Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Filip Ilievski (USC ISI) - Open-world AI Agents with Common Sense

Speaker: Filip Ilievski, USC

Talk Title: Open-world AI Agents with Common Sense

Abstract: In this talk, I will present my research on building natural-language AI agents that use common sense to act robustly in everyday situations. State-of-the-art technology is inadequate for this purpose: background knowledge and rules provide explainability but they cannot generalize to unseen situations, whereas neural models with natural generalizability are prone to making silly mistakes and are unable to explain their decisions. I will describe our agents which combine the best of both worlds to perform well on open-world tasks without the need for task-specific training data, by 1) organizing commonsense knowledge into a single harmonized resource; 2) enriching commonsense knowledge with axioms and preconditions; and 3) using the enriched knowledge resource to adapt neural models for out-of-domain scenarios that require common sense. The effectiveness of the combined approach is demonstrated through high performance on a range of out-of-domain tasks, including question answering and story generation. I will also reflect on my ongoing research on adapting AI agents to specific domains, enabling them to operate in embodied environments, and combining commonsense with encyclopedic knowledge.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

Join Zoom Meeting
https://usc.zoom.us/j/97448700889

Meeting ID: 974 4870 0889


Biography: Dr. Filip Ilievski is a Research Scientist in the Center on Knowledge Graphs within the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Filip holds a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing from the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam, where he also worked as a postdoctoral researcher before joining ISI. His research focuses on the role of commonsense and encyclopedic knowledge in filling gaps in human communication. Over the past three years, he mentored around twenty Master's and Ph.D. students, and collaborated with researchers at USC, CMU, Bosch Research, RPI, and the University of Lyon. Dr. Ilievski has over 40 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier venues on commonsense reasoning, information extraction, and knowledge graphs. Dr. Ilievski has also been actively organizing workshops (AAAI'21), tutorials (AAAI'21, ISWC'20, ISWC'21, TheWebConf'22), symposiums (USC), and a special journal issue (Semantic Web Journal) on these topics.

Host: Gale Lucas

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Cherie Carter