGnitive Neural GENerative system, such an architecture that casts the Common Model of Cognition in terms of Hebbian adaptation operating in service of optimizing a variational free energy functional.

Connor Hanley, Eilene Tomkins-Flanaganm, Mary Alexandria Kelly

Using Frequency-domain Holographic Reduced Representations (FHRRs), we extend a Vector-Symbolic Architecture (VSA) encoding of Lisp 1.5 with primitives for arithmetic operations using Residue Hyperdimensional Computing (RHC). Encoding a Turing-complete syntax over a high-dimensional vector space increases the expressivity of neural network states, enabling network states to contain arbitrarily structured representations that are inherently interpretable. We discuss the potential applications of the VSA encoding in machine learning tasks, as well as the importance of encoding structured representations and designing neural networks whose behavior is sensitive to the structure of their representations in virtue of attaining more general intelligent agents than exist at present.

Eilene Tomkins-Flanagan, Mary A. Kelly

Kanerva (2014) suggested that it would be possible to construct a complete Lisp out of a vector-symbolic architecture. We present the general form of a vector-symbolic representation of the five Lisp elementary functions, lambda expressions, and other auxiliary functions, found in the Lisp 1.5 specification McCarthy (1960), which is near minimal and sufficient for Turing-completeness. Our specific implementation uses holographic reduced representations Plate (1995), with a lookup table cleanup memory. Lisp, as all Turing-complete languages, is a Cartesian closed category, unusual in its proximity to the mathematical abstraction. We discuss the mathematics, the purpose, and the significance of demonstrating vector-symbolic architectures' Cartesian-closure, as well as the importance of explicitly including cleanup memories in the specification of the architecture.

Eilene Tomkins-Flanagan, Connor Hanley, Mary A. Kelly

We present a typed computer language, Doug, in which all typed programs may be proved to halt in polynomial time, encoded in a vector-symbolic architecture (VSA). Doug is just an encoding of the light linear functional programming language (LLFPL) described by (Schimanski2009, ch. 7). The types of Doug are encoded using a slot-value encoding scheme based on holographic declarative memory (HDM; Kelly, 2020). The terms of Doug are encoded using a variant of the Lisp VSA defined by (Flanagan, 2024). Doug allows for some points on the embedding space of a neural network to be interpreted as types, where the types of nearby points are similar both in structure and content. Types in Doug are therefore learnable by a neural network. Following (Chollet, 2019), (Card, 1983), and (Newell, 1981), we view skill as the application of a procedure, or program of action, that causes a goal to be satisfied. Skill acquisition may therefore be expressed as program synthesis. Using Doug, we hope to describe a form of learning of skilled behaviour that follows a human-like pace of skill acquisition (i.e., substantially faster than brute force; Heathcote, 2000), exceeding the efficiency of all currently existing approaches (Kaplan, 2020; Jones, 2021; Chollet, 2024). Our approach brings us one step closer to modeling human mental representations, as they must actually exist in the brain, and those representations' acquisition, as they are actually learned.

Robert L. West, Spencer Eckler, Brendan Conway-Smith et al.

This article presents a theoretical framework for adapting the Common Model of Cognition to large generative network models within the field of artificial intelligence. This can be accomplished by restructuring modules within the Common Model into shadow production systems that are peripheral to a central production system, which handles higher-level reasoning based on the shadow productions' output. Implementing this novel structure within the Common Model allows for a seamless connection between cognitive architectures and generative neural networks.

Alexander Ororbia, M. A. Kelly

In this article, we present a cognitive architecture that is built from powerful yet simple neural models. Specifically, we describe an implementation of the common model of cognition grounded in neural generative coding and holographic associative memory. The proposed system creates the groundwork for developing agents that learn continually from diverse tasks as well as model human performance at larger scales than what is possible with existant cognitive architectures.

Wang Jing, M. A. Kelly, David Reitter

Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability of computational language models, simple language features, and word embeddings to predict native English speakers judgments of acceptability on English-language essays written by non-native speakers. We find that much of the sentence acceptability variance can be captured by a combination of features including misspellings, word order, and word similarity (Pearson's r = 0.494). While predictive neural models fit acceptability judgments well (r = 0.527), we find that a 4-gram model with statistical smoothing is just as good (r = 0.528). Thanks to incorporating a count of misspellings, our 4-gram model surpasses both the previous unsupervised state-of-the art (Lau et al., 2015; r = 0.472), and the average non-expert native speaker (r = 0.46). Our results demonstrate that acceptability is well captured by n-gram statistics and simple language features.