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PhD Thesis Defense - Ehsan Qasemi

PhD Thesis Defense - Ehsan Qasemi

Title: Multi-Modal Preconditioned Inference of Commonsense Knowledge

Committee Members: Muhao Chen, Aiichiro Nakano, Daniel O Leary, Fred Morstatter, Luis Garcia

Abstract: Humans can seamlessly reason with circumstantial preconditions of commonsense knowledge. We understand that a glass is used for drinking water, unless the glass is broken or the water is toxic. Despite state-of-the-art (SOTA) models impressive performance in inferring commonsense knowledge, it is unclear whether they understand the circumstantial preconditions. In this dissertation, I initially propose a novel challenge of reasoning with preconditions attributed to commonsense knowledge, design three tasks based on the challenge in text-only setup, and show there is a significant gap between SOTA language models performance and humans on our tasks. I then use weak supervision in a combination of targeted fine-tuning strategies to improve the language models performance on the preconditioned inference task. Finally, I go beyond the text-only setup and investigate the problem of preconditioned inference in a multi-modal setup when the model is challenged to infer the preconditions from an image.

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Melissa Ochoa

Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/98769460750